What does precision marketing have to do with your student life?
The idea of this article is to show you why precision marketing can help you so much in your student life. Knowing these buzz terms is a way to keep up to date with market news. We are in the age of digital transformation, innovation and gig economy, and that requires more proactive first-time college students.
Industry and commerce are evolving at an ever increasing rate. All of these have effects on society, the economy and consumer relations. Thus, we have several options when we want to make a purchase. Nowadays, there are several ways to sell products and services. A clothing store can make sales through Facebook and an IT company can strike a giant deal through Linkedin. This context can greatly influence your life before you graduate.
What is marketing?
Well, before I talk about precision marketing, I'll explain the meaning of marketing. A word of warning, the text of this article is going to be a little long as I will show you the relationship of precision marketing with technology, with your lifestyle and with the opportunities for students. My goal as a teacher is to open your mind to other areas of knowledge and make you get along with it. No more lero, lero, let's get down to business!
Marketing is creating strategies to sell more. Simple as that, the idea is to win $$$$. This goes for companies, public agencies and entrepreneurs. If your marketing is poor, the chances of you making a profit are slim. The big problem is that selling a product or service is not that simple. It's not enough to push a product and wait for $$$ to fall into account. The hole is further down...
The power is in the hands of the customer. It is a real challenge for businesses to understand what goes on in the minds of consumers. That's why all the time you hear someone talking about marketing. Content marketing, controversial marketing, offline marketing, word of mouth marketing .... There are zillions of ways and strategies for you to be able to sell products to a person. Even if you are not in the media, advertising, or management fields, it is important that you understand the effects of marketing on society.
Do you know that Betina Rudolph story that went viral on Instagram? Yeah, it was a viral marketing strategy for Empiricus's website to get more subscribers. Why do some famous artists or people use an ugly or crude look to get attention? Marketing strategy as well.
It is important for you to have a sense of what these terms mean. This allows you to see opportunities that are not very obvious to the vast majority of people. This is relational intelligence. One of the big problems is whether it is worth attracting more customers or trying to sell more to old customers. The name of this is CAC, Customer Acquisition Cost. This way, companies can remarket and find out how much it costs to gain a social media follower.
The idea is to win over customers gradually. This way, the customer engages with the brands, feels involved and, after much effort, can make a purchase. You may realize that it is a giant effort to make a miserly sale. It's f###### hard, you have to be able to sell without looking like you're selling. That's why you see so many people investing in ads on Google, YouTube, and Facebook. The goals of big brands are to be increasingly present in the lives of consumers. None of this is by chance.
What is precision marketing?
Ok, now you have an idea of what marketing means. Let's know a little more about precision marketing. This term is very specific. The idea is to target ads and campaigns to the right audience. For this, you need a lot of customer data to be able to deliver a product on time. No wonder when you talk about running shoes with your friends, a Netshoes ad appears in your email hours later.
The opposite of precision marketing is mass marketing. Stores fire zillions of ads to reach as many people as possible. This is a tricky strategy because customers can block ads and businesses won't be able to sell. It takes focus. The same reasoning goes for your student career. If you want to get in touch with the mother-fucker teachers and headhunters, it's nice to chat about the subjects of their interest and not talk out of context.
An example of a precision marketing campaign, selling technology books to single, middle class, early college students and ages 18-25. In this way, companies can visualize the exact audience of the sale, the persona. The name of this is audience segmentation. To be able to get along with these ideas, companies need to understand a lot about Consumer Shopping Journey and Sales Funnel. That's why when you visit a website or an online store, they ask for your data and email.
Very well, I already showed you a notion about marketing and precision marketing. Now, you'll understand a little more about the technologies, innovations, and computer systems behind all these campaigns that companies use to sell more. Come with me!
The technologies behind precision marketing
I'm suspicious to talk about, but this is the coolest part of the article :). Understanding the technologies, databases, systems, and IT architectures behind sales strategies will give you insight into digital ecosystems that very experienced professionals doesn't have. The thing is to explore these details so that you understand the subjects of graduation in a practical and easy way. The more you read about these complex subjects, the more you can unfold in a conversation with older professionals.
A nice example for you to understand the concepts. You know that guy who sells savory in front of the university? You can be sure he knows: what is the favorite savory of most students, which students buy the most, which students never buy anything, the time teachers arrive and so on. His "database" is paper and pen. If this salesman is smart, he will produce the most savory the more orders from students, teachers, clients, and staff. This is also precision marketing.
This is all commerce. The big challenge is bringing this knowledge of the physical world to the online world. That's why companies invest heavily to get customer data. The more personalized an offer, the greater the chances of a sale. Information is gold in any business model. Digital businesses have one advantage over physical stores: scalability. With a website, you can attract customers from all over the world. The logic behind this is called geomarketing.
What is geomarketing?
