Customer Insights: Data collection, analysis and execution

Summer time is perfect for attending conferences and if the conference is organized by Canadian Marketing Association then it is even better. I was at the CMA’s roundtable conference and it was a great experience. As expected the conference was full of marketers from various marketing agencies and companies. The conference was focussed on using customer insights for successful marketing campaign execution and it was great to listen to some of the industry leaders. Below are some interesting points that I noticed during the presentation
1. Customer’s insights concept is all about consumer behaviour data collection, analysis and creating strategies that helps companies in creating an ideal customer’s profile for a particular product or service. It was great to go through some interesting marketing campaigns and all the presentations strengthened the fact that customer insights are necessary for any marketing project. However it will be interesting to know more about the support mechanism that is provided by the client’s marketing department to marketing agencies. I believe if the client management is really serious about working on an effective marketing campaign, this support mechanism is the key to success.
2. I am also curious about the decision making process in such marketing campaigns. Every data analysis process results into two or more than two hypothesis and strategists must be selecting one of those hypothesises. It is much easier to make a decision when you have a hypothesis leading by a huge margin but what happens in case of two hypothesises either have same scores or have a low difference in margins. Is there any industry standard process to make a decision or marketing agencies do it by their own standards? I hope not all such decisions are intuition based.
3. Last but not the least is the execution and analysis of the campaign results. Execution depends upon the customer insights but is there any way to measure how much the campaign is aligned with the customer insights. Also companies must be keeping a record of how much business they got from such marketing campaigns but do companies use this data for the future marketing campaigns?

For those who want to learn more about customer's insights, please visit this link

Google Adwords for small business owners

Google adwords is one of the most effective ways of online marketing. This marketing channel has been around for quite a long time and no surprises Google is churning hell lot of money out of it. However there is a significant change in the ways people used to perceive Google Adwords few years back. Small/medium business owners were the most benefitting customer segment of Google Adwords when it just started. The competition for the keywords was not so high and only early adapters knew about the impact of Google Adwords. With time the competition increased and all small/medium and big companies entered this battle of keywords. Nowadays even Google ad strategists don’t claim to bring profit to small businesses in a small time period. Means to say, if you are a small business owner don’t expect Google Adwords to do wonders for you in a month or so. Is there any solution for this problem? Yes, but you have to spend some money and time initially before you can see the adwords account bringing profitable leads/conversions. And time and money are the two most important constraints for any small business owner. So can we conclude that Google Adwords is a strictly no-no for the small/start-up businesses? I wont reach to such conclusion right now. There are marketers who claim to set up google adwords campaigns that are highly profitable for the small business owners (scam? Could be and be aware of that). If they do it, then they are doing a good job. But there are many companies out there that are just ripping off the customers.
Best strategy could be to give it a try yourself. Small business owners can ask their friends or family members to help them out in understanding this kind of marketing. One needs sharp marketing mind set up, technical knowledge and labour intensive attitude to control this beast. Your friends and family members can help you with the hard work and technical knowledge, which are the big chunks of the pie. Small business accounts can be started with a small investment and once the account starts doing well, you will see good conversions. And please don’t forget the branding impact of these ads.
Google Adwords are still the most powerful way of online marketing. Don’t ignore it but also don’t get trapped in the web of CPC, CPM and other addictive terms. Take is as a marketing channel and try it for six months. If it works, you are the boss. If it does not, don’t repent for the money you spent and start looking for the other options.