The Top 10 Questions Every Brand Must Answer To Grow In 2015

Every marketeer faces a dizzying array of choices in terms of strategy, tactics, and tools through which to reach their customers and inspire them to buy your products. As the media landscape becomes more fractured and the tools more varied, it’s more important than ever to stay focused on the right priorities that will ensure short-term and long-term success. With that in mind here are the top ten questions every brand must answer if they hope to grow in 2015.

1. What is your brand’s purpose? Every marketer is now aware that Boomers, Millennials, and Gen Z generations are looking to brands to be more responsible in exchange for their product purposes. As such, a clear definition of your company purpose is critical to capturing their attention and converting their support to sales.

2. What is your brands story? Once you have defined your brand’s purpose, mission, and vision you need to be able to distil that into a brand story that employees and customers want to share. Only then will you unlock the power of social technologies to amplify your message and build your customer community.

3. How do you align your leadership, employees, and partners around that brand story? Too often marketers think only in terms of how they will share their story with customers and ignore the need to create a company culture that is in alignment with that story.

4. How do you align your corporate citizenship, sustainability and foundation efforts? For decades each one of these areas had been treated as distinct silos within a company matrix. As such, they are often insufficiently connected or aligned with a brand’s story. Only when they are all pointed in the same direction can they amplify one another to generate marketing efficiencies that improve your bottom line.

5. How do you align your company and product brand stories? Many corporate brands have chosen to remain effectively unknown and lead with their product brands. With the new demands for transparency and accountability, company brands are now rising to the challenge of defining their story and aligning their product brands within it.

6. How do you align your external marketing with your internal culture?There is nothing more destructive to a business than for a customer to discover that a brand’s marketing is very different to the customer’s experience. By extension, very easy for an employee to become disillusioned when they see that a brand is telling its customers one thing when their experience inside the company is another.

7. What strategies must you use to tell your story effectively using social technologies? Too often brands bring a broadcast and self-directed mentality to social tools that turn on dialogue, interaction, and intimacy. It’s not surprising then that they find that their employees’ time and marketing spend is wasted.

8. How must you use each social media channel to capture the attention of existing and new customers? Each channel presents a unique way to command the attention of different audiences and to inspire them to amplify the company’s brand story. Only with clear communication architecture can that story and these channels be sufficiently aligned to build the brand and its business.

9. How do you share that brands story effectively at a local level? The people closest to a community are the ones best qualified to share a story. As such, every brand faces the challenge of localizing its overarching story in a way that makes it meaningful and relevant to customers in order to win their attention and purchasing preference.

10. How do you establish your leadership at a global level? Irrespective of your company size, you can now lead a global conversation once you have clearly articulated your point of view on a given cultural conversation related to your products and their benefits. Any ambition smaller than that undervalues the reach and impact of the web, social media, and mobile phones.

Each one of these questions is important in their own right, but taken together they are critical for the short and long-term success of a brand in today’s social business marketplace.

Big Data Analytics – Make it a business initiative and determine ownership

Although big data has recently taken the mainstream spotlight and become a major initiative in the enterprise, it has always been at play in the wireless space. The challenge now is delivering on the unique monetization opportunity that developing analytics and applications on top of the scale and timeliness of data presents.

Mobile operators are at an important crossroads. New entrants have forced these global brands to rethink how they will effectively compete to ensure long-term viability. For operators, it’s no longer about having the best network or hottest devices; it’s about having the smartest strategy for making the most of their greatest asset – customer data.

Although mobile operators will choose a variety of paths, the monetization of big data will be key to securing a viable future. For some, success will mean the ability to generate insights that improve customer interaction and proactively address customer demands. For others it will mean the creation of new revenue streams, such as selling data to third parties. Regardless of the path chosen, successful monetization rests on one key element – the strength of the analytics at play.

Operators agree that big data analytics should be a strategic priority to drive customer monetization opportunities, but the barriers are often significant. What is required is a major shift in mindset, skillset and technology. Operators must transform their organizations from the top-down in order to become truly data-driven. They must acquire new talent as they shift their focus from aggregating data to gleaning insights from it. And most importantly, they must embrace the latest technologies to be able to act on these insights in an automated fashion.

With increased competition and the heightened risk of over-the-top players infringing on their customer profits, forward-thinking operators are prioritizing their big data analytics strategies and turning to tactics that are proven to accelerate monetization opportunities.

–Identify the strategic need before laying the ground work: Too often, big data is seen as a technology initiative rather than a business one. Heavy emphasis is placed on determining the infrastructure required to support big data, but many times there’s not enough thought as to what’s next. This can result in costly efforts that fall short in return on investment. Operators are making a point to look ahead at what various owners will do with the data, i.e., what problems they may solve and how they can rethink future engagement strategies. Then they are focusing on the most effective plan for extracting, compiling and acting on the data.

