Retail is always a challenging industry, especially now as consumers’ shopping habits are changing to center around mobile and social experiences. One of consulting firm McKinsey’s recommendations for retailers who want to survive the digital transformation’s impact on the industry is to “get serious about using data and analytics for decision making.” Retailers of all sizes can do this by, among other things, leveraging their customer data to create more effective social media campaigns. When you focus your social media campaigns on the demographics that match your current customer profiles, you increase the likelihood of winning new customers in an efficient and cost-effective way.
Develop accurate customer personas with your data
Customer insights, like those Tranzlogic offers based on transaction data, can help you develop your customer personas – archetypes of the people who buy from your business. Although individual customers remain anonymous in the data, the information can paint a vivid picture of your customer base. For example, you can see customers’ ages, marital status, and whether or not they have children. You can also see their income level and their typical mortgage balance, credit use, and discretionary spending figures. Neighborhood, consumer preferences, media preferences, and activities round out the customer data. You can use this data to “create” profiles for your typical customers and then focus your marketing efforts on reaching others like them.
Reach out to similar people on social media
There are several ways your insights can help you reach new customers on social media. Here are just a few.
Append target and current customer data with social media to combine online and social media advertising with offline ads. This allows you to create store-by-store localized offers for existing customers and the nearby lookalike audience.
Sharable promotions offer a special deal to your existing customers and social media followers for sharing your post with others. This sort of peer-to-peer sharing is very valuable. McKinsey reported, “For the average consumer, peer recommendations carry ten times more weight than recommendations from salespeople.”
Paid social media ads, like those on Facebook, can target the demographic that matches your customer persona or personas. You can choose your audience by age, location, lifestyle, and more.
Localized and real-time offers on social media mobile apps can reach potential customers when they’re near your store or searching for products and services like yours.
Personalized marketing allows you to promote products that are popular with your best customers to social media users who match their demographics.
Track trends and measure your return on marketing
As you follow your customer data, you’ll see trends emerge over time that you can correlate to your social media campaigns. For example, if your customer profile is changing from married parents to empty nesters, you’ll want to refocus your social media offers to court this new persona. You can also mine your social media channels for your target market’s product and experience preferences to get ideas for offers.
Your customer data also lets you track the performance of your social media promotions. You can measure the response rate to your offers on social media, track the cost per customer, estimate their customer lifetime value, and figure your return on marketing for each campaign you run. As you track and benchmark these campaigns backed by accurate insights, new customer conversion can become easier and more cost-effective.
To learn more about how you can use customer insights to grow your business, contact us at info@tranzlogic.com or call (888) 855-0855.