It is a marketing subarea that uses economic, demographic, social, behavioral, physical and financial data to build more targeted sales strategies. For example, I have an online store that sells peppers all over Brazil. So it is interesting to find out in which regions of the country people enjoy spicy food. This is an interesting application of Business Intelligence (BI) systems.
Geomarketing analysis uses mappable customer records and prospects and attempts to relate them to information from market players, competitors, and prospects. There are several techniques to do this such as: knowing the zones of influence, studying the profiles of consumers, segmenting audiences and thinking about the best logistics to deliver products. In this case, the knowledge about Geostatistics, Data Mining and On-Line Analytical Process (OLAP) can be very interesting.
Precision Marketing Computer Systems
This is cutting edge technology, my friend. Well, we already talked about the importance of storing customer data. Companies with large data masses complement future customer profiles with information from the socio-demographic base. In this way, it is possible to extract refined knowledge from future consumers and think of products for the exact demand of these audiences.
As a result, geographic webservices (WebGIS) are gaining strength. These are systems that use georeferenced information available on sites such as Google Earth. Businesses that use this data can create products tailored to their customer types. In this case, the data registered on social networking sites, online shopping, electronic calendars, mobile phones and search engines have become a gold mine for large companies. The savory salesman's note card is now in the cloud (rs). The figure below summarizes all that I told you now.
The importance of SDW
Yes, the term is weird indeed and means Spatial Data Warehouse, a giant database with lots of geographic information. This type of system is the result of the fusion of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) with data warehouses (DW). SDWs use information from companies' Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems, a large computerized system for storing purchase, sales, and customer data.
In this way, it is possible to get closer to consumers. Thus, companies can track them by their consumption habits and preferences and "suggest" products according to the masses of data registered. In precision marketing, this spatial data can predict economic trends and even help governments with urban mobility policies. But it's not all flowers ... These huge amounts of data can undermine people's privacy and be used for kidnappings, robberies and even terrorist attacks.
What are the opportunities to work with precision marketing?
Well, precision marketing is a subarea of marketing. Therefore, students of marketing, media, foreign trade and advertising may have a certain advantage over other young people. But, you can do a postgrad or even an online course in this area. The point I want to make is this: don't hold on to a diploma! If you think an area is worth exploring, explore, get to know, network, and get in the mood with the crowd.
I'll give you my example, I publish academic articles on IT Governance, I teach Innovation and I work with Auditing. This is cool because it forces me to learn something new every day. For the past 6 years, I've been interested in the stock market. This spontaneous interest made me come up with some really cool book authors like Taleb and Warren Buffet. Knowledge is power, my friend!
Another example, I have a degree in Computer Science and managed to go to the area of Governance by meeting professionals trained in Economics. I work as a freelancer at RockContent, a site that I found working through the internet for ways to make money writing web texts. Open minded, explore the areas and see which one you think is the coolest. See now the opportunities to work with precision marketing.
Market research
A fancy name. The idea is to do research with potential customers to find out which types of products and services are most likely to be sold. It's no use you develop an app that no one will want to use, right? The big thing is: sell the product to customers before creating the product. The work is very manual because you will gather a lot of data with customers to identify consumer trends, services and marketplaces.
This enables the marketing crowd to create more targeted and effective ads. This is a hot area for those who want to start a digital business. In that case, studying a little more about Google Ads, Data Sciece, Statistics, and Big Data can be pretty cool.
Loyalty Programs
Every giant service company has a loyalty program. Do you know those miles your dad has on Emirates? Yeah, they are loyalty programs created by the marketing crowd. The goal is to keep customers loyal to a brand. If the customer becomes a fan, even better. Just think of the giant queues at Apple stores on the launch days of the new iPhones. Faithful customers = $$$$ in your pocket.
Jobs with loyalty programs are uncommon here in Brazil. In general, the senior marketing group with experience in public relations and hospitality working in this area. Only you can use these loyalty techniques in your college life and get on with the market. Like? You can "build loyalty" to those people who can help you in the future. So you can become a youngster with interesting content and get on the radar of the older crowd even though you are an inexperienced student. This is personal precision marketing (yes, I just coined this term (rs)).
Copywriting
I am a copywriter (rs). This professional is also known as ghost writer or anonymous writer. You don't need a marketing degree to work in this area. You have to LIKE to write. The goal is to sell products and services through engagement with texts, ebooks, ppts, newsletters, blog posts, infographics, templates and checklists. This helps you attract potential customers through rich and useful content. This is called content marketing. The big thing is to produce topics that are interesting to your target audience through precision marketing.
Well, this is the key precision marketing information you can apply to your student journey. I know the article has gotten huge, but the idea is to get you thinking and entertaining with interesting facts, technologies, and insights for your college life. If you have come this far, thank you very much for your attention :). You can follow me on Instagram for more cool content for free. If you enjoyed this article, then share it with your friends.
Pedro Londe