–Determine the owner of the problem – and the solution: Misalignment among C-levels and functional teams has been deemed a major barrier for moving big data initiatives beyond the exploration stage. Although the CIO has traditionally “owned” anything in the data realm, we are seeing business owners become more proactive in not only identifying the problems to be solved but also which solutions can best solve them. For example, CMOs within several leading operators are tackling the problem of churn by leading a big data analytics initiative from initiation to execution. This “single-owner” approach ensures alignment between the what, the why and the how.

–Focus on the data that matters: Taking an inside-out approach of analyzing streams of data to then determine the problem you want to solve can leave you trying to boil the ocean. To combat analysis paralysis, operators are identifying specific business problems that when solved can have a substantial impact on the bottom line, i.e. declining recharge volume, data adoption, churn, etc. This focused effort accelerates the process of determining which behavior changes will have the greatest impact on the goal at hand and the specific data which is required for modeling, analyzing and monitoring those behaviors.

–Invest in more sophisticated analytics: Many operators continue to miss the mark on when, where, and how to connect with their customers despite the vast amount of data that they have. To determine what’s relevant for each customer and deliver it in the right context, operators are adopting more sophisticated analytics to understand dynamic customer behavior over time. Flexibility, timeliness and the ability to scale to analyze millions of customers across any number of dimensions are top of mind for operators as they invest in more sophisticated analytics.

–Move toward real-time: Many operators continue to rely on batch processing of events to then determine how and when to engage their customers. Yet to proactively address customer needs, they know they must be able to analyze data in real time. True customer-centric operators are moving toward real-time analytics by confronting the technology challenges that stand in the way of easily and quickly getting the data. It’s not realistic to expect that every data source can be analyzed in real-time but operators are prioritizing the sources that deliver rich behavioral insights, such as usage and transactional records, to drive timelier and higher value customer engagement.

–Pursue plug-and-play for greater ease and speed: While analytics were at play long before the term big data hit the spotlight, many operators remain challenged to advance their capabilities – especially given the explosion of new technologies and techniques specific to mobile. To leverage more advanced analytics, such as behavioral clustering, prescriptive analytics and machine learning, operators are turning to productized solutions which ease the IT pain and expedite speed to market. Operators are also expressing openness to a cloud based approach based on the cost and competitive value of “analytics and action in a box.”

With increased competition and the emergence of OTT players, it has never been more important for operators to leverage their customer data assets to get ahead of the curve from a customer experience and monetization standpoint. Strategically minded operators who are embracing the next wave of big data analytics are transforming their business and customer engagement models. They are becoming more competitive, increasing customer value and profitability.

Onderzoek: 40 procent consumenten zegt dat sociale media klantenservice verbeteren

Veertig procent van de consumenten wereldwijd vindt dat sociale media klantenservice van bedrijven kunnen verbeteren. Dit blijkt uit een infographic van softwareleverancier Oracle, waarin de partij verschillende onderzoekscijfers heeft gezet om te kunnen bepalen of social crm meer is dan alleen een buzzwoord. Volgens de partij betekent social crm dat de klant geïntegreerd is in de planningmix en terugkoppeling, zodat klanten hun ervaring met het bedrijf kunnen delen.

Volgens softwareleverancier Oracle is social customer relationship management (social crm) een buzzwoord geworden. De leverancier heeft een infographic gemaakt waaruit moet blijken of cijfers de term ondersteunen, of dat social crm een rage is. Zo staat in de infographic dat uit cijfers van onderzoeksbureau Gartner blijkt dat crm het achtste belangrijkste aandachtspunt is voor chief information officers (cio’s). De geschatte waarde van de crm-industrie ligt tussen de twaalf en achttien miljard dollar.

De softwareleverancier schijft in de infographic dat social crm inhoudt dat klanten in de planningmix en de terugkoppeling worden geïntegreerd, zodat zij wat te zeggen hebben over hun ervaring met het bedrijf. Externe sociale kanalen als Twitter, Facebook en online customer communities, moeten geïntegreerd zijn in traditionele kanalen zoals e-mail, sms, telefoon en face-to-face.

In de infographic noemt de softwareleverancier ook dat 88 procent van de chief executive officers (ceo’s) dichterbij de klant komen zien als meest noodzakelijke businessdoel. Veertig procent van de consumenten vindt dat sociale media klantenservice verbeteren. Daarnaast heeft 36 procent van de consumenten weleens contact gehad met een bedrijf via sociale media.

Waarom organisaties moeten focussen op social crm is volgens Oracle omdat het percentage klanten dat ‘een persoon als ik’ als hun meest betrouwbare informatiebron noemt, nog steeds stijgt. In 2012 noemde 65 procent van de consumenten een persoon als henzelf als de meest betrouwbare infobron, in 2004 was dit nog 51 procent.

Bekijk de infographic hieronder: