Total information awareness is mission critical.
You know your customers and their habits, but do you know their whole story? What else do they buy, where do they go, and are they really loyal to your brand? It’s imperative that brands have a 360° view of how to effectively market to their customers. Without total information awareness, it’s nearly impossible to align your strategy with buyer behavior.
Marketers who double down on making sure their team – in fact, their entire organization – has easy access to critical first- and third-party data can achieve total information awareness nirvana. They can use data-driven insights to personalize their marketing strategies, acquire new customers, reduce churn, launch new products and mitigate risk. Let’s look at four key reasons why this is a worthwhile endeavor for any multichannel marketer.
Show a 360° View of Your Prospects
Understanding who is and is not your ideal prospect is the first and most critical step in setting up a successful growth marketing strategy. For example, advertising a new set of Sony wireless noise canceling headphones to someone who just bought a pair is unlikely to give you the results you want. These ads miss the importance of reaching the right person at the right time in their buying journey. Consumers receive and respond better when marketing is most relevant to their current life experiences and needs.
The solution? Connecting your customer and prospect data into a single platform. Data could come from lead sources, CRM, loyalty and campaign responses. Consider also layering on a marketing database that includes demographics, psychographics, life events and predictive spend behavior. With that type of data centralized, entire organizations from the marketing intern to CEO can develop hyper-targeted audiences, the first step on the right person, right offer, right place journey.
Know Your Audience’s Needs Before They Do
Total information awareness means that not only does your team have a crisp vision of your business and current customers and prospects, but you can actually look into the future and know their needs – sometimes before they do. Have you ever seen an ad on social media that aligned perfectly with your life at that moment? Maybe it was a promotion for new furniture, and you just signed a new apartment lease. Maybe it was a promotion for a new type of car insurance where you pay by the mile, and you just moved to Chicago so you’re driving less.
That type of “knowing” a prospect and perfectly timing the offer is thanks to data, and even more so, modeling and predictive analytics. Many hyper-growth marketers and merchants are relying on these strategies to give themselves a competitive edge. With total information awareness and data connectivity, marketing teams can create really powerful and predictive audiences. Bring on the data!
Launch Omnichannel Campaigns That Simply Flow
Today’s discerning consumers expect to have seamless brand experiences across all touchpoints, both online and offline. According to a new report from Group M and Meta, 69% of consumers say that brands that help them make more thoughtful choices can earn their loyalty. Essentially, prospects care when the brand cares.
At the end of the day, this means your messaging must not only be on point, but it should be a natural part of their daily life. With total information awareness, marketers can launch automated, triggered campaigns driven by unique data sources and business logic. The end result is perfectly timed messages that arrive in the newsfeed, mailbox, inbox, and even set-top box of their high-value audiences.
Grow Through Ongoing Optimization, Insights
A “set it and forget it” mentality is sure to tank any visions of marketing success. Winning the hearts and minds of potential future brand fans requires constant evaluation of both your audience and overall marketing spend. When you know your numbers – and exactly how well your campaigns are or aren’t performing – you’ve just unlocked a secret weapon for short-term and long-term growth.
Tapping into real-time insights means you not only reduce churn, but you therefore increase retention, loyalty and overall customer lifetime value. This is Music to your CEO’s ears. And of course, this means your marketing dollars go further and ultimately ROI improves, especially since it costs up to 7x more to acquire a new customer than to retain an old one.
Nailing your strategy and continuing to level up only happens when you can answer the question, “What is and isn’t working?” Total information awareness means that you’re closing the loop on the customer journey and analyzing campaign effectiveness through insightful reporting and analytics.
To continually identify optimization opportunities and golden nuggets of learnings, brands should ensure that:
- Dashboards and KPIs are customizable
- Data is flowing in real time
- Insights show consumer actions offline and online
- Audience data variables are used to enhance metrics
- Reporting is easy to read and accessible for all sophistication levels
Total Information Awareness Drives Total Brand Awareness
By ensuring your organization has access to a robust, centralized and connected dataset with the power to then take action on those things – either through segmentation, modeling, activation or analytics – marketers put themself in the driver seat to be the organization’s source of meaningful, strategic growth.
Gerard Daher is CEO of Speedeon