Holiday success hinges on a comprehensive understanding of your customer base, actionable insights and targeted objectives. Make a list of ways your business can be effectively marketed and check it twice. Compete for the attention and loyalty of your customers and do it effectively. The concept has much to do with brand engagement/brand loyalty, but the other half of the picture is data driven and involves presenting customers with what they want, when they want it. This holiday season and beyond allow full-picture, comprehensive data and strategy to do the heavy lifting for your business. 

The Power of Data

First, to hook customers and ignite them to buy your product or service, you must know who they are. This requires in-depth marketing research to understand your audience’s demographics, behaviors, and preferences. This can be done in house with a fully developed team or outsourced to ensure intracity. Once you have a full understanding of your customers, you now have to begin to map their journeys and this must be done as thoroughly as possible.

Beware of customer mapping technology platforms that offer incomplete insights, often relying on simplistic attribution models like first-click or last-click. Your data technology/strategy can either make or break your ROI, so opt for a full journey platform. Prioritize privacy compliance, quality data systems, and clear KPIs to witness the magic of heightened customer engagement and increased ROI.

Targeted Marketing through Data Insights

Now that you have the proper data technology, parameters and objectives, it is time to dive into the intricacies of putting together informed campaigns that elicit customer responses. Using trends found in customer data will help inform campaign strategies. This data will help you identify demands, changes in behaviors and can potentially help your business stay ahead of economic shifts. 

Additionally, using your customer data to identify pain points can help strategists make informed decisions on what opportunities lie in your market and how to build campaigns to capitalize on that. This part of informed decision making is very problem-solution based in the sense that watching customer behaviors and trends oftentimes helps reveal gaps in your services and allows for opportunities to offer new products and services to meet those needs.

The success of your campaigns hinge on this understanding of your customer data, opportunities/needs and your ability to pivot and act on them.

Customer Engagement this Holiday Season & Beyond

With solid customer data and a grasp of audience behaviors, your company’s set to kickoff campaigns, deliver results, and continue customer interaction. While the heart of your audience can be sold on brand voice and products, still one of the best ways to engage/interact with your customers is to provide spaces for feedback and customer voices to be heard like providing spaces for feedback and making changes based on it. This can be done via feedback forms, customer surveys and more, and this data coupled with customer trends and journeys will help your marketing team deliver updated and effective campaigns. 

Another way to ensure customer engagement this holiday season and beyond is to make sure your re-engaging/retargeting efforts are informed and consistently deliver accurate messaging to customers. Using your full-journey attribution technology, you’ll be able to identify lapses in the customer journey and deliver relevant messaging to call them back. Especially during the holidays, retargeting is essential to customer conversion and return on investment (ROI).

Customers want to know that they are understood, heard and they’ll want to interact with your brand if you’re delivering the products they want, when they want them. Don’t rely on uninformed strategy and expect miracles. Set up systems to allow your data to do some of the heavy lifting and then empower experts to interpret that data and accurately target your loyal customers.