Solve Retail Challenges with Marketing Intelligence
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Explain how marketing intelligence unifies data sources.
- Describe how marketing intelligence surfaces real-time data.
How Do We Improve Customer Connections?
It’s clear that retail brands need to improve their connections with customers. Marketing intelligence plays a part in making that happen. But how specifically? Let’s look at a couple of the pain points retail brands face when connecting with customers and see how marketing intelligence addresses them.
Challenge 1: Fragmented Data Is Frustrating
As you’ve learned, for retail marketers, data is crucial to providing exceptional customer experiences. Marketers are using a growing number of channels to obtain this data—from sales and website analytics to social platforms and email. As a result, retail marketers have a wealth of knowledge available to them.
But if this data is coming from different, disparate sources, it presents a variety of issues. For example, when data is fragmented and disorganized, marketers:
- Have to spend their time aggregating and preparing data, rather than analyzing it and drawing actionable insights.
- Are unable to analyze the whole customer journey, as they don’t have access to a holistic view of their marketing activities.
But that’s not all. Many brands also have to contend with other data deficiencies concerning:
- Governance: 68% of brands don’t have clearly defined roles and governance for managing consumer data.
- Agility: 63% of brands don’t respond to consumer demands and insights in an agile manner.
- Security: 54% of brands don’t have rigorous compliance and security to monitor and protect consumer data.
Solution: Marketing intelligence creates a single source of truth for data.
Remember, marketing intelligence makes marketing smarter. It helps solve the problem of fragmented data by connecting and unifying data sources into a single, holistic view. As a result, teams access and use the same set of facts, KPIs, and taxonomies across an organization. This bolsters common business goals and also increases efficiency in the process.
With marketing intelligence, rather than wrestling with data, marketers are free to quickly and easily find the insights they need to inform their marketing campaigns.
Challenge 2: Lack of Agility Is Aggravating
Unlocking insights through data is a key part of resolving the disconnect between customer needs and the experiences marketers are delivering. Research shows that brand leaders who reported a revenue increase of at least 10% in the past fiscal year focus on data at nearly twice the rate of underperformers across all areas, on average. And even though data is at the heart of customer experiences, the reality is, if it’s outdated and not actionable, it’s worthless.
Today’s customers expect brands to connect with them through relevant, personalized messages that will help them make decisions. If customers don’t feel connected to a retailer now, they’re likely to look elsewhere. And competition plus the speed of today’s market make this pivot pretty easy. If retailers aren’t also able to pivot and optimize in a more agile way, they’re likely to see their customers slip away.
Solution: Marketing intelligence provides access to real-time data.
Time is of the essence when it comes to reaching the modern customer who’s always “on,” active and connecting with brands in a multitude of ways. Marketing intelligence makes marketing smarter by putting actionable insights at marketers’ fingertips. Using those insights, they can quickly develop relevant campaigns, creative assets, posts, and touchpoints—all while making changes in real time.
Marketers also need to capitalize on every dollar spent across the marketing budget. Marketing intelligence helps marketers drive ROI for the business. How? It gives marketers a holistic view of their customers and ensures they’re optimizing their campaigns. Marketing intelligence provides access to data in real time, so marketers can pause or double-down on spend to ensure they’re not missing a minute of customer attention during big retail moments (think: holidays, back to school, and more).
So, there you have it: Marketing intelligence is a solution to many of the challenges that marketers face as a result of a changing retail landscape. Retailers who use marketing intelligence are pulling away from the pack. And you will, too, as you become a marketing intelligence expert!
Learn more about marketing intelligence and tools that can help in the Marketing Intelligence and Analytics module.