As consumer's media and purchasing behavior continue fragmenting – the challenges for marketeers keep growing: how to get relevant messages, across the right channels at the right time to the individual consumer?
The ingredients for success in today’s fast-paced environment are data, marketing automation solutions, advanced predictive analytics and true optimization.
Everything starts with understanding your customers. 360-view on your customers is a basic tool guiding your purchases, sales and marketing activities. Internal customer data enriched with external data sources such as market research data will provide a good starting point for steering customer focused marketing activities. Take a leap forward towards a more personalized approach by applying predictive analytics and true optimization. With appropriate tools and data science techniques, marketeers are able to build comprehensive picture of customers, competitive situation, the performance of assortments, different channels and staying ahead of changes in consumption trends.
In the age of one-to-one, mass marketing is not dead but instead it’s being transformed by hyper personalization powered by predictive analytics and optimization. Mass marketing optimization can be taken to whole new levels of accuracy when analyzing detailed consumer behaviors from receipt and sales data. This allows enhancing understanding of cross selling opportunities for instance. Loyal customer data naturally enables better accuracy for analyses – however, with the right tools and approaches there are means to analyze long-term shopping behaviors at individual level even when loyal customer programs are not in place.
By using the detailed historical sales data enriched with relevant data sources, it is possible to optimize your assortments and pricing. The competitive situation and local demand are going to vary between locations and geographical areas. Service network optimizer is a solution that allows retailers and service providers gain detailed insights both from current network performance as well as supporting in prospecting most prominent new locations, generating credible sales forecasts and adjusting their assortments to match with local demand and competition.
Direct marketing with printed offer leaflets is still a broadly used method for many retailers and groceries for instance. With large volumes, especially the distribution costs will quickly become significant. For these applications, there are opportunities for direct marketing optimization by focusing distribution at a more granular accuracy only for those areas where potential clients and existing service network have a good match - greatly enhancing the effectiveness of such campaigns.
When selecting which products should be chosen for promotional campaigns – there are typically two approaches: giving power for your suppliers (and making them pay for the campaign costs) or aiming to maximize the penetration for your targeted client base. For the latter, marketers should have their assortments readily analyzed by their penetration potential for various target groups when choosing between the various scenarios for campaigns. Simple and efficient!
The impact of the visual elements and their variations of your promotion banner can also be tracked and optimized. And we're not just referring to basic click-through metrics, but scanners which measure the eye motion and actual attention your promotional banner receives from a test group. Enabled by efficient digital marketing pipelines – the results of such analyses can be applied into your campaigns near real time.
Powered by advanced analytics and optimization, the existing marketing automation solutions can be transformed at scale into smart tools, which only don’t save manual labor from marketeers, but enable one-on-one dialogues with targeted messaging, individualized product and services recommendations, pricing and promotions in the right channels at the right time for your customers.
All the above-mentioned examples for optimizing marketing efforts already exist and are available from Houston Analytics and our partners.
The newest addition to our marketing portfolio is our media purchasing optimization solution AIROMI, which provides real time visibility for marketing ROI. The solution was developed in partnership between Houston Analytics and Omnicom Media Group Finland – combining predictive scenario planning tools enabled by our vast data base and robotized media purchasing process. With our solution, media purchasing will be taken into the digital era powered by artificial intelligence, where marketeers are able to quickly react to their campaign performance and execute necessary adjustments for maximizing ROI.
Artificial Intelligence in marketing is no longer hype – it’s becoming requisite staying ahead of competition and meeting the customer’s expectations.
