Download A guide to marketing agility

A guide to
marketing agility
Adapting your marketing in response to
changes in customer behaviour
March 2010
An Experian definition of agile marketing
Agile marketing is the ability to adapt or refocus
marketing effort quickly and successfully in response to
changes in customer behaviour, market conditions and
business direction to benefit market share or share of
wallet. It sounds simple, yet the means of achieving this
agility are more complex.
Why Marketing Agility is important – dispelling the myth of recovery marketing
“The punditry, prognostication, and general malaise that this bad-news-Bear
economy has brought with it has led many to focus on the past and cling to tired,
panic-stricken, reactive marketing that does little to actually solve the problems
that brands — and their consumers — are currently facing,”
Jamie Shuttleworth, EVP, Chief Strategic Planning Director at Draftfcb Chicago
There’s been much talk of how marketing should respond to the first signs of
economic recovery over recent months. The upturn, when it comes, will be a huge
opportunity for marketers to stop being reactive and proactively plan marketing
activity. But, doesn’t this miss the point a little? Whether we’re in recession or
recovery is not the issue. Good marketing practice and techniques have business
value no matter the economic climate. Isn’t the factor that sets one organisation
apart from another really how agile its marketing is – pinpointing and responding
quickly to changes in consumer trends and customer behaviour?
And consumers haven’t all responded to the recession in the same way. While
some may have tightened their purse strings over the past 18 months, others
have continued to spend and changed their habits very little. Others, given the
low interest rates feeding through to mortgages, may have even felt better off.
The important thing is that there is no universal truth when it comes to how
customers and prospects behave. That means there isn’t a formula marketers
can follow for success – but having an agile approach to marketing makes
pinpointing and responding to these changes easier.
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Five steps to gaining marketing agility
True marketing agility is predicated on the following requirements:
1. Joining up customer insight, product and channel
2. Having a single customer view
3. Combining customer insight with the ability to action this insight
Underplay one of these elements and the speed and success of response that
characterises marketing agility will be diminished.
In addition there are two further components that contribute to agile marketing,
namely:
4. Automating elements of the marketing process
5. Getting customer insight onto the boardroom agenda
1. Join up customer insight, product and channel
Agility means being able to make a change quickly and in the marketing sphere
this can often come down to the speed at which approval can be gained to adapt
a campaign focus or launch a new offer. A siloed structure with little overlap
between the key disciplines within insight, product and channel is a major
inhibitor to a rapid response. Agile marketing organisations understand where
the beneficial overlaps in their business are and maximise these to be able to
move quickly.
How to...join up
Marketing consultants can analyse your ability to be agile in terms of a joined
up structure to offer best practice advice. Joining up may not mean changes
to your organisation’s structure, for example Marketing Resource Management
(MRM) systems can quickly identify which channels, products and decision
makers need to be involved in a campaign and at what stage, creating step-bystep activity plans and sign off programmes.
2. Create a single customer view (SCV)
Obtaining a single view of your customers is a vital step in becoming agile.
This can be achieved by creating a marketing database in which you store all
customer information- from marketing communications to transaction history.
Having one consolidated record at potentially multiple data levels means that
a customer record might link to hundreds of events, multiple addresses and
multiple products.
Organisations need to be able to identify individual customers, understand
their history, highlight service issues, calculate propensity to buy new goods
and services and map and track response to key events and trigger offers. This
can only happen with a single customer view, when all data about a customer is
integrated and presented ready for use as a single record – preferably without
the need for complicated table joins.
The benefits of an SCV are obvious:
• Improved knowledge of customer behaviours to enhance experience,
relationships, retention and cross sell strategies and activities
• Valuable customer insight across all channels, locations and addresses to
make better customer management decisions
• Better analytics to drive decision making and relevant customer interactions
A guide to marketing agility | 3
How to...achieve a single customer view
It’s not an easy task and there are various approaches to delivering a single
customer view, but it’s one that’s well worth pursuing.
A first critical step is to use a software tool to cleanse and standardise address
data to the highest possible standard. The next stage is to apply a unique person
ID to create a consistent identifier of the individual regardless of address moves.
The next stage usually involves bringing in a team of data migration, integration
and analytical experts to help plan and execute the SCV database. Typically this
will involve manipulation, summary and aggregation of data from operational
system feeds, third party vendors, suppliers, partners and affiliates to provide
a better overall view and understanding of your customers’ behaviour in either
a hosted On-Premise (client-site) or On-Demand (hosted by the supplier)
database.
