Leveraging Marketing Intelligence to Improve Results
Over the last several issues of DM, we have outlined a disciplined approach to help you construct a powerful database marketing strategy. The approach hinges on consistently gathering, analyzing and leveraging three types of key information — Customer Intelligence, Business Intelligence and Data Intelligence.
This instalment tackles the role of Marketing Intelligence which involves leveraging automating work processes and technologies that pull all these types of information together in order to cost-effectively optimize your marketing results, including:
• Marketing Velocity
• Marketing Productivity
• Marketing Measurability
• Marketing Accountability
• Marketing Control
By automating routine marketing activities, you will free up resources so that you can focus on strategy and ad-hoc programs that will enable you to better cross-sell/up-sell, anticipate and respond to competitive or economic pressures, launch new products and ultimately enhance your revenues.
How to Leverage Marketing Intelligence
When managing your marketing campaigns there are varying degrees of marketing intelligence automation options available. For example, if your marketing activities are repetitive and guided by consistent business rules, you can automate list preparation and customer qualification – drawing from relevant databases at logical intervals. You can also process trigger-based campaigns. On-going marketing activities that can be easily automated include new customer on-boarding programs and customer retention programs.
In fact, you can automate any marketing program triggered by business rules. That use of marketing intelligence automation can streamline key processes including:
• Initial customer selection
• Recording in a campaign management data mart
• List processing and formatting
• Delivery data to your “execution” vendor
• Post-campaign analysis reporting
Supercharging Your Campaign Management
If you’ve automated marketing processes and continue to find the scale, number or breadth of your initiatives causes your team to devote considerable time to executing complex routine tasks, Campaign Management (CM) technologies are often a cost-effective solution. CM allows you to manage multi-channel, multi-wave campaigns and develop sophisticated ongoing dialogues with customers.
Dynamic and user-friendly interfaces allow you to use CM for optimizing campaign planning and performance measurement functionality. For example, CM solutions allow for multi-segment splits, nested segmentation, multiple wave designs, event-triggered capabilities, seed list management and other features critical for tapping into databases. At the same time, you can develop campaign selections, target segments, create control cells, and obtain counts for each step in the campaign.
CM solutions also allow you to develop multi-channel, dynamic dialogues with your customers. That means that you can map out the best 1:1 dialogues based on current and previous interactions offline and online. With all contact history recorded, you can establish response rules for automated measurement or for future trigger-based initiatives. The additional layer of history enables in-depth analysis of campaign results since the applications connect directly to your marketing data mart.
Typically, the entire marketing database is available in a logical view that takes a highly dimensional data model and presents a flattened view with an intuitive list of fields grouped by subject areas. Most applications also facilitate offer management processes for recording all financial costs and response assumptions. This allows you to compare planned versus actual results and enables full ROI calculations.
Marketing Resource Management
Marketing Resource Management (MRM) is the next level of automation for efficiently getting marketing tasks accomplished. When implemented correctly, MRM dramatically reduces the manual process involved in planning via multiple spreadsheets. As a result, it substantially reduces the need, and costs associated with, preparing time-consuming status updates throughout campaign implementation. That allows you to focus your resources on strategic activities rather than managing manual processes. Three broad areas comprise MRM:
• Production management, including a marketing calendar for managing activities and a workflow for managing individual tasks within each activity. Processes defined through your best practices ensure compliance every time. Project managers can set schedules and assign work to appropriate roles or individuals. Graphic displays of the tasks involved in delivering marketing projects provide insight into the production process and facilitate collaboration among your extended team of agencies and vendors.
• Asset management provides efficient access to marketing’s physical and digital assets.
• Financial management and planning provide data for budget control and forecasting. This enables improved financial decision-making and control with an up-to-the-minute view of budgeted, forecasted, committed and actual spend by project type, initiative, budget and date.
The Demand for Marketing Intelligence
As a marketer, you are always striving to keep ahead of fast changing industry trends, competitive pressures, economic fluctuations, fragmented markets and changing consumption habits. At the same time, channels are becoming more complex with dynamic content enabled through print and electronic communications. Finally, your ability to execute marketing programs successfully is being put to the test with the executive call for “doing more with less”. Tapping into any level of marketing intelligence automation ensures that you can be more efficient and more effective in all of your increasingly complex marketing initiatives.