The importance of marketing intelligence is obvious: if something costs more that it returns, it's not a good long term business strategy.
Question related to this Article:
How many of owners or general managers invest in offline / online media, without knowing the client profile of the readers / users?
Amongst the many clients I visit, I will resume their marketing intelligence as:
- First, managers don't want to know the answers marketing analytics provides,
- Second, marketing analysis does not offer sufficient insights for managers. It tends to confirm what they know,
- Third, they are not considering the impact marketing analytics can have on the companies, it can change the way manager think.
Beyond the obvious sales and lead generation, marketing analytics can offer profound insight into customer customer preferences and trends. Some SMB (Small and medium enterprises) invest up to 5% of their overall sales revenues, but do not get much out of it in terms of new clients generation.
Marketing Intelligence Exercise:
I invite you to do that exercise with your team, at your work place for nearly 1 hour. Turn off your cell phone, because what is needed is your brain.
- Organize a meeting with 3-4 of your staffs (Marketing / Sales, Operations...),
- Explain the purpose of the meeting is to review our marketing impact and decisions,
- Collect and Print all last 6 months advertising collaterals / actions that you have done,
- Extract from your online marketing sources (Google Analytics, Facebook Page Analytics...) some key reports,
- One set of reports needs to be print for each staff,
- Print a report of new clients generated through those actions,
- Ask your operational staffs about the clients, their behaviors, their loyalty, what do they care for,
- Evaluate the cost of your marketing spending, the results and ask yourself the questions:
WHO DID WE INTEND TO TARGET?
AM I SATISFIED OR NOT?
WHAT DID I LEARN?
Last week, I met one of my clients, and we had a meeting with a new supplier for a mobile application for the Dubai market. Their application is to list businesses such as hotels, restaurants, beauty salon, health club, spa. Their target clients are tourists and Dubai residents.
With the new era of technology, it feels like converting the thousand Yellow Pages into a friendly savvy mobile application. Although this mobile application seemed to be user friendly, this company is only able to tell me that 50,000 downloads have been performed in Dubai. On the many questions, I raised about marketing intelligence, such as what is the gender, age, location, and trends of your application, none of my questions found valid answers.
How can Owners / General Managers / Marketing specialist invest in a technology that cannot provide valuable data insights? Are the market following what other competitors doing? This related cost of AED 3k, 5k, 10k, 15k, 30k, does it really bring you clients?
Analytics continue to be a big buzzword in the marketing space, so it is important that you involves your key personnel, because you need more than one person to bring the success in a marketing intelligence strategy.
If you would like to share your outputs, use the box below.
Romain @ RSVP Hospitality
Interesting piece on market analytics. No doubt this will help individuals who are in the lookout for new business strategies. Good piece!
ReplyDeleteLet's imagine one second, that a competitor hotel is being built in the vicinity (1km radius), and that obviously you have taken this into consideration in your marketing plans. Any change lead to the delay in opening, will be an occasion for you to grab demand and yield. Not knowing this information may lead travel agencies or bookers to still pressurizing you with rates. Unfortunately too many hoteliers do not read newspaper or lack of collecting market intelligence that can modify their strategies.
ReplyDelete