Yes, indeed it’s the Double, Double, Toil and Trouble year 2020!! but we could make it better!!
It’s the year where the world of marketers have been hit hard by pandemic Covid-19. In the blaze of the anomalous health and economic setback, the world so boldly built by the marketers started tumbling down. They no longer had their upper hand in the presumptions of their so very precious customers. Their customer’s what, why, and how for the products they would be wanting or needing was made unknown to the marketers. And with all shops getting closed quickly and unexpectedly along with e-commerce sales being exploded and contact targeted interactions being rocketed, it made decision making harder for the marketers with the sudden unpredictable change. Media consumption also boosted up with all the self-quarantining precautions being taken.
This being the new normal situation, marketers are needed to make more fast and accurate decisions, but are failing at it. Even when marketers are clothing themselves with data, they seem to be getting improper portrayal of their performance and their customers.
There are certain things that could be done to make situations much better:
Marketers could build a feedback loop between every data, insight, and action to make it more efficient and marketers could start with simpler data then test and prove the wins and impact over business even if its small initially, then move onto the bigger data sets.
IoT has been helping many companies in letting them knowing if or not their products are being liked and if they are being used to its full worth through the usage pattern of their customers. And all customer interactions either happening online or offline would generate digital data. Even phone conversations which was once considered as offline data and impossible to track, is now, thanks to our new technology era, has been made online and now could be studied.
Zero Moment of Truth a term coined by google on 2012, could be very useful in getting to know, test, analyze, and optimize the “moment” in the buying process when the customer gets influenced to purchase which in turn gives revenue.
The gleam of marketing analytics should be on the data that would yield us revenue but not only on easier areas but also harder data areas like phone conversations. DISH had started doing this now and generating 60% conversion rate.
Marketers need insights on the conversations that turns to sales may be through easier data, like by measuring website visits and email open counts or harder ones like phone conversations and analyzing it same as any other digital activity. In this ever-changing diverse world, we now need the decisions to be made all the more based on facts which in turn would generate revenue and to stay deep rooted to customers.