One of the most exciting developments over the last few years has been the increase in demand for data planning and customer data analytics. A number of leading blue chip companies are beginning to realise the benefit of digging into their customer databases and, as a result, are now seeing significantly higher returns on investment.
The GFC forced marketers to put all marketing activities under the microscope and demand more measurable and performance-based marketing outcomes. This meant ensuring all marketing spend was based on more rigorous forecasting outcome models.
At the same time, with reduced budgets and tougher acquisition targets, many smart marketers started to leverage their own customer databases and look for more effective ways to sell more or different products to existing customers. Consequently we are seeing a dramatic rise in the use of individual customer data to drive communications. But there is a shortage of people with analytics and insights planning capabilities.
To meet this need, in November 2010 we set up ngage, a data-planning consultancy, led by ex Dunn-Humby strategist, Carl Oldham. The demand from both our existing clients and new clients has been quite overwhelming. As a consequence we have been working with many blue chip clients such as Toyota, Nestlé and The Sydney Morning Herald, providing supplementary analytics and insights planning resources. We are not trying to replace in-house skills, but instead, add our complementary skills, tools and resources.
Over the last few months we’ve been getting out and chatting to many CEOs and marketing leaders about our data offering. We’ve found that many share similar issues around their customer data. Some companies have four or five separate databases on different systems that don’t easily talk to each other. Others have good customer data but haven’t been collecting email addresses! The one commonality is that most clients are keen to do more sophisticated segmentation and profiling of their customers to improve the effectiveness of their marketing communications programs.
And it’s not just the companies you’d expect to be doing more of this work, such as the Banks and Financial Services providers. We are seeing Automotive and FMCG companies investing money into building customer databases and relationship marketing programs. We’re having some interesting discussions around the role of social media and how these efforts work closely with eCRM programs.
We’ve put all our recent insights and knowledge into a presentation that covers the issues, challenges and opportunities that exist in the world of data. Titled ‘Discovering untapped profitability’, it explains why marketers are more interested than ever in customer data. Plus it showcases some great case studies of recent work ngage has carried out and how we’ve helped companies discover their untapped profitability. Please contact me if you’d like to see this presentation.
Many marketers are changing their views and immersing themselves in this interesting cross-over of mathematics and direct marketing. And as we see a greater shift to digital communications, data analytics and insights will become even more powerful and more important tools for all marketers.
