CMOs Perspective: A 4-Step Framework on Leveraging Social and Marketing Intelligence to Shape Marketing Strategy and Maximize ROI

In today’s age of big data and unprecedented consumer empowerment, the essence of marketing remains to fulfill consumers’ needs. However, the way in which consumers engage with brands and their buying behavior has changed dramatically.

Social media has taken on a highly influential role in generating awareness, engagement and leading consumers to conversion and advocacy. It has also become a real time consumer lab capable of generating valuable and reliable insights. Making social part of a wider integrated marketing ecosystem supported by social and marketing intelligence tools will help CMOs provide Board members clear ways to measure ROI.

Combining social and marketing intelligence will not only benchmark the effectiveness of marketing activities, but also validate and improve marketing strategy by providing relevant and timely insights.

Creating a model that addresses marketing’s key strategic pillars through intelligent data bundles will provide marketers the necessary real time insights they need to achieve the CMOs objectives of shaping a marketing strategy that increases revenue and maximizes ROI.

The 4 Steps to Leveraging Social and Marketing Intelligence

1. Landscape: Understand the landscape and benchmark
2. Content: Evaluate your content and how it is being used
3. Activation: Measure your activations performance
4. Development: Measure your ability to drive business development

Having the right information at the right time (with the right depth and relevance) will lead marketers to a much greater understanding of their brand’s situation and related opportunities. This is the role of intelligent marketing analytics.

Step 1: Understanding the landscape

Gathering intelligent data about customers/competitors and how your brand performs in that context is essential.

• Competitive intelligence: Benchmark and score your brand against key competitors. Understanding your performance versus competitors will lead to both strategic and tactical changes in the marketing mix
• Customer retention: Identify and measure key drivers of brand loyalty and performance. Knowing why consumers buy your brand is a powerful way of retaining them and increasing usage, a strategy often neglected to focus on recruitment.
• Targeting & segmentation: Define and optimize customer targeting & segmentation. 
An in-depth knowledge of different targets/segments profiles and needs validated by concrete actions in the social context can drive significantly strategic decisions.

Step 2: Evaluating your content

Content is who you are and how your brand communicates with its customers.

• Campaign performance: Measure your communication campaign’s efficiency. 
Learning how and why the campaign is performing along the funnel leading to conversion will drive strategic decisions about future communication direction.
• Content optimization: Measure content performance and efficiency drivers.
 Diving into the details of what is working or not will be key to implementing changes to optimize content.
• Media buying & efficiency: Measure targeting & media efficiency. 
Having an in-depth analysis of media performance (paid, owned & earned) linked to targeting strategy will drive strategic shifts in marketing investments.

Step 3: Measuring your activations

Actions close to the point or moment of purchase are key for generating conversion.

• Lead generation: Identify and measure key affinity drivers. 
Understanding how to improve the way leads are generated/nurtured will drive improved conversion.
• Promotional effectiveness: Evaluate promotional activities performance.
 Defining the ROI of promotional activities will increase optimization opportunities.
• Pricing effectiveness: Optimize price points for increased returns. Analyzing sales performance at different price points optimizes profitable revenue generation.

Step 4: Measuring business development opportunities

The ability to create new business is crucial in a constantly evolving world and consumer pool.

• Customer acquisition: Identify and measure key conversion drivers. 
Acquiring new consumers can be the most costly but often the most rewarding endeavor in marketing and requires precise insights to succeed.
• Innovation: Measure success of new launches and identify new opportunities.
 Measuring the impact and effectiveness of new offers in real time & in the real world while listening to consumers to uncover new potential opportunities are key to most brand’s health and survival.
• 
 Customer touch point optimization: Improve interaction efficiency with consumers. Defining whether the brand is optimizing its conversations with customers from recruitment to conversion and advocacy will drive key strategic shifts in focus and spend.

Intelligent data on demand

Being able to address, coordinate and make sense of all the data combined in this 4 steps marketing ecosystem will enable the marketing intelligence provider to become a truly strategic partner for any CMO and marketing team. The pressure for strategy validation and concrete results in the form of increased revenues and profitability is higher than ever and these foundational data points provide the insights needed to achieve success.

By using data collected in social through existing data analytics tools and adding data from other relevant sources, it will be possible to deliver true marketing intelligence and provide intelligent data on demand.

Scoring and benchmarking a brand’s performance, collecting real time insights and presenting results will create real value added in the process of marketing strategy creation and implementation.

This post was originally published on LinkedIn.