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In order to keep up with the pace of the consumer, marketers need a nimbler approach to consumer insights. Successful marketers are pivoting from traditional methods that provide after-the-fact insights to real-time consumer intelligence that continuously captures a holistic view of the consumer — past, present, and future. They employ a tight integration of data, analytics, measurement, and the technologies that interact with the consumer on an always-on basis. Enabling brands to understand customers and prospects with insights derived from real-time consumer behaviors facilitates relevant, timely, and consistent engagements, which increase conversion, buyer confidence and loyalty, upsell/cross sell, and competitive advantage.

Real time is not just for big brands. Our article in this issue of Forward provides insight into how brands of all sizes use real-time consumer under-standing to improve results.

— HAIDEE HANNA, VP of Marketing, Resonate

THE RACE FOR RELEVANCYKEEPING UP WITH THE SPEED OF THE CUSTOMER WITH REAL-TIME CONSUMER INTELLIGENCE CONTRIBUTED BY HAIDEE HANNA

Brands have never been so fragile. The way we find, consume, and share information has changed dramatically in the past 10 years. Traditional customers have been replaced by a more demanding, less loyal breed of customer, and the explosion of channels makes attracting and retaining this new consumer even harder.

Digitally savvy buyers are more likely to base their purchasing decisions on relevant customer experiences than on a logo. Even as these device-hopping consumers’ behaviors and preferences change at a dizzying pace, there's still an expectation for a consistent, meaningful experience — but if it's not optimal their perception of value drops and they disengage.

So how can brands serve and delight smart customers across different channels and devices? Marketers must move beyond insights based on consumer demographics, transactional behavior, browsing

habits, and intent. These methods only provide a snapshot of the consumer’s past or last behavior. After-the-fact insights are backward-looking, often disjointed, and can’t predict future behavior. The challenge for marketers is to harness insights about their customers and prospects more quickly and comprehensively. The real-time consumer intelligence race is on. ➝

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FORWARDDRIVING INDUSTRY THOUGHT LEADERSHIP FOR MARKETERS

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CUSTOMER UNDERSTANDING IS IMPERATIVEMarketers need to remember that however much customer research they have, if the research is not being updated in real time, their understanding will grow increasingly fuzzy. Stale insights lead to stale marketing.

Many marketers claim to have a customer intelligence strategy, but most lack a contemporary approach for applying consumer insights to strategy or execution decisions in real time. Brands often lack insights into the individual motivations and drivers behind current customer behavior. When they fill in the gaps with internal assumptions, they fall prey to what Srividya Sridharan, VP and research director at Forrester Research, calls the “illusion of insight” — an instance of confirmation bias that occurs when marketers use data to confirm pre-existing biases about their customers.

A significant portion of marketers are willing to admit that they don’t truly understand their customers and prospects. According to the “Resonate Consumer Obsessed Survey of CMOs,” conducted in August of 2016, only 50 percent of CMOs feel they understand their current customers well, and only 35 percent feel they understand their prospects and targets well. For marketers willing to acknowledge the gap, the next step is questioning and validating everything they know. Marketers need to be able to answer the following questions with real-time data to back them up:• What is the profile of my key customers and segments beyond

demographics and transactions; how is this shifting over time?• Is my current segmentation strategy reaching the right people?

• Who else am I currently engaging?• How do I know what is important to buyers and prospects; what

matters most and motivates them to purchase?• How do I better understand my most valuable customers and

find more like them, at scale?

Without real-time visibility into the answers to those questions, marketers struggle to understand the underlying DNA of their customers, how their behaviors are shifting, and what they are likely to want or do in the future. The risk of getting out of sync with the often erratic changes in behavior and preferences of today’s consumer comes at the steep price of lost opportunity.

Real-time intelligence and insights allow marketers to react swiftly to opportunities exposed by these shifts. It also helps them adjust and map campaigns and messaging to effectively address what’s important and what matters most to customers in order to best influence consumer buying behavior.

THE REALITY OF WHYAccording to Resonate’s survey of CMOs, 70 percent of marketers want better data on the “human elements” of their customers to understand why customers do what they do. Consumers latch on to what is important to them. The problem, however, is that most brands are disconnected from consumer belief systems.

The best marketers go beyond the data and device. They get to know the people and mine insights about their underlying values,

The SituationShinola, a purveyor of luxury watches, leather goods, and high-value niche items, sought to gain a better under standing of its target customers, how to find more people like them, and how to increase conversions.

The brand saw its target audience as hipsters, who found the company’s built-to-last, American-made products appealing. However, the brand’s research was not keeping pace with who it was actually reaching, and it had limited data to drive creative strategy. Internal data alone was not ideal for segmentation analysis, and there was a limited tie from their market research to activation strategies.

The SolutionUsing its real-time consumer intelligence

platform, Resonate measured and analyzed millions of data points from Shinola’s website visitors, purchasers, and digital activity to uncover in-depth profiles of Shinola’s actual customers and prospects. These profiles included demographics, psychographics, contextual online behaviors, media consumption habits, and more.

