Get Started with Marketing Intelligence for Retail
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Describe the changing landscape of retail.
- Summarize what marketing intelligence is.
The Ever-Evolving Retail Landscape
The retail industry is undergoing unprecedented changes. Every day, customers are redefining their shopping experiences. They have high expectations and have come to expect on-demand connections with retailers, and they’re using more channels to interact with brands—from mobile apps to social media to email. In fact, 67% of customers say that they want to shop from retailers that offer them a seamless customer journey across shopping channels.
Convenience is key: Many retailers are shifting away from traditional brick-and-mortar stores and taking their business online to meet customers wherever they are, whenever they want. And these shoppers are seriously savvy—they have access to a wealth of product information and reviews that impact their purchasing decisions.
This modern age of shopping presents some real challenges for retail marketers. How can they manage customer and marketing data from a multitude of technologies and channels? How can they quickly use this data to gain a deep understanding of customer behavior, meet the growing needs of their customers, and deliver the right message at the right time? And how can they do it all efficiently and within their marketing budget? It’s a tall order, but thanks to marketing intelligence, it’s possible.
Marketing Intelligence Makes Marketing Smarter
Just like the name suggests, marketing intelligence is a type of AI-powered technology that makes marketing smarter. How exactly? Well, it takes data science one step further by enabling marketers to:
- Gather, visualize, and analyze insights in one place.
- Put data into context and relate it to specific campaigns.
- Provide conclusions about and recommendations for customers, competitors, and even internal processes.
Customers report that interactions with retailers’ products, services, and brands across touchpoints are disconnected. Only 13% of customers say companies generally excel at delivering connected experiences. By using marketing intelligence, retail marketers get the information they need to build meaningful connections with customers during every stage of the retail journey.
Take Isabelle Givens for example. Isabelle is a marketing manager at outdoor gear and apparel retailer Northern Trail Outfitters (NTO). She’s been tasked with rebalancing a smaller budget to focus on areas that provide NTO with the most impact. To prioritize her resources, Isabelle relies on performance analytics as she evaluates her marketing campaigns.
She notices that it takes her team one week every month to deliver a report. The team manually creates custom reports for every request. On top of that, they have to sift through data from separate channels to piece together sales info, email clicks, social impressions, and so on.
Once Isabelle receives the reports, she has to look at many disconnected insights to understand how one part of the funnel impacts another. For example, she wants to know if a video ad improved sales. It looks like the video ad outperformed the static image ad, boosting apparel sales. But Isabelle had to go through more than 20 data streams to make this assessment. She shares her findings with the creative team and asks that they prioritize video ads and spend fewer resources on creating static image ads.
Isabelle is making an impact, despite the manual work and challenges her team encounters. But imagine what Isabelle could do if all of her data was in one place—giving her instant visibility into KPIs across the business. She could be making these types of decisions in days, not weeks.
Isabelle knows first-hand how important it is to build the strategy and infrastructure for her team to make fast, data-driven decisions. Let’s see how Isabelle—and you—can start using marketing intelligence.
Get Started with Marketing Intelligence
There are three steps to creating an effective marketing intelligence strategy.
- Data integration and management: The process of unifying and connecting marketing data. When done well, marketers are able to see any data—social, search, display, programmatic, web, email, and CRM—all in one place.
- Data analysis and optimization: The process of making sense of the data and structuring it to make better decisions.
- Alignment and collaboration: The process of aligning data within a single system to inspire collaboration across teams. With on-demand access to data and reports, every team has the information to move forward together.
To sum up, marketing intelligence helps deliver the flexible, relevant, and convenient shopping experiences that customers expect. Plus, it gives businesses easy access to their data to make better (and faster) decisions.
In the next unit, we explore a few challenges that have a significant effect on the retail marketing landscape. We also uncover how marketing intelligence provides opportunities for marketers to truly transform their customers’ retail journeys.