Buying the fastest car in the world doesn't do you much good if you don’t have paved roads to get you to your destination. In this dynamic and splintered marketplace, advertisers and brands are faced with a similar dilemma: once you have AI-driven consumer insights, how do you best leverage them to drive conversions and sales?
Although it's been years since AI bridged the gap from science fiction fantasy to reality, companies are still figuring out how to harness all of its potential with insightful and actionable solutions. Now that the dust has settled, applicability has taken priority over any remnants of its initial novelty.
Consumer insights are only as good as they are useful. In the following sections, we’ll take you through some of the top ways companies are using the Oculus360 platform to drive more revenue and more efficient marketing investments.
Personalization
Personalizing a campaign to speak to the individual characteristics of your audience is essential in allowing your marketing voice to rise above the deafening noise in a typical customer’s life. Instead of broad, “one-size-fits-all” marketing messaging, optimize your copy, creative, and calls-to-action based on the insights you've acquired. Personalizing your messaging strengthens the emotional bonds that inherently boost conversions.
For a recent Lincoln Motor Company sales event, we analyzed the specific luxury SUV attributes that resonated most with particular target demographic segments. By leveraging those insights to customize the digital ad content for the campaign, we were able to better align Lincoln's ad message with the specific attributes that were favored by each demographic. By personalizing the ad messaging to each segment, we increased revenue 4% and click-through rates by 15% for Lincoln.
Likewise, email campaigns can be transformed from generic and forgettable blocks of text to a finely tuned tool conveying a particular message to a particular individual. Such efforts no longer have to cast the widest net possible to catch a handful of fish. Instead, a personalized approach driven by segmented insights allows brands to infuse dynamic email campaigns with the content that will resonate most with each individual consumer.
Brand Health Tracking
Brands must be agile in order to best navigate and connect with an ever-evolving marketplace. The insights provided by Oculus360’s platform help companies gauge the impact campaigns, messaging, and product changes have on brand identity and health, providing the important feedback loop needed to properly steer through the crowded marketplace.
A leading vitamin company recently relied on Oculus360’s platform to extract consumer insights from conversations in online retail channels. After discovering that the terms “fruits” and “vegetables” had high sentiment values with their target audience, the company was able to elevate those product attributes within their messaging to better engage their target consumer segments. The impact of these actions was apparent in online conversations and the brands level of engagement and sentiment relative to competitors.
Content Optimization
Your digital assets, content, and creative are your primary tools to create the emotional bonds that foster ROI and conversions. Collectively, they establish the messaging and tone needed to strengthen the connection between consumer and brand. The insights provided by the Oculus360 platform allow brands to compare intent and impact to isolate the topics, keywords, design, and content that maximize engagement.
One of our customers used Oculus360 to understand the conversations online about purchasing diamonds and precious stones among its millennial target audience, then they compared that to the content on their website, in their newsletters, and in other communications. Through this, they identified several areas where their communications were missing the mark. By addressing these gaps, they improved engagement and conversion with this important segment.
Product Innovation
Similarly, the design of specific products and services can be optimized to concentrate on the particular features and attributes that are most desired by the target demographic. The insights gathered by analyzing specific customer conversations within the vast digital environment provide the data points needed to properly tailor design features. Such data can also reveal opportunities to target new demographics, create new products, or extend existing lines to better satisfy market demands.
A large auto manufacturer uses Oculus360 to mine online conversations. While conventional thinking is that minivans are family vehicles, their efforts revealed that millennials like minivans as a “swagger wagon” -- they can pack in a bunch of friends for a night on the town with just one designated driver. They also realized that millennials prefered their minivans over other brands. They used these insights to innovate new features that appeal to millennials, such as including more USB charging stations throughout the van.
Target New Markets
Just as consumer insights can help reveal new customer segments that your brand should be targeting, it can also help you identify new markets that have an established affinity with your current customers for brand and advertiser extension opportunities. Co-branding or aligning with other brands can be a particularly effective way to maximize the impact of these affinities.
Using Oculus360’s Audience Affinity analysis, the Dallas Cowboys were able to better understand which eSports teams and game genres were best inline with their current brand by analyzing social conversations to gauge brand affinities according to personality type. These insights allow the Cowboys to focus on the eSports teams and events that best align with the Cowboys existing fan base, enabling them to extend their existing brand sponsorship and advertiser relationships to eSports and the largely millennial eSports fan base .
Our insights also helped improve product cross-promotion by enabling recommendation of products with similar occasions of use. This led to consistent increases in traffic, dwell time, basket size, and transactions. As well, they saw decreases in cart abandonment and returns.
Merchandising Optimization
Retailers and e-commerce companies can empower themselves by integrating consumer insights into the products they sell and how they market and merchandise those products.
Oculus360 helped a large department store revamp their online merchandising strategy by analyzing how consumers perceive their brand relative to four of their competitors. The insights we found revealed what drove customers to buy specific apparel and accessories. This allowed the retailer to completely revamp their website merchandising copy, images, and search terms to align with the product attributes, perceptions, and usage scenarios that were the most attractive to their customers.
Be Deliberate with Your Message
The marketplace is far too complex and diverging to rely on the antiquated notion of an marketer’s gut feeling. While there will, of course, always be an important place for human ingenuity and instinct, the potent combination of machine learning and big data can act as GPS if properly integrated into your marketing strategies.
Applying the consumer insights derived from Oculus360's innovative platform makes sure you will always have paved roads to get you to your destination. The sheer scope of the consumer data available in the digital environment can be transformed from a hindrance to a distinct advantage if integrated in a deliberate and organized fashion. Let Oculus360’s platform provide you those GPS coordinates to find and engage your target audience.