The FindingsResonate discovered Shinola’s website visitors and purchasers aren’t the young hipster crowd the brand’s traditional marketing research had led it to believe they were. Its customers are older, affluent, and well educated. Optimistic and active, Shinola customers are family oriented but still care about status and luxury. While they didn't over index on patriotism, they

appreciate practicality, sustainability, and innovation in the products they buy.

The ResultsResonate developed a new segmentation strategy and activation paths for both online and offline media. The company also constantly monitored these new personas, attitudinal segments, and demographic segments to understand the reach and engagement of all Shinola digital assets through the entire purchase funnel. Insights to strategy occurred in just six weeks.

In the two months following implemen-tation, Shinola achieved an 80 percent jump in home page visitors and a 40 percent increase in conversions. Shinola was also able to focus media spend on the right people to avoid wasted spend. — H.H.

LUXURY GOODS MANUFACTURER DRIVES EFFICIENT CONVERSIONS WITH NEW SEGMENTATION STRATEGY

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beliefs, motivators, actions, and purchase drivers in real time in order to be relevant in the moments that matter, anticipate the next, and to affect present and future results.

At the 2017 Forrester Consumer Marketing Conference, Anjali Lai, a data analyst at Forrester, shared that the brands that have adopted a person-first, values-based understanding and approach to their marketing efforts are expected to be seven times more relevant to consumers and four times more profitable. That kind of success comes down to how fastidious marketers are in gathering and implementing the right kinds of data and insights.

OPTIMIZING FOR THE CUSTOMERThe mantra of getting the right message to the right person at the right time has echoed through the halls of marketing for decades. Are brands any closer to turning this goal into a reality? Sort of. Marketers now understand the importance of relevancy but still struggle to achieve it. Face it: receiving a marketing message that is truly contextual, anticipated, relevant, and individualized is rare.

That said, marketers come closer to achieving this rarity when they optimize messages and experiences for customers, not just channels. Optimizing for relevancy requires knowing changes in customer preferences and behaviors as they’re happening in real time. When a brand’s audience moves and changes, the brand’s execution should change with it.

When optimizing to the customer, marketers should be asking themselves the following questions:• Am I reaching the right segments with my digital marketing? • How do I know?• Which media, channels, and media partners are most effective

in reaching my customers and prospects? • How do I continuously track initiatives in real time to make

tactical adjustments that may improve performance?

Real-time consumer insights should live side by side with assessing channel performance, drawing from real-time behaviors to optimize media placements, reach, and spend. The key is looking beyond headline performance numbers to see whether the different strategies are reaching the right people. Optimizing the right people minimizes wasted spend, maximizes ROI from media dollars, and delivers measurable results that prove the efficacy of media buys.

TOOLS THAT ENABLE THE POWER OF KNOWING While data and analytics are already a cornerstone for leading brands’ marketing approaches, the step change in the volume and extent of customer data over the past few years has shaken even the most seasoned marketers. Making sense of the onslaught of customer data can be overwhelming, especially once you move to optimizing for the customer. How can marketers focus on creating meaningful conversations and increasing conversions without getting mired in the details?

To succeed in the era of the smart customer, brands must understand the different sources of consumer data and intelli-gence and take advantage of technologies that will help them get closer to their customers and prospects in real time. Not surpris-ingly, brands plan to invest heavily in the skills and technologies required to dominate consumer intelligence in 2017, according to a recent Gartner report.

Rather than the traditional approach of waiting for data to be extracted from one’s website, email, and social platforms, real-time intelligence technology taps into data as interactions occur and fuses it with relevant first-party customer data (CRM, transaction history, loyalty programs, etc.). The most powerful dimension of this data isn’t its size, it’s the immediacy and relevancy of it. That's why a separate Gartner report projects spending on real-time analytics between 2016 and 2019 will grow three times faster than spending on traditional analytics.

Data will only continue to expand in the coming years; marketers should look to work with technology partners to harness and leverage real-time consumer intelligence with the capacity to deliver the necessary insights at scale, as well as to prepare them for emerging channels such as the Internet of Things and virtual reality.

As predictive analytics and modeling increase in importance, they will help marketers answer questions of how likely their target customers are to buy or respond to a message. As spending on predictive analytics grows, marketers will derive more insights from the data to use in their upper- and lower-funnel initiatives.

MAKE YOUR MARKETING SMARTERAs fast as today’s pace of change seems, it is currently the slowest it will ever be. And while keeping an eye on lower funnel metrics is always a hobby in marketing, a better tactic for crafting effective strategies is to look at trends through the lens of the modern consumer, whose values and purchase drivers are changing at breakneck speed.

Marketers must ensure that they keep pace. Failing to do so means risking losing out to competitors who are already using real-time data — at scale — to optimize their interactions with consumers.

Real-time consumer intelligence is the new frontier of competi-tive differentiation, fueled by profoundly human insights — their values and motivations. Competitive advantage comes in deeply understanding customers at the individual level. Done right, acquisition rates will soar, brands will produce better results, key metrics will move in the right direction, and marketing will operate more effectively than ever.

Haidee Hanna is VP of marketing at Resonate. You can email her at haidee.hanna@resonate.com.

Christian Bonilla, senior product manager of analytics at Resonate, contributed reporting.CR

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