3. Get customer insight - and make it work
Insight into customers – previous purchase habits, channel interactions, geodemographic data, lifestyle preferences, modelled propensities and so on enables organisations to create targeted campaigns that deliver real results,
whilst improving the efficiency of your marketing spend. Customer location is a
valuable factor in gaining this insight, although it is often overlooked. Being able
to target customers and prospects more precisely in the areas they live and work
and analyse this in relation to the location of retail outlets and footfall, as well as
the geographical distribution of traffic to your website can help you allocate your
marketing resources more efficiently, improve response and maximise ROI.
How to...make insight live and work in your organisation
Having customer insight is great, but it’s how you understand it and use it to
feedback and inform future marketing that’s pivotal in attaining marketing agility.
Set piece analyses, such as looking at customer churn or segmenting your
customer base are, of course, essential, but by combining this with day-to-day
customer insight, organisations can really start to drill down to look at what
happened with previous activity, how successful a campaign was by channel
preference, how agents are performing relative to each other, the success or
failure of promotional efforts, the performance of new product launches and
store layouts, the tenure of customers, their likely headroom to spend more with
you and their lifestyle choices.
Integrating this insight with actionable ‘off-the-shelf’, consumer classifications
such as Mosaic helps you understand the relationship between spending habits,
lifestyles, channel preferences and locations. Embedding this segmentation and
the insight it provides into your operational CRM systems enables you to respond
quickly to changes in consumer behaviour.
Linking tools such as Mosaic geodemographics to economic forecasts of
consumer spending helps you to understand your exposure to changes in the
economic climate, identify opportunities and risks across your customer base
to future-proof your organisation, through better, more accurate and timely
forecasting of customer behaviour.
Marketing analysts can be invaluable in helping to turn insight into ‘actionable’
strategy that can be used to drive and shape marketing activity. To maximise
the value of your insight you must have a clearly defined set of objectives and
process for implementation.
4 | A guide to marketing agility
Take the case of needs-based segmentation, which can be a great tool for
marketers to understand the varied motivations and usage habits of a typical
customer base. Undertaking such a piece of work without understanding the
overall business objectives, gaining high level buy in, and having a clear path for
on-going usage (for customer retention as well as business development) can
make the work redundant before it has begun.
Once a clear business objective has been defined, and the implementation
process agreed (with everyone from IT teams through to management)
developing the insight is only the beginning of the process. Once created the next
step is to incorporate this insight back into your customer database (as well as
integrate into other applications, such as your contact centre).
You must also invest in educating the business on the best way leverage this
knowledge to maximise its impact.
You should also consider how you intend to maintain your understanding of
customers so that it evolves and keeps pace with changes in your business
and remains contemporary to the needs of your customers. It really is a case of
understand, build, implement, develop and evolve.
Essentially, by planning the insight based on business need, and understanding
how the analysis needs to be actioned, the agile business can operationalise
insight and drive huge value from the investment.
Finally, capturing insight into how your customers interact with you and your
competitors online has also become crucial as more purchasing activity moves
online and new business models emerge where visits, traffic and interaction
drive advertising rewards and success on different axes. Key questions
organisations need to answer include:
• What is the share of time spent on my site as opposed to my competitors?
• What search terms work best to drive traffic to my site?
• What levels of sentiment for my brand exist on line, and how is this changing
following a recent campaign?
• How can I influence the opinions of my brand being expressed on social
networks?
• What is the potential value of each of my customers’ social networks to my
business and how can I reach those that have the most influence?
• How do I maximise the value of any data I hold describing depth of
any relationship, sentiments/attitudes expressed, geo-demographic
circumstances, and current interactions/browsing behaviour to deliver
relevant targeted messaging and advertising either on my site or on other
‘publishers’ sites?
A guide to marketing agility | 5
4. Move towards marketing automation
Marketing Automation is a subset of customer relationship management
(CRM) that focuses on the definition, scheduling, segmentation and tracking of
marketing campaigns. The use of marketing automation makes processes that
would otherwise have been performed manually much more efficient and makes
new processes possible.
Definition from Marketing Automation Times
Marketing automation is the move towards less resource intensive, trigger and
event-driven marketing. It has a key role to play in marketing agility and requires
an organisational culture to be comfortable setting triggers and business rules
for marketing activity, defining what will happen at a certain trigger or event and
then allowing that course of action to happen without further intervention.
Marketing automation technologies can significantly increase the speed at
which companies can react to changing customer habits and profiles, helping to
ensure that customer communications achieve consistent relevance around both
“message” and “moment.”
Traditional marketing has involved processes which are batch based, ‘push’
campaigns which typically involve two key events – the receipt of the message /
ad and response / non-response. Real-time marketing developments now enable
more sophisticated scenarios allowing data intelligence to interact across
multiple channels to direct interactions with customers, thereby creating many
events which can be measured.
