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Brands are hard to understand. If you ask five people to define the word, you’re likely to get five completely different responses. That’s why we believe it’s more important to understand what a brand does.
Brands provide countless benefits for the companies that invest in their development, particularly when they gain strength. We’re devoting this entire month to helping you understand the values of a strong brand.
Truth #1: Strong brands are forgiven.
It’s true. If your brand has some weight behind it, consumers will forgive your missteps. Take Netflix for example. In 2011, the company was embroiled in a 60% price increase that resulted in the loss of 800,000 subscribers and a 77% drop in stock price.
It sounds terrifying, but the company quickly turned around. In 2013, Netflix’s stock hit a 52-week high and rose 213% over the previous year. All was forgiven.
After building deep reservoirs of goodwill, strong brands can weather the toughest storms.
Here are three things that determine brand strength:
1. How well it delivers on value proposition
Is your company keeping its promises? Is every customer touchpoint an expression of brand value? One of the greatest ways to build brand strength is demonstrating consistent reliability in terms of value proposition.
2. How visible it is in the marketplace
Do customers immediately know what your brand is and what it stands for? Visibility and awareness are huge contributors to brand strength. If consumers feel like they know you, they’re more likely to trust you.
3. How entrenched it’s become in customers’ lives
How does your brand interact with its customers? Every company has a unique opportunity to develop relationships and entrench itself in consumers’ lives. Building that strength makes your brand omnipresent and often, the first choice when a buyer needs to make a purchase.
What are you doing to build brand strength?
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This guest post comes to you from Randy Parker, Senior Developer at Movéo.
Today, we will explore combining two modern techniques – Personas and Big Data – which can work together to form a tool greater than the sum of its parts.
Personas are a method of segmenting your unique customer base to create humanly accessible descriptions of the different customer audiences you are attempting to reach. Different portions of the entire customer universe will often respond to different features or communication methods about your product and their engagement will increase if you speak specifically to their interests. Imagining a virtual person, in detail, for each one of these segments puts a human face, desires and goals to what would otherwise be a dry set of statistics.
These personas can help lead gen, marketing, media placement, sales and customer support get a feel for who they are communicating with. Properly designed personas are instantly relatable to the average person.
Moreover, there is immense value in going one step further and tying all those dry statistic values or ranges to these personas. Go through all of your Big Data properties and match which values would best fit each persona. It’s a big job, but once it is accomplished your data can talk to you not only in masses of numbers and categories, but will let you know WHO you are talking to by matching its data to a best fit persona.
On the flip side, Big Data helps inform the creation or optimization of Personas. Through cluster analysis you can see groupings of customer behavior that could indicate an attribute that defines one or more personas. You can see if the personas you developed match the actual data, if you created distinct personas that don’t show up in the data, or you might have missed a grouping that gives you an opportunity to refine your communication with a new persona type.
As always, never sit on your laurels – make it an iterative process to constantly use new data to refine your personas, update them, and communicate a clear vision of your interactions.
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This month, we’ve offered insight about how your company can better understand data and move towards optimization. Now you may be wondering how we address data at our own company.
We’re happy to report that we’ve taken huge data-related strides in the last year. In December, we welcomed data specialist Jiani Zhang to Chicago. She’s leading our new Data & Insights group, a team we formed in response to the growing need for data specialization in the marketplace.
Jiani is enhancing our approach to data-driven communications and helping us meet our clients’ needs as they relate to information. Together with the rest of our employees, she is leveraging data to enhance the integrated services we offer our clients. Jiani’s strong analytical background made her a natural choice for the role, and we’re already impressed by the direction she’s taking with our Data & Insights group.
As Jiani says,
“We’re building an ecosystem in our firm in which everyone leverages the availability and use of data-driven insights for informed solutions to client business challenges.”
We stand behind our decision to make data a priority and let it shape the future of our company. Onward and upward!
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According to a survey conducted by McKinsey on Marketing and Sales, big data has serious impact on marketing ROI. In fact, better marketing analytics can improve returns on a company’s investment by 10-20%, whether the data sets used are “big” or not. Measuring the benefits of marketing efforts has always been a challenge, so the potential of data is a serious incentive for CMOs who need to report the value of their work.
Here are three ways data optimization directly impacts marketing results:
Higher profits
Currently, big data users report 6% higher profits than other companies, along with a 5% higher productivity rate. It’s smart to begin the process of data adoption as soon as possible, because these numbers will only climb as the scope of data optimization improves over the next several years.
Better customer understanding
Today’s extended sales cycle means customers potentially have more interaction with companies than ever before. 61% of worldwide consumers use digital channels as part of their purchase journey, leaving a massive data trail available that relates directly to the process. Analyzation of that data helps marketers get to know customers on unprecedented levels. What this insight, companies can engage buyers at the right times, influence them when it’s time to buy, and create advocates when the process is over.
