As markets transform and sometimes tighten, agencies are striving to make themselves invaluable to clients to avoid seeing their services slashed in budget cuts. One way they’re making themselves indispensable is by offering consumer and market intelligence to inform strategic planning. And we’re going to show you how that looks, and why it’s so attractive to brands.
In doing so, we’ll detail:
- What streamlining processes looks like for modern brands
- How using data-driven campaigns influences ROI
- Monitoring consumer conversation and market intelligence to inform decision-making
And here are stats supporting the increasing use of data intelligence to inform brand and agency planning:
- 90% of Fortune 500 companies use data analytics for competitive intelligence
- Media often directs consumer sentiment, but this isn’t always true, which is why having both consumer and market intelligence is critical
- 32% of established companies are focusing their efforts on social media and consumer sentiment analytics
Helping Brands Rethink Their Martech Stack
Agencies are priceless to brands when it comes to helping them streamline processes. And this involves capturing critical consumer and market intelligence to inform decision making. There are tools that are specifically designed to limit static and target only what is valuable for your client, saving them precious time and money which could be spent on other aspects of their business. And part of this is the martech stack.
A brand’s martech stack should include many tools that integrate with a foundational tool capable of powerful data analysis. Used in conjunction with other tools, it should be able to:
- Identify influencers to help promote a brand
- Detect events and moments that cause shifts in consumer action
- Identify what deters customers from completing their purchase
- Measure and protect your brand’s health and head off potential crises
What are these martech tools specifically? They can be placed in the following categories:
- Management tools that are used by operations and share insights between team members
- Content and experience tools that track how consumers experience everything your business offers, from products and services to your website
- Social and relationship management tools that track consumer sentiment via social media analytics
- Sales and ecommerce tools that capture the consumer journey
- Advertising and promotion tools that help brands create personal experiences, at scale.
Each support competitive intelligence gathering in different ways, which is something more companies are adopting each day. In fact, 90% of Fortune 500 companies utilize them. And their standard for usage typically falls to demonstrable ROI, which is something many brands struggle with in the social media analytics realm.
Demonstrating ROI with Data-driven Campaigns
As Covid-19 is spiking, every industry is taking care with its messaging, as we can see in the leisure category. The past six months are highlighted in our timeline below showing the conversation shift. In July the segment Reopening Leisure Centers was a hot topic. And as we get closer to November it all but dies off and is replaced by Leisure Center Plans and Leisure Travel. This demonstrates consumer hesitancy:
If an agency wanted to know where a travel brand should focus its efforts, exploring the timeline is priceless. We can see that 80% of travel this winter will be done by car. Showing that although they may not fly, consumers still plan to stretch their legs.
An agency could recommend a campaign focused on shorter trips and travel tips that tie into these excursions. It could create a consumer-generated photo contest, for example, where they share images from their short trips and tie in brand imagery (whatever that brand may be). Creating a hashtag or key phrase to accompany the effort would make it easy to track and capture for ROI purposes.
But it doesn’t need to be that specific. Just knowing how people are traveling and preferred activities, agencies could help brands generate awareness that ties in and track the social conversation spikes that happen around it. It’s easy to create a benchmark for whatever social conversation in NetBase Quid and measure for awareness as you go.
For example, below we shared the engagements per posts on analyses we’ve performed around the general COVID conversation against that of the social mood around the pending COVID vaccine. If this were a marketing campaign we were tracking, ROI would be clear:
But how does one capture this awareness and engagement? Let’s see!
Capturing Consumer & Market Intelligence Awareness
32% of established brands are focusing their attention on social media analytics so they can pull specific intel from across the social web, including forums, blogs, consumer reviews and much more.
For example, if we were wondering how consumers are feeling about travel, specifically social distancing while traveling, we could segment that specific portion of the overarching travel conversation:
Clicking anywhere on the nodes of this segment reveals tweets, blogs and posts from all over the world (or whatever area we geographically isolate) about this very issue.
And we can also isolate the conversation to uncover influencers that can be supporters or detractors, depending on what we seek to share. It’s important to have a good sense of both as they can either drive consumers toward or away from your brand’s efforts:
Agencies coming equipped with actionable real-time insight delivered by billions of resources save time and money for brands – any make themselves indispensable. Become the ‘it’ agency everyone wants to do business with by leveling up your consumer and market intelligence game. Reach out for a demo to see it all in action.
