FORMCEPT features in NASSCOM Emerge 50
2013-10-19 16:56:34
“Half the money I spend on marketing is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”
- John Wanamaker
The popular quote above summarizes the pressing dilemma that every marketer faces. Much of the marketing spend, even in today’s age of advanced analytics and technology, is incurred blindly, i.e. with little or no reality-check. This is primarily due to lack of information and ground-level insights. To make marketing spend more targeted and generate better returns, marketing and sales data from multiple sources need to be unified – but currently this is near impossible at scale.
Marketing RoI or MRoI, is an index to assess the returns generated on investment in the overall marketing mix. This in turn helps businesses strategize, assess, and dynamically manage marketing profitability. Following are the various ways in which MRoI can help a business:
It is widely believed that measuring Marketing RoI and identifying well-defined means to improve the same by optimizing the allocation of marketing budget is the key to reducing the blind spots in marketing. But, there are multiple challenges to this, as explained below.
Key Challenges for Measuring and Optimizing MRoI
- Effectiveness of a marketing campaign needs to be estimated based on different sources of data, but these data come in diverse forms and are difficult to be unified and integrated into a single index.
- Industry-wide marketing trends are difficult to obtain, as for most companies marketing data is a well-kept secret – hence marketing baselines and benchmarks are difficult to establish
- Timely insights required for dynamic marketing strategy-making– but due to high pre-processing time, insights obtained are ineffective
- Insights on effectiveness of marketing campaigns are too generic that only provide the macro-picture. The granular insight pipeline is hardly available at city / town-level, district level, or taluka level.
- Marketing baseline is extremely difficult to determine in a dynamic marketing environment, the question most marketers ask is – how much is enough?
- Lastly, the challenge remains to determine which elements of the marketing mix are working, and which aren’t – i.e. attribution challenge
To understand these challenges let us consider the following scenario:
The Solution - FORMCEPT’s Innovative Marketing Analytics and MRoI Indexing with MECBOT
FORMCEPT’s cutting-edge enterprise analytics and business intelligence solutions have resolved strategy problems for many business both in India and globally, including a handful of Fortune 1000 clients. Keeping with its mission to bring powerful business insights to core functional areas of enterprises, FORMCEPT has now trained its flagship unified data analysis product MECBOT to make Marketing RoI a piece of cake for decision-makers.
Let’s say that Mr. M, the Marketing Head of business A, fixes the marketing budget for a given period, say FY 2017-18. Mr. M also identifies and prioritizes the primary marketing outcomes that need to emanate from this budget, and the geographic regions where this campaign will be targeted. MECBOT feeds on different sources of data on past campaigns such as – Dealership Promotion Campaigns, Push Content Marketing – Mobile and Internet, TV, Radio / FM, Newspapers & Magazines, Billboards, Ads behind / on the side of buses, Ads in metros, Event Marketing, etc. Based on the industry and the region, MECBOT recommends a smart marketing campaign mix to Mr. M. MECBOT also listens to industry-wide trends. MECBOT then analyses the industry-wide marketing campaign and prepares a comparative analysis of the marketing campaigns of competitors of A. These insights are delivered to Mr. M in a timely manner with a dashboard view that is easy to understand. Mr. M is able to design a highly effective marketing campaign quickly and track its results in a real-time basis for further improvement.
How it Works
As an intelligent cognitive application, MECBOT uses a powerful combination of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Bigdata and Machine Learning to solve this problem. To give you a behind-the-scene view of how MECBOT accomplishes this task, here’s a simplified outline of the process:
How Can Businesses Benefit from MECBOT’s MRoI Analytics?
If you are wondering what other businesses think when it comes to powerful MRoI analytics, consider this - McKinsey recently analysed over 250 business marketing engagements during the last five years, and the study has shown that businesses that “put data at the center of the nmarketing and sales decisions improve their marketing return on investment (MROI) by 15 – 20 percent”.
How do MRoI metrics impact marketing decisions for various businesses? A few examples are:
- FMCG products quantifying the impact on sales created by trade promotions and celebrity brand endorsements, and subsequently optimizing the mix for better returns
- Automotive companies rationalizing their channel strategy and promotion campaigns in dealership networks across peak and off seasons
- Technology businesses mapping their pay-per-click campaigns across various digital media to optimize website traffic and customer conversions
- e-Commerce businesses channelizing binge consumption through attractive discount campaigns, festive brand associations and seasonal marketing...and many more.
At the end of the day, marketing analytics that don't make sense to the marketer cannot impact the MRoI - and this is where we come in. Unlike traditional analytics, FORMCEPT’s unified analysis product MECBOT makes it possible for you sharpen your marketing strategy and get the results you want quickly and easily. To know more about what we do and how we can help you, write to us at contactus@formcept.com.