Smarter strategy
One CMO survey reports that 61% of projects do not use marketing analytics to inform decisions. This alarming statistic verifies that many companies are leaving marketing’s potential impact untapped, resulting in less business growth over time. Companies who use data to shape marketing strategy will end up with smarter campaigns and less overall spend. Targeted work that’s backed by numbers brings specific results, removing the need to attempt things in an undefined way.
How is your company using data to its advantage?
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Big data adoption is an overwhelming process for companies of every size. It takes a lot of research and hard work to find the right data and means of implementation to influence business decisions. However, in the end, it’s not the data that makes the impact. It’s what your company does with it.
The ability to gain insights and drive decision-making with data is essential to success. As our Managing Partner Bob Murphy said on the blog, it’s time for marketing to use data-driven insights to connect efforts directly to Impact on Growth.
Here are the three areas where data can be most effective. Use them to shape your company’s data-driven strategy.
Customer Engagement
With data, your company can truly refine the who, the where, the what and the why of its intentions. By understanding the habits of your company’s ideal customer – current or future – the marketing department can engage them when it really matters. Putting the right information in front of customers at the right time makes all the difference.
Customer Loyalty
Companies should absolutely use data to shape their influence with customers. Only after examining buyers’ deepest needs can a company become truly relevant. After the initial purchase cycle, data should be utilized to shape customers’ habits of return, which is equally important. Develop a strategy to turn buyers into advocates.
Marketing Optimization
Data has the potential to make a powerful impact on your company’s marketing optimization efforts. If your organization is wondering how much money across which channels leads to the biggest impact, look at the numbers. This is the way to link marketing efforts directly to Impact on Growth, an essential step in moving forward.
Where is data making the biggest impact at your company?
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So far, we’ve focused our big data posts on developing a greater understanding of what it actually means and how it can work for you. Technical knowledge aside, the most important piece of the puzzle is understanding how to connect it to customers. Therein lies true optimization.
Putting hype behind us, most companies are experiencing a need to make data practical. They need to learn the best form of application to see results, and making data relatable to real customers is one of the first steps. Telling a personal story with abstract information can be challenging, but this is where a marketer’s intuition comes into play. Data analyzation is simply a means of gaining customer insight that leads to better decision making. Those decisions are the ones that lead to impact on business growth.
Wondering how to do it?
Technology’s impact on customer experience only continues to rise, presenting an opportunity to better learn what customers want. Once companies have figured that out, they must decide how to deliver it, using a combination of technical skills and natural intuition.
Directly impact purchase decisions.
With the help of data experts, the information at a company’s fingertips will help them shape customer perceptions when they matter most – during the purchase cycle. By dissecting customer desires on a higher level, it’s possible to directly influence buying decisions by engaging prospects when they are most interested, but before they slip away.
Develop flexibility.
Today’s customers are accessing your information and products on a wide variety of devices and in varied situations. They’re more connected than ever. Companies must adapt by capturing as much information as they can about a prospect’s profile, history and context. With that data, they can develop systems to ensure that all information placed in front of customers is relevant and appealing.
Reach new markets.
In addition to optimizing the customer experience of existing leads, organizations can use data to expand into new markets that previously felt out of reach. All it takes is a deep knowledge of information to understand that buyer’s story. Through targeted analyzation, they can figure out what those groups need and intervene with answers in the form of products or services. They must simply determine the areas of focus and ask the right questions. Companies who do that will be met with a wealth of truth that creates a path to sales.
How do you use data to understand your customers?
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If you’re a company looking to make a data investment, you probably have one thing on your mind – optimization for business growth. You’re headed in the right direction, but with all that big data brings to the table, it can be hard to know where to focus your energy and funds.
To answer the big data movement, new products are frequently being released that make data more attainable for marketers. It almost seems impossible to know what approach will make the biggest impact at your company. We understand, and we want to help.
Today we’re suggesting four areas of focus to guide your data investment. Decide what best meets your company’s needs before taking the next step.
More Sophisticated Analytics
Today, new forms of complex analytics are constantly hitting the market, and some of them may serve your company well. Whether it’s time series analysis or high-level social data, explore your options and compare them to your goals to find a fit.
Integration of Existing Data
As we said last week, your organization might be sitting on top of dark data that simply needs to be better utilized. In that case, your first investment should be integration. Find out how to make the most of the data your company has and let it start shaping business decisions.
Migration to Big Data Platforms
Perhaps batch processing is no longer meeting your needs or will clearly fail you as you move further into data adoption. If so, transitioning to a big data platform might be the way to go.
Improved Risk Analytics
Improving your risk analytics is a smart move, and depending on your company’s status, it might be a good way to transition into data investment. It enables you to use information to make better decisions that lead to higher return on capital and business growth.
