Marketing in the 21st century

The marketing profession is going through a major transformation. Traditionally, marketing focuses on three key responsibilities: understanding the customer, how and where to market and building the brand promise.

These responsibilities are now transforming into new dimensions that require marketers to function and collaborate differently.

We are talking about the new marketing imperatives of understanding the client as an individual, having a clear view of the client experience journey or the systems of engagement and lastly, integrating the company’s culture and brand to be authentically one.

With today’s Big Data, a marketer has the potential to transform his/her role and use the new insights to drive strategic decisions for growth and competitive advantage.

Big Data—the enormous volume, variety, veracity and velocity of data being produced—holds tremendous potential for the marketing function.

With the right marketing mix, marketing professionals can use Big Data to better understand individual customers, predict their behaviors, create tailored interactions and maximize the value of each interaction.

Gone are the days where we just talk about understanding markets. We have moved onto a smaller rabbit hole that promises much more. Marketers now need to understand each customer as an individual.

Maximize each engagement

Customers are individuals. To be a successful marketer, one needs to go beyond broad customer segmentation to determine individual preferences and anticipate individual behaviors.

By understanding each customer as an individual, one can develop highly targeted promotions, determine the next best action for each individual and deliver a tailored experience—one that improves outcomes and increases return on investment (ROI).

Social media sentiments are crucial especially for business to consumer (B2C) enterprises. Collecting and analyzing the content from social media must be a top priority.

The volume of social media content is staggering: Every minute, there are some 1.7 million Facebook posts, a third of a million tweets, plus some 2.8 million YouTube views, according to Edelman Digital’s 2013 Social Media Trends.

In the Philippines, social media is changing the way the Filipinos do things in general.

Going by the numbers from Socialbakers, one of every three Filipinos is on Facebook. Big businesses are cashing in on it and there’s no sign that it’s going to slow down anytime soon.

To make a point, in May 2013, ABS-CBN Integrated News and Current Affairs (INCA) tied up with IBM Philippines to utilize its deep big data analytics expertise and patented tools in analyzing public interactions on social media that helped made better sense of the social media activities in the recent mid-term elections.

Facebook is just one of the many channels that offer marketers routes into the psyche of a customer.

As the number of customer channels increases, delivering a tailored experience across all channels is a must.

Whether a customer engages—in person, via telephone calls or comments via Twitter or on YouTube, the need to anticipate what the customer wants and then make the most of each interaction is crucial.

Improving marketing effectiveness

An effective marketer seeks to sustain interest, generate qualified lead and goes on to convert an inquiry into a new sale—while making the most of the marketing investment.

In the past, many marketing campaigns fail to generate actual sales.  The good news is, today’s advanced analytics has the potential to maximize the value of Big Data and transform key marketing functions.

Employing big data analytics for behavior analysis, for example, enables marketers to explore a broader range of customer information than previously available, detect patterns in prior behavior and more accurately predict future behaviors.

As a result, marketers can determine the next best action, better target promotions and increase the effectiveness of advertising campaigns.

The valuable customer information that marketers collect can be used not only to improve marketing but also to enhance product development.

By sharing emerging trends and real-time feedback gathered from social media and other sources, marketers can make a valuable contribution to successful product development. Moving from traditional marketing strategies to more data-driven approaches that employ advanced analytics, marketers can optimize their audience, channel, content and yield. They can better target high-value customers, determine the best channels for reaching those customers, tailor the messaging and ultimately deliver better results.

Big Data is more than a simple matter of size; it is an opportunity to find insights in new and emerging types of data and content, to make your business more agile, and to answer questions that were previously considered beyond your reach. Until now, there was no practical way to harvest this opportunity. To sum it up, it is about bringing science to the art of marketing and realizing that things can be done smarter.

(The author is country manager for Marketing of IBM Philippines.)