Reprinted with permission © 2008 TreeTop Technologies
Businesses are about products, whether items to sell or services to offer. But where a company may have a quality in abundance with its products, what is lacking at times is intelligence, marketing intelligence, that is.
Sitting under the more general umbrella of business intelligence, marketing intelligence is an area where many firms need to do more work, and where IT professionals may be able to shine with expertise on building databases, mining knowledge and implementing the right tools.
"Particularly with concerns about the economy and weathering the storm, every company wants to be smarter and more efficient," notes Renan Levy, President and Chief Operating Officer of Intellidyn Corp., a Massachusetts-based multi-channel database marketing services agency. "That means being more intelligent in your marketing and having better knowledge of your customers and the ability to better segment them to do personalized marketing."
The problem is, as studies show, that more than half of the companies don't have a good knowledge of their customer base, Levy says. Also, while the vast majority of companies believe personalized marketing has significant value, only one in five actually use personalized marketing approaches.
"Part of the reason more companies don't implement personalized marketing is that it takes knowledge of its customers to do this," Levy notes. "Regardless of whether companies develop this capabilities in-house, or outsource, they have to have a good and accurate customer database."
This is, of course, where IT professionals can play a key role, by building good database frameworks and helping to determine how to best gather, mine and analyze the data.
"The technology you use can be critical, because you want your data to be actionable," Levy explains. "The idea with personalized marketing is to approach the buyer with relevant offer at the time when they are ready to purchase".
Along with technological considerations, companies that want to use personalized marketing also need to make sure the necessary knowledge is spread across the organization.
"It's important to have product development, R&D and marketing personnel on the same page, because you need all three elements of the triangle," Levy says. "They all need to have the same vision and same approach, and they need to be using the same tools to communicate and share information."
Action Item:
Footnotes: From "View from the TreeTop" Volume 2 Issue 12 December 2008