Embrace Customer Insight Marketing – or risk becoming a support function

Customer insight marketing

Marketing teams are often accused of being ‘too soft’. Behind this thought is the idea that marketers are unable - or unwilling - to recognise harsh business realities.

 Of course, this is far from the truth. At trueology, we see that what marketing leaders typically need above everything else are compelling insights and empirical evidence to support decisions day-to-day and influence long term strategy.

The focus therefore of any external agency, must be to empower the client to achieve this through a combination of analytics, insight, strategy and creative.

The problem with traditional methods

Marketing professionals appreciate the realities of business all too well. They know that ‘customer is king’, and that success depends on the ability to meet the evolving needs of the customer. The problem is the traditional methods used to demonstrate their case are frequently less powerful than those used by others. For example, a comment during a focus group can be easily disregarded, when compared with the cold, hard facts of the balance sheet.

To meet this challenge and turn up the ‘customer centricity’ volume to the same level, marketing leaders need customer insight which is not only robust, but genuinely new and inspiring.

The complex role of insight marketing

With continued advances in technology, increased channels of communication and the massive growth in data, the role of marketing has never been so complex - or offered such huge potential. So, against the backdrop of increased pressure from the business for data science and intelligence; real opportunities to step back, reflect, learn and move forward again are hard to find.

As ambitious marketers come under pressure to drive change, success will lie in enabling a shift from delivery orientation to one with more ‘thinking time’ aligned to planning and optimisation. To do this, organisations must create the ability within marketing to leverage customer data and communications technology if marketeers are to remain relevant and able to inform strategy.

This is no mean feat, as these business assets have gradually been subsumed into the domain of non-marketing functions which simply do not focus on what is best for the customer, leading to marketing teams hamstrung by inefficient or disjointed communications channels.

 Leveraging new technology

However, technology is changing this. Software is evolving at a rapid pace – there are multiple platforms available which can easily knit together data from email, web, call centres and direct marketing, allowing marketers to plan, execute and measure communications from a single point. 

With this in place, change can often be radical and swift. By empowering marketers in this way, we have helped clients across charity, membership, utilities, financial services and travel to make significant changes over a short space of time.

 For example, our customer value planning tool for a charity, found a pot of £4.2m of Gift Aid income.

The solution: we recommended a targeted campaign to gain a Gift Aid ‘opt-in’ from historical donations. The organisation was convinced; and within four weeks, business systems, customer services and the web were aligned to support the project. This level of combined effort had never been seen before across the charity. The campaign went on to be repeated for three years and raised over £3.4m.

Embrace the change

So, as always – change is coming. Technology is advancing rapidly and allowing marketers to manage customer communications across all channels. Whilst data science is becoming part of a marketers' standard tool kit, to remain relevant - marketing teams must embrace and take ownership of these changes or they will simply become a support function, unable to genuinely see, understand, or have dialogue with the customer.  

What we can do to help

At trueology, we can analyse your customer and prospect data and translate it into immediately actionable (often unique) insights into their transactional behaviour, engagement and lifetime value - Giving you the ammunition you need to develop strategies that help you...

...acquire, retain, grow and even win-back customers

Contact our team to let us know how we can help you: +44 (0)1242 672427 or hello@trueology.com