Guest Column : How data analytics is changing the marketing game

Traditional marketing is fading away. The new normal is data driven marketing. Every decision from what colors to use in the creative to which offer is used in a tactical campaign, is now driven by hard data and analytics. In the past few years, there has been a paradigm shift in the way marketers are developing their strategies. The impact of analytics on the industry is visible from the fact that within a short span of time, it has become a fulcrum of marketing. A recent study conducted by Forrester revealed that 44% of B2C marketers are using analytics to improve customer responsiveness by upto 36%.

Not only is analytics helping marketers drive response, it is also helping to inform functions like new product development, customer lifecycle management and going beyond simply understanding consumer behavior to predicting it. For example, at Shine.com we use an analytics engine that predicts emerging skills much before they are in demand in the job market. This data enables Shine to run more targeted candidate acquisition campaigns and also to keep updating the product portfolio of our latest venture – Shine Learning, which offers e-learning courses to experienced professionals wanting to upskill.

In today’s competitive world, it is not only essential for marketers to develop their campaigns creatively but knowing the right channels to push them through and measuring their impact has also become a necessity. Analytical tools are providing marketers with a wealth of data like what their customer wants, which channel they want it to be delivered through and what price they are willing to pay for it.

These insights on consumer buying pattern are helping marketers to reshape their strategies to better target their customers and has made their campaigns more effective than before. The success of a marketing campaign has also changed to a great extent with the advent of analytics. Gone are the days when marketers used to rely on gut feeling and old tools to gauge the success of their campaign. Today, with the help of data analytics their campaigns have become more streamlined and testing can be undertaken within a virtual marketplace before the campaign goes live.

The new environment is compelling marketers to think from a consumer’s perspective and interpret and manage the data efficiently. This is certainly not a smooth task and will likely require training and reskilling of employees. The onus is on marketing heads to look at changing the structure of their teams by looking at technical skills of their team and providing training/upskilling to them.

While learning and working in parallel sounds tedious, with the mobile revolution, e-learning has become much easier and can be used as a channel to help employees reskill themselves in a timely manner. It was this need for upskilling in the job market that let Shine.com to recently launch Shine Learning - India’s largest career skills site for working professionals which provides over 500+ courses in fields like digital marketing, analytics, and mobile marketing and other functional areas. Any marketer who wants to be future ready needs to look at courses that can help him / her to learn what’s next in marketing and analytics is one of the top skills on that list.

(The Author is Neha Kaul, Marketing Head, Shine.com)