In the past, tracking the efficacy of your marketing efforts was a relatively straightforward endeavour. Businesses typically launched targeted campaigns aimed at delivering an uplift in sales, mindshare, or brand recognition, gathered data to see how efforts impacted them, then used that insight to refine the strategy for next time.
But in recent years, a huge wave of change has made understanding marketing performance a lot harder. Consumer preferences are evolving rapidly, myriad new channels have emerged for both buying and promotion, and technology has advanced to enable data-driven marketing decision-making.
As a result, today’s marketers are faced with some diverse and complex market and technology challenges. On the market side, teams are contending with:
- Immense pricing pressures which are transforming consumer buying habits and driving marketing budgets down – challenging marketers to do more with less
- A continuous stream of new channels that marketers need to master at speed, and incorporate into increasingly complex omnichannel marketing strategies
- Shifting consumer needs that are often conflicting – such as high demand for sustainable products, that are also low cost and available at scale
And on the technology side, teams are also being challenged to:
- Embrace hyper-personalisation and use deep consumer data to tailor campaigns and experiences around individuals
- Build marketing technology ecosystems and have experts on hand to integrate all of their tools and channels
- Manage large volumes of diverse data and extract meaningful insights from data present in silos, at disparate data sources
Tackling all those challenges at once is tough. But that’s exactly what The Smart Cube’s Marketing Analytics solution is designed for.
We build from the ground up to enable long-term marketing analytics success
Our Marketing Analytics solution is made up of three tiers – the data tier, the analytics and reporting tier, and the application tier.
The data tier is the foundation of the solution, and provides a unified, governed environment for all marketing data sources including sales data, CRM data, third-party data sets, social listening data, digital properties data, and many more.
Each data tier we build is designed around the specific needs of the organisation we’re supporting, and bespoke governance and controls are applied in line with relevant regulatory and organisational demands.
This purpose-built ecosystem for marketing data streamlines the transformation of diverse data points into actionable insights, preparing it for AI applications. With an analytics and reporting tier built on this foundation, disparate data is refined into analytical outputs, facilitating contextualisation for marketers to drive informed actions.
Integrated marketing algorithms then utilise this processed data to conduct market mix modelling, attribution modelling, sentiment analysis, and customer journey mapping, enabling the extraction of valuable insights crucial for personalised campaigns and optimised strategies.
Driving marketing strategies with continuous insights
The final tier of our Marketing Analytics solutions – the application tier – sits on top of the analytics layer, and contextualises analytical outputs for marketers, empowering them to make informed strategic decisions at speed.
The tier is made up of three modules:
Marketing ROI and spend optimisation
The capabilities in the module help teams assess the impact of every interaction they have with prospects, accurately see the ROI of their various marketing efforts, and track progress against a wide range of other relevant marketing KPIs.
Those metrics also help teams clearly understand how they can optimise their campaigns, marketing spend, marketing mix, and omnichannel strategies to drive progress against whichever KPIs are most important to them.
Consumer insights
Our consumer insights module helps teams create a 360-degree view of consumers so they can understand and better influence their behaviours.
It empowers marketers with continuous insights into consumer needs, enabling them to build timely strategies that align with emerging and evolving demands. So, no matter how quickly demands shift, their marketing efforts can stay aligned with them.
Personalisation
Our final module helps teams turn vast quantities of consumer data into hyper-personalised campaigns, touchpoints, and experiences.
With a single view of the consumer, marketers can test different campaign and engagement types, learn what works for each individual, and develop highly personalised strategies that deeply resonate with the people they target.
How it all comes together to enable a 360-degree consumer and market view for CPG companies
The three tiers of The Smart Cube’s Marketing Analytics solution come together to deliver a unified and future-ready marketing data ecosystem, and an always-on view of campaign performance, consumer preferences, and market opportunities. But to fully understand its power and potential, we need to look at an example of the solution in action.
Imagine a hypothetical CPG company. Like most organisations in the CPG industry, this company collects vast quantities of marketing-relevant data. Social listening data helps the team understand consumer sentiment. Marketing engagement data helps them understand the impacts of their efforts. And CRM data provides insight at a single-consumer level.
Each data source contains valuable insight that can help marketers drive ROI and create impactful campaigns. But while they’re siloed and separate from one another, it takes a massive amount of effort to build up a clear picture of consumer and market needs from across them. By the time the team has collated and extracted that insight, conditions have moved on again, so the team is constantly trailing behind consumer and market change.
With our Marketing Analytics solution in place, all of that data – plus numerous other sources – is unified in a single data layer. There, diverse and disparate data sources can be processed alongside one another with ease to deliver deeper insights that marketers can quickly put into action to drive value and ROI.
So, CRM insights that give visibility of consumer journeys can be further contextualised with market-level data and social sentiment analysis to pinpoint market opportunities at a granular level. That enables marketers to create and tailor highly impactful campaigns, and ensure they’re focusing their efforts in the right places at the right time.
The analytics layer built on top of that data layer ensures that as new data is gathered and onboarded, it’s automatically turned into actionable insight. So, the marketing team have their biggest questions answered, without ever even having to ask.
The end result is a complete, always-on view of consumer and market needs, that enables rapid data-driven marketing decision making, and enables marketers to continuously improve their efforts and create value.
In today’s rapidly evolving conditions, this insight enables marketers to stay ahead of continuous changes, and:
- Understand how consumers are responding to new pricing pressures, and how their marketing should evolve in response.
- Make data-driven decisions on where and when their brand should be present, to help marketing budgets go as far as possible.
- Embrace new direct-to-consumer selling models and keep up with competitors that are evolving their commercial models.
- Optimise marketing efforts across all channels, and create omnichannel strategies that can scale effectively as new channels emerge.
To learn more about our solution and learn what The Smart Cube could help your marketers achieve, visit here or talk to us today.