Super bowl ads are a delight to watch, and super bowl ad numbers are a delight to crunch. And what has preempted this ad marketing success – was it a company’s creative hat or the scientific thrust. Tuning into the voices of the past, we are held captive by Bill Bernbach’s conviction that it is art that has made the difference as also by David Ogilvy’s belief that it is fastidious research, more towards science, that has made this possible.

Fast-forward to the digital, data-driven world of today. If human intuition drives marketing, there is advanced analytics entwined into human intuition to create marketing magic. Every marketing pie that is spent today is expected to create greater returns. For that to happen, organizations take cue from marketing analytics, lean on insight-driven decisions to nurture greater returns from marketing activities.

The four Marketing Ps, Product, Price, Promotion and Place, are areas that seek marketers constant attention in terms of maximizing gains from the marketing spend. With marketing analytics, organizations can turn data into insightful information, reap rewards to make every penny and marketing efforts spent on Product, Price and Promotion count.

Product

Take Domino’s. It delivers pies that capture attention which in turn helps capture a major piece of the market pie. With menu innovation driving attention, that becomes as easy as pie for Domino’s. The upshot is that there is something in Domino’s that attracts the customer. Marketers must uncover the truth as to what’s ‘sticky’ about their products or what’s not sticky about their products.

As marketing organizations correlate products with the retention rates, upsell, cross-sell success and revenue generation, empowered by advanced analytics capabilities, more rewards are to be reaped round the corner. Apart from knowing what creates ‘stickiness’ in their products, marketers can leverage insightful information to roll out relevant campaigns that can help them enhance product usage, retention as well as increase revenue.

Price

Price can be a double-edged sword. When the price is too customer-friendly, it could possibly eat into a company’s revenue. If it is pricey, then it could possibly repel customers. Every dollar that is counted here counts.  So many variables affect pricing, cost of manufacturing products, customer demand, market trends, purchase history, discounts, promotions among other features.

Through Markdown optimization and value-based pricing, marketers aim to achieve that pricing sweet spot- for both the customer and the company as well. It is the power of advanced analytics that takes marketers closer to this objective, help them create optimal price points that can accelerate revenue generation.

Pricing can also be used as a weapon to create differentiation in the market. Starbucks is a case in point. The company relies on analytics to ensure that optimized pricing lead the way to increased profits. Moreover, for Starbucks, promoting premium pricing is also a vehicle to differentiate itself from the pack. With marketing analytics giving the lead, marketers can use pricing to buttress revenue generation as well as use pricing as a tool to differentiate itself from competition.

And to enable that, marketers leverage huge volumes of data that that can lead them to optimal pricing – competitor pricing, product sales growth, profitability, price elasticity, promotional data social media data, marketing spend data, seasonality information among other data waiting to used. Marketing analytics entwined with advanced analytics capabilities can help organizations keep pricing as the revenue tailwind.

Promotion

Intense competition can be attributed to many promotions adopted by today’s marketers.  Marketing organizations seek to find answers to some critical questions and ensure good mileage from their promotions.

  • What promotions to run and at what price point?
  • What is the channel to be leveraged for the promotion?
  • Which customer segment to target?

Queries of this order taunt organizations even before one looks to connect the promotions that are run with the sales resulting from promotions. Marketing analytics comes to their rescue by allowing them to foresee promotions that can produce desired results and increase revenue.

While organizations combat customer churn, promotions built to lure the customer back into the fold also increases sales as well as revenue. With robust marketing analytics driving optimal use of customer data along with other data including channel data, social media data, mobile data, sales, SKU data, and other relevant data, marketers lay a solid platform to rank and score promotions, roll out insight-driven promotions to keep customers in their fold.

Place

Different customers in different places have different preferences, needs and wants. What’s sauce to a goose in Rome cannot be that for a goose in London. For marketers, it pays to know which product, what promotions and what price points can make a difference to their marketing efforts in a region. Marketing analytics not only allows marketers to know the sort of promotions that need to be run, but also gives the lead to run those promotions at a specific location to drive desired outcomes as well as increased returns.

Marketing analytics has come good for organizations to know what has happened in past, analyze the present and predict the future. While it supports every marketing goal, it also lays an assured path for organizations to maximize returns from their marketing spend.