Marketing Managers: 3 Ways to Leverage Big Data into Big Success

For marketing managers, it is becoming increasingly imperative to combine big data with an integrated marketing communications strategy in order to increase brand awareness, relevance, and growth. As an undergraduate student in the Integrated Marketing Communications program at Northwestern University, I have found two articles that highlight two brands that have executed highly successful marketing campaigns through the creative use of data. 

The article, “Big Data as a Marketing Strategy – Spotify’s 2016 Campaign,” by Lior Schneider at Overdrive Interactive analyzes the huge success of Spotify’s data-driven campaign, “Thanks, 2016. It’s been weird.” In this campaign, Spotify shared funny, interesting, and culturally relevant insights from user data. For example, a billboard in London read, “Dear 3,749 people who streamed ‘It’s the End of the World as We Know It’ the day of the Brexit vote, hang in there.” The brand took an integrated marketing communications approach by presenting these insights across different forms of media, from billboards to sponsored advertising on social media. All in all, this campaign strengthened and raised awareness of the Spotify brand, as it generated high levels of engagement and conversation from Spotify’s users and target audience. 

Source: http://crossing-technologies.com/big-data-analytics/

Further, the article, “Dove’s New Billboards Criticize the Way the Media Discusses Female Athletes’ Looks,” by Adweek's Kristina Monlios explains how Dove created a machine-learning algorithm to detect sexist quotes about female athletes in real-time in order to increase Dove’s brand relevance and to re-establish Dove as a thought leader in conversations about beauty and body. Similar to Spotify, Dove took an integrated marketing communications approach by not only sharing insights on its social media channels, but also by live streaming negative commentary regarding female athletes’ appearances on digital billboards. The campaign encouraged people to join the conversation, challenge sexist rhetoric, tweet at media outlets, and use the #MyBeautyMySay hashtag. The campaign was widely successful, as it turned #MyBeautyMySay into a globally trending movement that reached and engaged millions of people. 

Based on my review of these two articles, as well as my relevant studies in the Integrated Marketing Communications program, here are three action items to consider when creating your next marketing campaign: 

1. Become Data-Driven –  Do not restrict big data to just behind the scenes; instead, create data-driven campaigns to share valuable insights with consumers. 

2. Be Relevant – Create campaigns with insights that are culturally relevant and interesting to your target audience.  

3. Always Engage – Create a campaign that does more than just market your brand or product; create a campaign that engages, surprises, or inspires your audience, whether that be through humor, social change, or really any method of your own choosing. 

As you prepare your next marketing campaign, think about how these three action items can leverage engagement and growth for your brand. 

  

Justine Ivanov is an undergraduate student currently pursuing a Communication Studies major, an Economics minor, and an Integrated Marketing Communications certificate at Northwestern University. 

She hopes to work in marketing upon graduating in June 2019. 

To contact Justine, you can find her on LinkedIn or Twitter. 

Marketing Managers: 3 Guidelines For Engaging with Your Consumers on Wearables

As a marketer, the growing popularity of wearables and the recent release of the Apple Watch may have you asking how your integrated marketing strategy may be affected by this new trend. As an Integrated Marketing Communications graduate student at the Medill School at Northwestern University, I am always learning about how advertising and content must be personalized for each distinctive media types in order to be effective and stand out among competitors. I have come across two articles that have nicely outlined the current state of wearables and how marketers must react in order to connect with their customers.

Scott Amyx's article "How Will Your Company Wear BYOW" in Wired lays out how many different industries will be affected by the growing trend of wearables and how it will affect their product strategy. Executives need to be cognizant of "overcoming the complacency of current market success" and stay engaged with smart wearable tech. In order to do this, companies must first develop a matrix of available technologies and capabilities in order to better understand the competitive landscape. Then, they should evaluate their product's capabilities to learn how it can solve a business problem and consumer need in order to grab the attention of their customers. Finally it is essential that executives have a defensive and offensive strategy that allows for adaptation to the rapidly changing landscape.

Image Source: https://wtvox.com/2015/04/the-inception-of-wearables/

Furthermore, according the Content Marketing Institute's article "4 Ways Wearable Tech Could Change Your Marketing Strategy" by Erin Rodat-Savla, marketers must stay engaged with this market and experiment in order to strengthen their wearables expertise. One strategy to consider is making content more glanceable by narrowing down messages in order to make it more relevant and usable on this platform. Marketers should put themselves in the customer’s mindset and ask if this information is “just in time” and unique to this platform. They should also integrate experience with convenience by tapping into location and emotion. By combining the knowledge of customer location and emotion, marketers can utilize wearables data to solve specific problems that other platforms and competitors cannot.

Based on the insights of these two articles and my graduate studies in the Medill IMC program at Northwestern, I have 3 action items that you should consider when formulating your wearables strategy to engage consumers:

• Be short and unique – Create timely, contextual content that offers consumers something unique to their wearable device rather than similar to their smartphone or tablet. 

• Help consumers achieve their goals – Wearables are an opportunity for you to connect to the consumers' desire for information and self-improvement and offer them a way to interpret their health data into actions. For instance, if you are a shoe company, you could offer customers a coupon for a new pair of sneakers after they have walked a certain distance.

• Create more actionable segments – With more lifestyle data available on consumers, you can create more actionable segments based on behavioral metrics, such as targeting consumers that enjoy running or getting coffee at a certain time and cross-selling them products that complement their activities.

With the increasing consumer usage of wearables, it is important for marketers to always keep the consumers' needs in mind and provide them with unique, timely content. There will be an increasing influx of consumer lifestyle data and it is up to you as a marketer to sift through the clutter in order to gain insight and provide your consumers with benefits that cannot be gain from other media.

Thu Dang is double Wildcat who earned a B.A. in Economics and International Studies from Northwestern University and is currently pursuing a Masters in Integrated Marketing Communications at her alma mater. She is passionate about the health & wellness industry and has experience working at a healthcare communications agency. She hopes to continue marketing for a good cause after graduating in August 2015 and you can contact her through Twitter @tdang13 or LinkedIn.