The Data Strategy Edge.Competing In South Africa With The Future In Hand

The Promotional Data Strategy

The Data Strategy Edge. Competing In South Africa With The Future In Hand© The Happy Media Content Agency 2

Data Strategy is becoming increasingly relevant in the South African landscape. As businesses and brands, there can be no under-estimation about the importance of knowing more. It’s not good enough to merely think you know your audience, your target market or your customers. You have to start making sure you do. Antiquated systems of measurement and data collection have been replaced worldwide by sophisticated data mining platforms and techniques and the headache posed by Big Data is not a new one. But that headache is often one that could have been averted. Growing piles of data sit, unmanaged, untapped - why? Because no one planned for it. No one asked why the data was being collected in the first place and so now the job of trying to turn that knowledge into something of value in a business sense is proving difficult. South Africa has a chance to be ready. You have a chance to ensure you’re equipped with a forward thinking strategy that looks to produce and mine data in line with achieving your business goals. Just like brand, content and management, data too requires strategy. To those who do it right, competitive edge and high performance await. To those who fail to prepare, well let’s just say you know the rest of that proverb.

Use Discount Power to Drive StrategyCreating Relevant Strategy That Achieves Business Goals

What is a Promotional Data StrategyA global survey called Big Data: Lessons From the Leaders has been completed by the Economist Intelligence Unit. Nearly half of the companies that were reported as “significantly outperforming their peers financially” said a well-defined data strategy was one of the cores of that success. The report suggests that businesses can only benefit from clearly defined goals that allow for the formation of practical data strategies that make achieving those goals a focus.

A promotional data strategy is just one tactical pillar in your comprehensive corporate data strategy. It uses, as its foundation, your business’s potential promotional value in the form of product discounts or other items of value in order to gain insights into product related or other information. This type of strategy is excellent for:

‣ Using the products you already sell to gather data from buyers about their perceptions of those and other products, their price points and their true demand.

‣ Using the products you already sell to convert anonymous traffic on your website and social spaces into data profiles.‣ Using the products you already sell to educate, up-sell and share more information about other opportunities that current or

prospective buyers may not have known about otherwise.‣ Using key product promotions to create data profiles that will enable you to serve salient content to the specific mindsets and data

collections you have attained.

A promotional data strategy is also very flexible in that it allows for:

‣ A business or charity that doesn’t necessarily sell product online to also offer product for a time that it knows will relate to specific customers, members or mindsets. (An e-commerce platform of some sort would be needed.)

‣ A business to run the promotional activation part of the strategy at any time and in line with data needs (It’s not required to be running all day every day.)

‣ A business to not only gather data but also to activate other action-for-discount interactions (social sharing etc)‣ A business to create value for the customer’s data and actions hence building relationships of substance with them in a two-way

interaction.

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How Do I Get There?Creating Relevant Strategy That Achieves Business Goals

Steps Towards Your Data StrategyBefore You StartA lot of companies in South Africa recognise the need for data strategy in some shape or form however factors like lack of organisational readiness and appropriate skill sets are just two critical areas that may hinder its inception. You may find within your own business that these, along with other elements, would be holding you back from a shift towards the competitive edge that a successfully implemented data strategy provides.

Take the time to give some thought to these obstacles now and bring them top of mind by filling in the blank cells below:

1. Lack of organisational readiness

2. Lack of appropriate skill sets

3. 4. 5.

Now fill in what you’ll need to consider as next steps to preparing your business for the successful progression towards overcoming these obstacles. We find that good old fashioned conversation is often the best and lest pressured place to start:

Highlighted Challenge

1. Lack of organisational readiness

2. Lack of appropriate skill sets

3. 4. 5.

Suggested Next Step

Highlight Key Areas For Focus

Discuss Data Strategy with Peers

While this may not seem like rocket science, it’s amazing how choosing to plot momentum building actions can create a daisy chain within your organisation. If there is a genuine benefit that you’ll take from a data strategy, the key stakeholders will quickly let you know what it should look like. This will create new filters for you when it comes to hiring new staff and how you perceive data within your company.

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What Does This Thing Look Like?Creating Relevant Strategy That Achieves Business Goals

Where Can Data Help You?Defining Your Need Your promotional data strategy should be built around specific business goals. How does data help one achieve these goals? Often a great place to start is to define areas of your business that may not be working exactly the way you want them to, in effect, a place of ‘pain’.

There are many areas that may come to the fore when you conduct this exercise and so it’s best to hone in on the areas that could be solved or made better by you knowing more. For example you may be seeing high volumes of traffic on your site or social media spaces but are not able to convert them. Another example could be that you have a high bounce rate on your home page and that people are not moving through to the purchase phase.

