Recently I had the privilege of hearing Nathan Falkenborg, Head of Consulting & Analytics, North Asia at Visa speak at the SAS Executive Forum in Singapore. Nathan has also spoken at SAS Premier Business Leadership Series where he talked about how the analytics guy won over the marketers at Visa.
Nathan immediately captured attention by asking the audience what Marketing Excellence is. I’m not sure what was going through everyone else’s mind, but I was waiting to hear key insights from this marketing leader. I was not disappointed - here’s my top six takeaways from the keynote.
Marketing objectives
Everything you do in marketing needs to be underpinned by your business objectives. Everything. Simply put, if you’re not tying your results back to the business you’re not leading marketing excellence. If your underlying focus is on the business objectives, and therefore how marketing will achieve these, then you can feel much safer in your analytical marketing journey.
Seek Risk
Marketing excellence starts with the creative marketer who seeks risk. This means you’re thinking of new ideas and always asking yourself “how can we?” and are open to the possibility (probability?) of failing. It’s important to understand that when you’re testing new things, give yourself the opportunity to fail fast! This then becomes part of a test and adjust mindset, rather than throwing your hands in the air and declaring failure.
Be truly customer-centric
In a customer-centric organisation it should be the case that the marketers, the analytics team and the frontline staff all have an excellent understanding of the customer. Usually this is from a variety of different perspectives, like interviews, data and analytics. The customer centric marketer has a deep understanding of the customer through the data – that’s customer intelligence. It’s what you do with that data to drive business results.
Test everything
Develop an experimentation mindset. Above the line measurement is difficult and it takes time to get a common model to measure to understand the ATL activities. It’s tough. Digital advertising is very measurable but doesn’t necessarily connect you to the end result, be it the change in consumer behaviour or the specific change in sales. Every campaign must be considered a test.
Unlimited metrics
The number of likes and impressions don’t mean anything unless they translate into business results. Digital is interesting but you have to connect it to the bottom line. To build your marketing excellence, measure your existing customers, below the line. If you’re not comfortable, start with A/B testing. Sounds easy but it’s not. You need to learn how to measure and how to measure appropriately.
How did Visa do this?
The first step is to design the experiment. Target the right people to optimise the return. In financial, the measure is acquisition, that is, the response in the channel. Did you respond? Could I approve you? Did you become active? After we can answer these questions, we can develop a model based on who you look like then we can understand your predictive lifetime value. To learn more about how Visa uses SAS read this case study.
Looking at how you can develop your marketing excellence? Take the Customer Intelligence Assessment to understand your current marketing capability versus your planned capability. What do the gaps look like?
