Marketing Strategy
The aim of our customer strategy consultants is to deliver understanding – of your customers and how they interact with or react to your brand or brands – so that you can enhance their experience of those brands in the future.
How do customers truly engage with your brand?
By applying the insights gained from analysis and research, our experienced strategy consultants help clients to optimise their above and below the line activity in order to meet their objectives.
Working closely with and complementing our services in areas such as data / analytical consulting and campaign management, and frequently in partnership with our clients’ marketing agencies, we can help you interpret and benefit from key information related to:
• The customer life cycle
• The customer journey
• Customer touch points – be it through call centres, online, social media
• Optimising communications programmes
• Defining and engaging with your most profitable customer segments
• Channel effectiveness
• Loyalty programmes
Our consultancy helps clarify how to drive maximum value from your marketing strategy and budget. It ensures that communications are relevant to target groups. This goes beyond the message and style of communications, but extends in to the other factors that are critical to engagement in a world where people are bombarded with marketing messages – the right channel; the right offer; and the right timing. The team offers considerable experience of digital marketing, including social media, providing an in-depth rationale of why campaigns do and don’t work.
Even the best database and up-front analytics cannot overcome poorly conceived or targeted strategies and implementation. This is where our customer strategy team can operate as trusted advisor and ensure that you achieve maximum return on marketing investment.
Analytics
Life used to be so simple for brands. They had absolute control over their image, messaging, and customer touchpoints. Then the digital revolution arrived and changed everything. A dozen new ways of buying products have seemingly popped into existence, user generated content and social media ensures a brand annoys a customer at its peril, and in order to secure any sort of internal investment to wrestle control of the customer experience you’ll need an exciting big data solution.
Thankfully, whilst the data streams have grown exponentially, the basic formula for successful customer analytics has not changed
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Create an accurate view of marketing performance: optimise media mix through attribution
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Create a single customer view
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Segment and target accordingly: group people by behavioural, attitudinal, financial or preferred touchpoints
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Track and optimise through test and learn: App/web analytics, campaign evaluation, and control cells
Some questions you may be asking, which we and the science of customer analytics can help answer:
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Who will be the next customers to churn, and why?
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Which channels are my true marketing channels and which ones merely assist a sale? How do they all work together in the customer acquisition journey?
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How do I use pricing to maximise profit whilst keeping my best customers?
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Where are the cross sell opportunities in the existing customer base?
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Which customers are actually costing me money, once cost to serve is taken into account?
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I need to lower cost to serve. How do I know which customers will be happy to be driven to digital and which will be just driven away?
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How can I use my touchpoints to ensure every customer receives a unique experience, flawlessly tailored to their exact requirements?
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What is the anticipated lifetime value of each of my customers?
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How often should I contact my customers?
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Which of my customers shouldn’t I contact? (Why wake a sleeping cash cow!)
Campaign Management
Today’s Marketers demand a solution that enables them to communicate with their customers with the most relevant message at the most optimal time. This requires a solution that is capable of delivering such high levels of personalisation that an individual customer or prospect can end up in a segment of one with unique offers and content being served to them compared to the rest of the customer universe. The solution must also be able to react to an inbound customer interaction in real-time and then either change the customer experience or send an outbound communication based on the behaviour that they have just exhibited at any one of your customer touchpoints but also to take into account their previous behaviour.
A campaign management platform also needs to be truly multi-channel and able to effectively utilise today’s digital channels, as well as more traditional channels such as direct mail and your contact centre. One of the challenges that Marketers face is how to deal with channel fragmentation whilst providing the customer with a consistent experience, offers and tone of voice, regardless of how they chose to interact with your organisation.
Any Campaign solution must sit on a Single Customer View (SCV) data source that contains; all existing customer product holdings with your business, all your analytical models used to target a customer with the most appropriate communication, a view of all Marketing and Service inbound and outbound contact history, contact preferences and suppression data.
Finally, a Campaign Management solution must be easy for business users to utilise without being programmers, so drag and drop user interfaces are essential, as is the ability to automated and co-ordinate all marketing processes within the solution.
At IMS we provide Campaign Management solutions that meet all of the above criteria and enable our clients implement their contact strategies, leveraging their data and analytical assets to provide a return on their investment in these key areas.
Data Solutions
Single Customer View Data Solutions
IMS’ expertise in a wide variety of industries data enables us to build accurate, efficient and relevant Single Customer View data solutions that will generate customer insight to drive optimal customer contact strategies through understanding a customer’s full relationship and interaction with a client organisation.
We build a wide range of database solutions for our clients from project specific data marts to enterprise wide customer data warehouses. Our design philosophy and rapid development methodology provides our clients with scalable data solutions that keep pace with their changing business priorities and needs.
Our understanding of all types of customer data, enables us to design and build optimal data models at the heart of our database solutions to drive customer analytics and communications.
Data Strategy Consultancy
We can help your organisation formulate a data strategy to help drive your business forward and leverage your investment in your vitally important customer data assets. We can help you to review and improve the quality of customer data and its related processes and technologies within your organisation.
Marketing Optimisation
