If you are a small or mid sized (or any sized) business, your challenge today is to stretch your marketing dollar as much as possible. Your objective is to reach and convert as many potential customers as you can with that limited budget. This is critical today in the era of Groupon, especially if you are in retail.
We will talk about three obvious marketing challenges that can be significantly reduced with data and analytics.
1. Anticipating your customer needs ahead of time
To the uninitiated this may sound like fortune telling, but it is not! The trick is in building models of consumer behavior. Models help you to estimate the likelihood that a given prospect will make certain types of purchases. In a very interesting application, big box retailer Target, builds models that can predict if a given female shopper is pregnant and can estimate with a great degree of accuracy when they are likely to have the baby. For such customers, the retailer systematically sets up a lead conversion program where timed messages and coupons are sent for various baby related items such as cribs, diapers, infant toys etc to increase the chance they will come back and shop for more.
We will talk about three obvious marketing challenges that can be significantly reduced with data and analytics.
1. Anticipating your customer needs ahead of time
To the uninitiated this may sound like fortune telling, but it is not! The trick is in building models of consumer behavior. Models help you to estimate the likelihood that a given prospect will make certain types of purchases. In a very interesting application, big box retailer Target, builds models that can predict if a given female shopper is pregnant and can estimate with a great degree of accuracy when they are likely to have the baby. For such customers, the retailer systematically sets up a lead conversion program where timed messages and coupons are sent for various baby related items such as cribs, diapers, infant toys etc to increase the chance they will come back and shop for more.
2. Deliver a focused offer (a coupon) at point of sale to increase conversion
If you know for example, that a shopper has purchased items such as boxes, duct tape, etc, the likelihood that they may be moving is high. The reward for you, the retailer comes in if you can offer at the point of sale, coupons for other items that might help in a move, such as cleaning supplies.
3. Optimize spending on PPC campaigns to maximize your returns
85% of the time a consumer's first interaction with a brand starts with an internet search. No wonder that pay-per-click advertising is such a major revenue generator for search engines. With increased competition for clicks, the cost per click for popular search keywords are high. It becomes increasingly harder to get ads placed high enough on the search engine results page in order to generate clicks. As an SME it gets much harder to compete with the "big boys" for such valuable internet real-estate.
Models can be built to predict what price you as a retailer must bid at in order to get a certain placement position. Furthermore, models can also be built to predict click through conversion, and sales for a given keyword-position combination.
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