Recent research conducted by GlobalWebIndex across 32 markets indicates that 80 per cent of internet users own a smartphone.
Team that with the findings from Tecmark’s study, which found that people check their phones 221 times a day, and it becomes very apparent that we have entered an era where customers are now “always on”.
Consequently, consumers are leaving behind more real-time data than ever before, which gives a real insight into the way they interact with brands. This brings both great opportunity and challenges for marketers looking to withdraw valuable insight from data. The opportunity presented is two-fold. If marketers are quick, they can execute impactful real-time tactics to engage creatively their consumer base in the right place at the right time.
There are numerous examples of brands creating brilliant campaigns based on real-time tactics. Look at Specsavers. It has, for some time, been closely monitoring consumer trends and conversations to react with timely and creative marketing. One such example was during the 2012 Olympics, when the brand put out an advert which displayed a South Korean and North Korean flag, a tactic to highlight when the South Korean flag was accidentally displayed during a women’s football match between North Korea and Columbia. Specsavers’ timeless strapline, “Should have gone to Specsavers” (in South Korean no less), was cleverly placed below the images.
But, while there are many examples of tactical activations based on data, there are very few that show the data insight being applied for wider strategic campaigns and decisions. This is where the second opportunity lies. Marketers can use the data as leading indicators to understand consumer habits better, enabling them to build trends over time and start predicting future behaviours.
I should highlight that there is nothing wrong with tactical decisions. They are crucial because every decision, big or small, is in aid of fulfilling the wider strategic goal. However, those alone are no longer enough as we shift more and more into fathoming consumer habits to predict future behaviour. There are some brands that use real-time data to inform strategic decisions - Amazon being one. The retail giant tracks this data over a longer period to identify how its consumers are interacting with its brands to understand when they buy and how.
The brand is already looking into “anticipatory shopping”, sending out packages to customers before they even buy them. Simply put, it sees members of its customer base as people, not numbers, and that is where human insight plays a massive role. Much too often, data scientists and analysts get caught up in metrics, rather than deciphering what the numbers mean in human terms.
It’s when marketers apply this human, broader thinking capability alongside the data that they can be more predictive in their thinking and activity, and ultimately boost ROI. It’s about bringing the magic and logic together. This is actually something we did for Curry’s PC World. We showed how predictive insights could create something really magnificent for a brand at a strategic level.
For the brand’s “We start with you” campaign, data insight and analysis was used to anticipate how a bigger creative, brand-building approach would deliver beyond reputation to improve customer experience and sales as well. Applying this insight gave the brand the confidence it needed to embark on a different approach to its consumer campaigns and improve its performance by doing so, driving £48.5 million of sales, equating to a 9:1 return on investment.
It’s a brilliant example of how predictive insights and the human approach can come together to deliver a highly-profitable result. More marketers need to adopt such an approach and realise data lends itself to both tactical activations as well as strategic decisions. As long as you analyse the data with people in mind and not numbers, a lot more becomes possible.
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