Originally published on AdAge India
The digital age has transformed marketing possibly more than any other business function, through changing customer preferences and the shift in power from the business to the consumer.
Today’s marketers need to focus the business on the customer, but must also understand and drive the marketing technology stack and analytics. They need to be creative leaders through countless channels, all while organising the business behind their revenue growth and innovation agenda.
Here are five ways marketers can up their game.
1. If you’re not accountable, then you’re a cost
Marketing needs not only to show that their activities provide a return on investment (ROI), but must also make a better contribution to the organisation’s strategic goals. Incorporating the company strategy into plans is key in establishing marketing’s value to a business, although it can be a challenge to prove their activity is having an impact, often due to the fragmented nature of digital platforms leading to poor data analysis.
2. Let the data speak
Data and analytics are driving huge shifts in marketing today. Marketers must learn how to leverage data to determine the right strategy. They need to understand what value they’re trying to get from their data – data shouldn’t be an objective, but should be fundamental to marketer efforts.
Reaching the right user at the right time with the appropriate message in the right place and motivating them to an appropriate action presents a major and important challenge for companies. At Xaxis, we have always believed in using a data-droven approach to help brands make their marketing message a welcome occurrence rather than an unwanted intrusion.
In order to meet this challenge, companies need to analyse potential and existing customers’ interests and behaviours and accurately target users based on this information. Data has become the cornerstone of modern marketing.
To get the most from their data and analytics experts, marketers should make additional investments in the tools that support their real-time customer-facing efforts, namely web personalisation, and marketing automation.
3. Package your marketing plan
Marketers need to have a broad insight into the whole of the rest of the business — sales, engineering, finance, etc. They need to understand and internalise the practices and priorities of all those other teams and then package it all together in the marketing plan. To deepen such partnerships, marketing leaders should speak the language of their peers across the C-suite, translating marketing concepts and insights into terms that align them with other stakeholders’ objectives.
Marketing leaders who can do it effectively are better primed to contribute to organisation-wide long- and short-term objectives, as well as to secure the support of the top management team.
To become influential, marketers may need to position their customer insights and goals not as marketing objectives per se but as ways to help their C-suite colleagues reach their own goals.
4. Getting started with AI
AI is the game-changer for marketing today. By handling repetitive and rote functions at massive scale and speed, AI can augment people, elevating marketers to stay focused on the higher level work - the strategies that lead to the business outcomes they want their marketing to achieve.
AI’s most powerful capabilities are unearthed when brand marketers feed in first-party data. Businesses with strong customer touch-points such as retailers, restaurants, and car dealerships tend to have rich data on who their customers are, their buying habits and preferences, their locales, what incentives might motivate them, and more.
The hard work comes in getting hold of it all — from CRM systems, websites, POS databases, frequent shopper cards, and other online and offline sources — normalizing it, and figuring out how to get it to interact properly when mashed together.
Marketers could work with data scientists and engineers to get them to help use data to answer questions, then apply machine learning to better hone in on goals.
5. Have a voice at the table
According to Darell Sansom, CMO AXA UK, “Data is useless without the ability to analyse it and gain insight that lets you talk to the right customers at the right time and makes you more likely to be effective.”
There is therefore an increasing demand for marketing people who not only have all the soft skills, but who can also understand the data, the analytics, and the technology that underpins it all. There is also a growing need for marketing and IT departments to work more collaboratively within a business.
Marketers have to learn how to use data science for their work on a global scale, and they need to position themselves for success, regardless of how accessible data scientists may be on any given day. 91% of senior marketers indicated that customer data was essential to making decisions. With that said, we are undoubtedly seeing the immense value of marketers who know and understand data science. But the question is, how much data know-how is necessary?
Originally posted on Exchange4Media
It is well known that India’s retail sector is undergoing rapid transformation. Rising household incomes and easy credit are combining to drive a shift to consumerism. Today, the retail industry accounts for more than 10 per cent of India’s GDP and about 8 per cent of the country’s employment.
By 2020, the retail sector is expected to double in value to US$1.3 trillion, up from the current US$672 billion. E-commerce forms a significant part of this growth - the business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce market has been forecast to reach US$700bn by 2020, with business-to-consumer (B2C) e-commerce reaching US$102bn.
