Customer knowledge, an essential marketing investment

Knowing your customers well has become a headache for customer marketing teams. What is true one day is sometimes not true the next! Whether this is due to exogenous factors or simply linked to the individual, we are witnessing increasingly rapid changes in customer behaviour.

Added to this is the multiplication of purchasing and communication channels, which generates volumes of available data exponential and therefore increasingly complicated to manage.

Accepting customer volatility

Today'scustomers are present everywhere at once, on all channels (shop, website, app, mobile...) and whenever they want - consumption practices that have exploded since 2020.

That said, they make fewer impulse purchases. The latter are more often prepared: consultation of product sheets, comparison between competing brands, etc. Moreover, giving meaning to consumption has become a determining criterion in the act of buying. They pay more and more attention to the approach of brands, to their adhesion and their commitment to causes such as the environment, respect for human rights, etc. Their consumption is more reasonable or at least reasoned!

Finally, if price was for a long time the main factor in the decision to buy or not a product, this time seems to be over. Today's customers expect a brand to pay special attention to them, to seduce them, surprise them and recognise them so that they commit to a lasting relationship .

In this context, any brand must study closely the profile of its customers, their tastes and their needs, in order to propose adapted offers and services. Without a thorough knowledge of the customer, it will be difficult for them to succeed at a time when the level of demand has become very high in terms of product quality, service and now ethics.

The consequence for brands: focus on useful data

The multiplication of channels and the explosion of digital technology are generating more and more data and thus offering marketing teams the possibility of enriching customer knowledge. Data is a goldmine for marketing teams! By collecting data from all available sources, it allows them to have a complete vision of their customers and thus to understand and analyse their behaviour in order to set up adapted marketing action plans.

But you have to know how to optimise the use of this exponential volume of data. Marketing teams must capitalise on the data while asking themselves the question: what data do I really need? Is it up to date? Because collecting raw and unstructured data is not enough. You have to know how to exploit it and unify it to make it intelligent: this is the only way for a brand to build a deep knowledge of their customers and to be able to interact individually with each of them, whatever the point of contact.

Yes to a data-driven marketing strategy but well managed!

Algorithms as a solution to customer volatility

The only alternative is for brands to be agile and pro-active. That's why they have every interest in equipping themselves with predictive analysis toolsbased on powerful, scalablealgorithms capable of "digesting" all kinds of data to understand and anticipate changes in their customers' purchasing behavior and tailor communications .

The difficulty also lies in the temporality of the analysis of the actions - it is necessary to be able to retrieve the information but also to process and use it almost in real time to create relevant interactions with the customers.

Even more than before, marketing teams must consider and understand the customer as a whole, off and online. In today's ultra-competitive environment, customers will demand that brands deliver a unique experience.

A large majority of them know that the latter use their data and they agree if they do it intelligently. It is a 'give and take' contract: misuse that does not respect them in their uniqueness will cause them to disengage.

The more customer knowledge the more relevant the customer relationship.

ConclusionPutting every piece of data to work for individual marketing

Customer knowledge has become the grail for customer marketing teams, as it is now the basis for all marketing strategies. In addition to the challenge of retrieving all the information available on customers, it is above all necessary to be able to exploit its full potential because each piece of data can be used to enrich their profiles.

So to make data "intelligent", customer marketing teams need to rely on tools that will help them to continuously "increase" the knowledge they have of each customer.

By relying on a platform capable of calculating indicators on a daily basis (product appetence, channel, etc.) to better understand customer behavior, they will have all the cards in hand to switch to individualized marketing and higher ROI!