Has your company made an investment in one of these categories?
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As we mentioned earlier this month, big data isn’t always the answer. Data-driven marketing and business strategies, however, are right for everyone. If you’re thinking about a big data investment, consider this first. Sometimes optimizing information for your company means finding the right data to match your goals, whether or not it’s the biggest.
An essential part of the big data movement is learning how to shape business decisions with data. We couldn’t agree more that data optimization is one of the best ways to make an impact on business growth; in fact, we’ve added a specialist to our team to lead the new Data & Insights group that will address this need for our clients. As you’re moving towards data adoption at your own company, it’s important to understand the specific nature of varied data sets and their relevance to your company’s needs.
Your data investment might be better aimed at high-quality analysis than big, cumbersome sets of information that may or may not solve your problems.
Here are four elements that help determine if particular data sets will work for you:
Quality
Where is your data coming from? How reliable is it? Who manages it? These are all questions to ask when you determine the quality of a particular set of information.
Connection to Goals
Sure, maybe a data set has been brought to your attention that provides really fascinating information about your customers. It’s important to be discerning, though – will this new insight help you reach customers in a way that impacts your bottom line or takes your company to the next level?
Context
Be careful not to use data out of context. Information can be intoxicating, and along with that comes a desire to force it to serve your purposes. Use the information for what it is, and if it isn’t applicable to your business goals, move on to the next thing.
Intuition
Big data is never going to make business intuition go out of style. As companies move towards data adoption, senior leadership will have a good grasp on what will work and what won’t, and that should be trusted even amidst the hype.
How do you determine what data is relevant to your company?
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In our recent exploration of who should handle data at your company, we shared some of the perks of training existing employees to manage complex data sets. A recent survey by New Vantage Partners reports that as executives prepare to increase data investment over the next few years, an overwhelming 68% plan to retrain current staff to manage big data initiatives rather than hire new specialists.
While it’s easy to understand that this approach might be more cost efficient and capitalize on the value of varied perspectives, actually training your employees to leverage big data is much more intimidating. To help, we have four ways managers can prepare their staff for data adoption.
To form a diverse team that can optimize big data and use it to solve business problems, start here:
1. Bring in the experts
Before you do anything else, bring in a data specialist to teach your team how big data differentiates itself from the information they’re used to managing. After the initial training, consider holding one-day seminars on a monthly or quarterly basis to keep your staff updated on the way data optimization practices evolve over time.
2. Change organizational structures
As your company moves towards data adoption, senior leadership should take a hard look at organizational structures. Some changes might be necessary to allow current employees the time and space become the resident data specialists.
3. Form data governance standards
Data, especially when it comes to its impact on business growth, isn’t just a passing trend. If your company is considering a big data investment, it’s critical that data governance standards be formed before implementation. Shaping your data staffing and training with intention will set it up to be successful for years to come.
4. Establish a data lab
Why not establish a data lab at your company? This can serve as a platform for employee training in the future and serve as a place of congregation for your current staff members who have been tasked with big data implementation. You can use it to provide them with guest speakers, seminars and other inspiration to make growth happen.
Does your company plan to utilize current employees for big data management? If so, how will you prepare them?
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As the collective desire to optimize big data grows, your company is probably facing many decisions, and you’re not alone. Every organization is trying to determine what kind of investment is right for them and how data can make the biggest impact on their goals. One of the most important questions to ask before moving forward is this: who should handle data at your company?
Three Data Staffing Options to Consider
Chief Information Officer
The Chief Information Officer, or CIO, has been a popular title as of late, but before taking the plunge, it’s important to examine whether or not it’s the right fit for you. What is the scope of your company’s data plan? It might require a c-suite executive for leadership and development, but chances are, you’re not there yet. Your personnel investment as it applies to data might be better structured in another way.
Data Scientist
The data scientist is another appealing hire for the data movement, but again, its necessity depends on your company’s structure and data plans. Even then, a good one might be hard to find. Three years ago, McKinsey Global Institute reported that by 2018, the United States will suffer an alarming shortage of 140,000 to 190,000 people with the deep analytical skills needed to make data-informed business decisions. Your company might not have the scope or data access to invest in a data scientist yet, but if you do, there’s still another option to consider.
Diverse Data Team
As you make progress in data optimization, you might want to think in broader terms when it comes to staffing. A diverse, multidisciplinary team with varied skill sets is often the best way to harness the complexities of data. This is especially true for large companies with the interests of multiple departments at stake. Different people bring fresh perspectives to the table as they address big data adoption and technology challenges. A team mindset is helpful in decision making, and it’s often more cost effective to provide training for existing employees who have knowledge of your company than to hire new ones and start from zero.
Who do you envision managing data at your company?
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