What digital brings to the table for retailers
Digital platforms are fundamentally changing the way many businesses work, as they offer the capability of using data to break through traditional boundaries of function and organisation.
For retailers, digital enables opportunities to acquire new customers, increase footfall, add value through better engagement with their existing customers, reduce operational costs and improve employee motivation. Taken together, these benefits are delivering a positive impact on revenues and margins.
Digital technology is driving the re-imagination of the store of the future. Price and quality are no longer strong enough attractors – the rise of online shopping means retailers must work harder to persuade customers to visit their physical stores, and hold their interest once they’re there.
Digital investment is the recipe for retail success
Rapid advances in digital technology are enabling the creation of memorable and personalised in-store experiences for customers at scale. Consumers unquestionably desire such experiences, and businesses are responding by explicitly designing and promoting them. Digital technologies are helping retailers understand consumer needs, provide greater choice (through visual merchandising for example), and help shoppers decide, via innovations like Virtual Trial Rooms.
In India today, one third of all buyers research online before making a purchase. This behaviour is known as ROPO – research online, purchase offline. Smartphones have ignited internet adoption in our country in all areas of life, including evaluating and researching possible purchases. This makes it all the more important for retailers to invest in the digital medium and engage with customers throughout their purchase journey.
At the same time, digital helps retailers reduce costs, increase loyalty and enhance customer service.
In confirmation of these trends in customer expectations and sector competition, a recent forecast says global spending on retail sector technology will grow 3.6 per cent to reach almost $203.6bn in 2019, with similar growth rates for the next two years.
Programmatic for a better retail experience
Today’s customers expect their shopping experiences to mirror their personal online world. Data defines their online experience, and they expect personalisation in the communications, products, and services they consume. Thus data, and the technology to exploit it, is crucial in attracting customers through personalising purchase journeys.
The most effective way to leverage the vast quantity of data on consumer behaviour, now available to the retailer, is programmatic advertising.
Programmatic is, after all, about handling massive amounts of data and then using that data to drive real results. That meshes perfectly with Artificial Intelligence (AI), which is about the intelligent handling of these mountains of data to ever-greater effect. AI is particularly well-suited to help programmatic advertising fulfill its promise and drive real outcomes for brands.
By combining retail data with the existing data sets on online behaviour, programmatic will have access to a much more complete picture of who the consumers are and how they behave online. One key thing it will let us do is know more precisely when a consumer has actually become a customer, or has completed a purchase. It then becomes possible to stop placing ads for the original offer and instead switch to up-sell and cross-sell opportunities. Also with the advent of third-party deterministic data sets like telecom use, TV viewership, purchase habits, insurance and classifieds, programmatic is advancing. By using AI it is able to predict the customer’s purchase cycle – when the next purchase will be made.
Path to purchase In the new world of retail, the complexity of a path to purchase becomes increasingly evident. According to a June 2018 report, a quarter of India’s population were digital shoppers last year - a number forecast to rise to 41.6 per cent by 2022 - and when they visit a physical store, they’re using their smartphones to look up product reviews, compare prices, and find coupons. Theirs is a cross-channel, multi-platform journey built around retail, e-commerce, and mobile-commerce omni-channel experience. And it is programmatic marketing that allows retailers to reach audiences across all these channels with precision. Categories such as automotive, consumer durables, jewellery, electronics and real estate have to map their consumers’ journey across channels, since most buyers are following the ROPO pattern – so omni-channel engagement is essential, throughout the purchase journey.
Retailers also now have the power to engage with consumers using interactive banners and videos as part of an integrated marketing campaign, through targeted location-based advertising on mobile devices and Digital Out Of Home (DOOH) screens – and measure the impact of such a campaign on store visits. Xaxis Places is a solution for Indian retailers that closes the loop between digital activity and physical store visits.
Xaxis Places
Retailers must learn how to navigate this non-linear, twisting and turning path. The reward for mastering this challenge is access to a consumer who is ready to become a customer, and a customer who is conditioned to become a loyal store and brand supporter, with enhanced lifetime value.