Precision Marketing 101

Precision marketing emphasizes relevance as part of the technique. To achieve relevance, Precision Marketing marketers solicit personal preferences directly from recipients. They also collect and analyze behavioral and transactional data.

The most common applications of precision marketing are in customer retention and revitalization. Here are a few examples for precision marketing tactics that have been used by several major companies, such Best Western and Tesco.

Today, the pressure to demonstrate Marketing ROI has never been greater, and many companies are taking a more scientific approach to marketing, and treating it as a true business discipline. This means applying more rigor to capturing, analyzing and manipulating customer data, and delivering narrowly-defined messages designed to resonate with customers’ specific wants and needs. This process is called precision marketing. Based on extensive research and their own experience working with some of the world’s largest and most progressive marketing organizations, Jeff Zabin and co-author Gresh Brebach show how precision marketing can yield enormous business value. Writing in an engaging style that touches on everything from Renaissance thinking to Minority Report, they provide a definitive roadmap for combining precision marketing with mass marketing to cut costs, grow revenues, and create an overall competitive advantage.

The international hotel chain finds a new take on an old-school direct response medium helps build brand loyalty and adds to the bottom line.

Tammy Lucas, managing director of marketing programs for Phoenix-based Best Western Intl. is not operating under any illusions when it comes to the image of the 4,000-location strong international hotel chain. "A lot of companies find themselves doing the same things over and over. At Best Western, we definitely test new marketing ideas to see what moves the needle," she says. "That may surprise some people who think Best Western is just a 'same-old' brand. We've been looked upon as a stodgy brand, but we have spent a lot of time and effort in marketing to contemporize the brand."

The potential of "precision marketing," the ability to use social media and other new platforms to tailor campaigns at the individual-consumer level, is already upending studios' traditional marketing strategies, according to panelists Friday at "Hollywood's Hunt for the Next Big Thing: How Start-Up Innovation is Transforming the Entertainment Business."

"It's about personalization," said Singer. "When you know that someone enjoys your brand, it's about getting to them in a way that's more meaningful."

A growing desire to delve deeper into data for consumer insights have led to the creation of Lifestyles, a segmentation and modelling system based on customer shopping behaviour Noelle McElhatton reports.

So it proved. Until 2001, Tesco and dunnhumby had typically restricted analysis samples of customers to around 10 per cent, in order to control the cost of data storage and transmission. The sea change came with lowering costs of technology, and Tesco's growing desire to delve deeper into the data for consumer insights. The challenge was to make sense of the 104 billion rows of data stored at any one time.

Tesco Lifestyles was the result - a segmentation and modelling system based on customer shopping behaviour. "Lifestyles is ultimately about trying to understand factors that drive shopping behaviour, for example price, promotions or healthy eating, together with measurement of Tesco's share of a customer's wallet or purse, says dunnhumby chief executive Edwina Dunn. "We wanted to capture more spend from each customer, and nudge them into buying products from Tesco that they might buy elsewhere."

Internet marketing, also known as digital marketing, web marketing, online marketing, search marketing or e-marketing, is referred to as the marketing (generally promotion) of products or services over the Internet. iMarketing is used as an abbreviated form for Internet Marketing.

Internet marketing is considered to be broad in scope because it not only refers to marketing on the Internet, but also includes marketing done via e-mail and wireless media. Digital customer data and electronic customer relationship management (ECRM) systems are also often grouped together under internet marketing.

Internet marketing ties together the creative and technical aspects of the Internet, including design, development, advertising and sales. Internet marketing also refers to the placement of media along many different stages of the customer engagement cycle through search engine marketing (SEM), search engine optimization (SEO), banner ads on specific websites, email marketing, mobile advertising, and Web 2.0 strategies.

Personalized marketing (also called personalization, and sometimes called one-to-one marketing) is an extreme form of product differentiation. Whereas product differentiation tries to differentiate a product from competing ones, personalization tries to make a unique product offering for each customer.

Direct-response marketing is a form of marketing designed to solicit a direct response which is specific and quantifiable. The delivery of the response is direct between the viewer and the advertiser, that is, the customer responds to the marketer directly. This is in contrast to brand advertising.

Houston in the No. 1 city in the U.S. for shoppers keen to M-commerce, according to a study by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB).

New York, Atlanta, Los Angeles and Dallas/Ft. Worth, rounded out the top five, according to the IAB study, which cited comScore data in support of its findings.