If you are plugged in, you would have heard by now that data can improve marketing effectiveness. The details may be blurry depending on the environment your business operates in and ease of access to such data. Many companies rely on big data agencies to provide them with information about their consumers. Companies end up spending a fortune to get this information to enable them improve their marketing. How exactly does this help? Does it justify the spend to agencies? Here are three ways data can improve marketing effectiveness.
Market Segmentation
Data enables you break down consumer information into different categories. You can evaluate consumers by age, gender, location, marital status etc and understand why a certain group is purchasing your product versus the group you assumed would make most of the purchases. You have a clearer picture of who your primary and secondary customers are and why. For example, if you are an FMCG brand that specializes in tea production, you may see an increase in sales in green tea because majority of the younger and even older people have been told that green tea is beneficial for detoxing. This helps you plan your merchandise so you can increase stock for your green tea products. This brings us to our next point.
Merchandise Planning
No matter the size of your business, no organization wants to have a full warehouse with products that have not moved for over a month. Data can relieve your company of this burden. As portrayed in my previous example, if the company gathers information that their green tea products are moving faster, they would increase supply of that product and regulate supply for the others to match its demand and that can only be done with data. This also enables the company to switch marketing direction for that product to create more awareness since its moving anyway.
Customer Loyalty
The price wars that companies get into sometimes sway consumers to try other products. If an organization has done the background work to ensure that their consumers are not easily swayed, then no matter the new price offerings, consumers will remain loyal to a brand. What does this background work involve? Some companies run loyalty marketing campaigns to initially capture the information of the buyer. They then further probe these consumers immediately after the campaign to find out reasons why they bought their product and what exactly they would like to see. If their reasons go beyond pricing and the promotion bait, they take that information and improve their products. So when pricing wars begin, they are not easily swayed because the company that ran the promotion has now tailored the new and improved product to exactly what the customer needs. The customer ends up paying for quality and relevance and is likely to overlook the price to get value for their buck.