It’s a trend that is gaining momentum in the multi-channel and digital space in
particular. The more complex the environment, the more marketing automation
has a role to play – it allows marketers to let go of the operational side of
marketing and focus more on creative elements.
A simple example, association modelling – in the web environment the familiar
‘people who bought this also bought this’- is well practised at its basic level
by the likes of Amazon, ASOS and now even M&S and is part of marketing
automation. It’s the ability to look across the web, a call centre environment or
stores and see purchase patterns and then flag these up to allow certain events,
such as special offers to be flagged also.
Telcos, media and financial services organisations were the early adopters of
marketing automation. Telcos, in particular, have both the transaction history of
customers and have the channel too – mobile – to enable them to be pioneers in
the automated marketing space.
How to…automate your marketing
Marketing automation requires a new way of managing data assets. Firstly, it
requires the ability to automate modelling processes to predict events (good
and bad). No longer is it appropriate to ‘hand craft’ models in the traditional
way. Secondly, optimisation technology is crucial to enable decision engines to
make the best customer offer / channel to maximise organisation goals within
the constraints they operate (e.g. capacity of call centres, budget available,
number of offers and products). Thirdly, organisations need ‘target, test, and
measure’ technology to enable potentially thousands of executions within the
offer / channel to be tested across on-line channels, identifying best performing
ad-executions for particular customer groups. Finally, marketing automation
requires a capability to deliver real-time performance, often taking advantage
of in-session behaviours on web sites, mobiles, and mid-call interactions within
call centres.
6 | A guide to marketing agility
5. Get customer insight onto the boardroom agenda
Customer insight and segmentation is too often viewed as ‘the thing that marketing do
to decide which offer or communication to send to each contact’.Whilst this is certainly
an important output of customer insight, this information should form the crux of all
decisions that are made by an organisation.What your customers are doing is a far more
relevant barometer of the financial climate, than what the economists and media tell us.
Having this insight will mean marketing budgets will be truly aligned to the opportunity
your business has to react to whatever the financial climate. Being able to get this
insight in the board’s agenda will allow marketers to gain approval and sign off more
quickly, get more buy-in to initiatives, and result in fewer hoops to jump through.
How to….get customer insight onto the boardroom agenda
In this world of data-driven marketing it is getting easier to get insight onto the
boardroom agenda. Data is losing its nerdy tag and is becoming a recognised area of
expertise within many organisations.
Key considerations when generating and presenting insight:
• Make your insight accessible and easy-to-digest for the audience, often less-ismore and the first step to getting acceptance of your learning is to make it easy to
understand
• Ensure your insight is actionable. It is all too easy these days to drown in a plethora
of information about customers.The most dynamic and influential businesses make
their insight actionable, they embed it within their operational systems to improve
customer experience, enhance brand reputation, and respond dynamically to changes
in customer behaviour
• Focus on the ‘afters’.What does this mean for the organisation, and how can we
improve performance and measure this improvement to demonstrate the impact of
this knowledge on revenues and margins?
• Understand the consequences of not acting. Part of making the case for ongoing
analysis of customer behaviour is understanding the impact of not monitoring this
behaviour on a regular basis
Conclusion
Marketing agility is about being fast, responsive and flexible in your approach to
marketing. It’s also in large part about putting customers at the heart of your business
and responding to their changing needs and behaviours. Joining up, developing a single
customer view, gaining customer insight (and actioning it), automating marketing
processes and getting the business to buy into the value of increased customer insight
are all ways of achieving this.Yet, while there are clear steps, as we’ve outlined here, in
the drive to achieve marketing agility, it’s as much about a mind-set, as it is a checklist
of marketing approaches.To that end achieving marketing agility is something that
successful organisations constantly strive towards. It’s a long journey, but one that is
well worth the undertaking, with plentiful rewards along the way for your business.
About Experian
Experian is the leading global information services company, providing data and
analytical tools to clients in more than 65 countries.The company helps businesses
to manage credit risk, prevent fraud, target marketing offers and automate decision
making. Experian also helps individuals to check their credit report and credit score,
and protect against identity theft.
Experian plc is listed on the London Stock Exchange (EXPN) and is a constituent of
the FTSE 100 index.Total revenue for the year ended 31 March 2009 was $3.9 billion.
Experian employs approximately 15,000 people in 40 countries and has its corporate
headquarters in Dublin, Ireland, with operational headquarters in Nottingham, UK;
Costa Mesa, California; and São Paulo, Brazil.
For more information please visit: www.experianplc.com
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