Alternatively it could be something as simple as you having a promotion you’re going to be running or a discount you’ll be offering anyway that could be turned into a unique data gathering exercise for you. Or perhaps you’re wanting to turn your traditional advertising spend on platforms like radio and TV into more focused pieces of content that drive your prospective buyer through a number of interactions while also allowing you to successfully measure whether those platforms are reaching the right target markets.

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The Possibilities Are EndlessFrom the simplest of interactions to data strategies that define your entire content strategy, a promtional data strategy allows you to move and change through the product you offer and the way you offer it.

The power to offer discounts on unrelated product to customers who are currently with competitors in order to tailor make your direct marketing to that customer is immense.

Imagine, for example, a particular supplier of insurance would like to know when non-members are having their anniversaries on their current insurance product. They could offer up a discount on aspirational products from one of their loyalty program’s service providers in order to ascertain the perfect time to start comparative marketing. The amount of data derived from the promotion means that the nature of the prospect along with their preferred methods of communication can be discovered and utilised effectively.

Are You Customer-CentricCreating Relevant Strategy That Achieves Business Goals

The Customer, and then Content is King

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The More you Know the More you can CareWe all know the feeling that we get when it’s quite evident someone took the time to give us what matters most to us. It’s a relational aspect of human beings that can never be underestimated and the current climate means if you’re not leading the way in this space, then someone else is.

Your promotional data strategy has to focus on efforts that will provide you with real business value. Customer analytics is key to this in order to offer better services. Better services mean happier clients, more referrals and ultimately customer retention.

This is self-evident but the challenge increases as more potential customers become become increasingly clued up on the variety of market options available to them.

Experience is the New RealityA well balanced promotional data strategy will see you interacting with clients and not just mining data from them.

Properly done, your strategy can incorporate content, social sharing and creative touches that when coupled with the discounts you’re giving away generate a key term in the business-customer relationship spectrum: Experience.

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Don’t Start Until You KnowCreating Relevant Strategy That Achieves Business Goals

It’s A Lot of Fun but more so when it Works

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Don’t even begin to plan any form of data strategy until you are very clear on your business goals and vision. If this means walking around the building to every employee to get a better understanding of the company’s true needs - then do it.

F rom market ing to data qual i ty to in terna l communications to PR - what do you need this data to achieve?

If you’ve got a content strategy working for you already, this data may be the best news its had all year. Content’s best friend is data.

ResearchWe ran a Promotional Data Campaign with a well known smart phone manufacturer. They used just 10 products, smart phones, as their discount product. The campaign ran for 3 days in which the smart phone company received the following conversions:

3790 people visited the campaign resulting in 12079 clicks690 people logged in to the campaign of which 313 produced full profiles (they produced 15 pieces of data each equalling a total of 4695 new things the business knows about their customer in just 3 days).

This is a conversion rate of just under 10%. Imagine converting 10% of your traffic into data on a regular basis, especially if that data was clearly lined up with achieving your business goals?

The traffic sources showed a 400% viral effect. What? A data strategy can create viral? Yes.

The product discount average was 33,9% meaning that the buyers never waited to redeem the full discount but still happily gave the business 15 new pieces of data. This resulted in a profit per profile scenario where the smart phone producer actually made money while gathering data. This is just one example of how a well planned promotional data campaign can add to the impetus of your organisation.

Thanks for Taking the TimeCreating Relevant Strategy That Achieves Business Goals

Remember, Conversation is Key.

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There is a lot to be excited about as a business leader in the current landscape. The power of strategy has never been better lined up to be rewarded. The targeted and focused nature of digital means that when you take the time upfront to discern your next set of tactics that you should, when this is applied with wisdom and to the right data sets, make significant strides in the marketplace.

Combined with your management, content and brand strategies, your data strategy will ensure you’re at the top of the pile when it comes to practical innovation in business.

As mentioned earlier, the best way to introduce new thinking into your organisation is through relationship and conversation. Become the new thinker you want others to be and start a journey. The board room isn’t always as successful as a casual lunch or a coffee to start.

The Happy Media Content AgencyIs a boutique Content Agency that works closely with organisations in introducing and developing new thinking in the marketing and native content space. Specialising in:

Content Marketing & StrategyNative Content Concept and Production ProjectsContent Curation & ModelingCreative Data Strategy

With years of real experience on both sides of the commercial publishing coin (at broadcast and brand) the focus of the Agency is to introduce new thinking and market leading innovation into the Southern African space.

The time is right and business needs edge. That’s what we like to help provide. We believe our partners are excelling while the market sleeps.

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The Happy Media Content AgencyStrategic, intelligent content & concepts

Johannesburg, South Africa, wwwDOThappymediaDOTcoDOTza

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