Why your brand needs a fresh customer intelligence strategy for the next decade

The world of marketing and business is changing as we speak. Data privacy regulations are evolving at a pace more rapid than ever before, bringing privacy-first mindset to the forefront for the first time. Consumers and their needs and behaviours have been changing for some years how and what they buy, how they consume content, what digital and physical interactions with advertising and store locations really mean, and so much more. There is unprecedented competition for brands from existing players as well as new home grown challenger brands especially as an outcome of COVID-19 where consumer loyalty has been tested across the lifecycle. Theres unprecedented pressure on marketers to do the right thing for business and for consumers and do it fast. How businesses leverage customer data to make decisions on the go and to what end its a time of evolution for business, marketing, and consumers. If we go by history, every time a flux such as this happens, brands and businesses go back to the drawing board and refresh their consumer connection and data strategies.

This time around though, focusing on data alone will not cut it. Because everything they have known about marketing, business, technology and ad tech is transforming as we speak and the old playbooks will not work anymore.

Brands need a renewed customer intelligence playbook a playbook that shapes what business and consumer insight will look like in the coming decade.

‍Why customer intelligence?

Thanks to the transformation of  consumer data platforms, ad tech and constant connectivity, brands have had all the data sources they needed in order to understand buying journeys and purchase triggers and barriers. What they need now is to go beyond and allow customers to be seen and heard in the ways they need to be seen and heard as whole, pro-choice individuals instead of the broad strokes of demographic-driven segments that they have been perceived as in the past, thanks to siloed data sources and minimal effort in understanding each consumer as an anonymized individual. If brands can pick up this thread now and start delivering true customer intelligence instead of plain vanilla customer data, they will become game changers in their own right.

The new generation of customer intelligence promises to be far less about the data brands own about consumers and more about how this data is analysed and leveraged to deliver empathetic, contextual, delightful customer experience across the board.

Customer intelligence is all about transforming data to actionable insights, with efforts in data enrichment, connecting the dots and deriving meaningful insights from various siloed data sources, and bringing it all together into a consumer connection strategy that gets results.

Customer intelligence in 2020 and beyond promises to be all about actionable insights to make rapid business decisions and critical pivots, and eventually achieve quantifiable results from each consumer touchpoint across the purchase journey. Its about leveraging data to make the most of moments that matter in a customer journey.

At the core of this transformation is customer intelligence.

How customer intelligence empowers brands and marketers

Marketers around the world have been grappling to get audience insights and measurement right in the midst of increasing complexity within the existing insight mechanisms. Apart from just the inability get a holistic view these customer journeys, measure marketing touchpoints, and optimize omni-channel ad spends accordingly, other marketer challenges include

• Disparate customer data sources
• Lack of customer data or poor data quality
• Lack of skill in working with such humongous amounts of data and crunching numbers to measure quick and measure right
• Keeping up with continuously evolving customer behaviour and needs and wants
• Keeping track of privacy and other regulations within the ad tech ecosystem
• Ad waste and pressure to deliver high outcome marketing campaigns

What if we were to tell you that customer intelligence addresses all of these challenges?

1. Customer intelligence enables Hyper-contextual advertising and messaging as well as platform selection, thus increasing conversion rates and reducing ad waste significantly.

2. Customer intelligence enables Optimized media mix and spend by giving marketers a continuous view into which platforms and media sites work for which consumers and segments.

3. Customer intelligence enables a continuous view of customer behaviour through online and offline realms. This helps predict customer behaviour, needs and wants and deliver not only the right communication but also new product portfolio and services, promotions, in-store experience and enhancements for stronger consumer connections and delightful experiences.

4. Customer intelligence helps brands scale reach by enabling identity resolution, or creating highly individualistic customer profiles for strategic outreach. With a layer of lookalike modelling on top of these profiles, brands can scale reach beyond the existing walled gardens.

The way forward

Since we began product development for Factori, we have been in touch with brands and marketers and we understand markets globally. The response has been truly encouraging and its a sign of things to come. Customer intelligence and first party data enrichment through the right platforms is the way forward. Brands that get in on this early during peak flux within their industries promise to be game changers.

Our question are you going to put yourself in the middle of flux and be the trial-and-error marketer? Or are you going to take a step in the right direction with a customer intelligence platform which is the obvious future of marketing?

We are ready and delivering rapidly in the right direction.