NAED is hosting a series of Adventure Roundtable discussions to help you dig into your use of data for your marketing strategies. The first event is less than a week away, on Thursday, July 22 at 1pm Central time. The series of three events will kick off with Mark McGready, Director of Strategic Analytics at SPARXiQ and NAED’s Data Insights Advisor, helping you use all of the tools at your disposal for three key activities:
- to take an audit of the changing business from before the pandemic to today
- to define and understand the upcoming market changes that will impact their business
- to build a tailored activity-specific plan of your goals and objectives in a post-pandemic world
After the presentation, attendees will break into smaller groups for virtual roundtable discussions on the topics.
There is still time to register yourself and your marketing department for the events. You can register for the events by clicking here.
tED magazine took the time to send McGready some questions to help you understand what will be addressed during the first event. You can read part 1 of the interview by clicking here.
tED magazine: How would you rate some of the most impactful influences on our supply chain right now? This would include, but is not limited to, supply chain shortages, a new way that our customers are working and buying, virtual business, construction delays, and warehouse and delivery operation changes.
Mark McGready: I think the number one issue we’ve had for the first half of the year has been price increases along with supply issues. The reopening happened quite quickly and I think it’s caught many off guard. However, these issues pass, and we should look to the second half of the year. Going forwards I think critical influences will be rebuilding relationships, working with new personnel, and understanding the buying preferences of customers. Working from home might be here to stay, so virtual relationships might become the norm with buyers, and with that an increased demand for meetings and support.
More than anything the market looks hot, and everyone should be set to prosper over the next couple of years as investments get approved and customers race to keep up with their competition. 2020 paused a large amount of capital, that’s just dying to be spent now. Anyone trying to hire a home contractor this summer understands just how busy things are. It should be a safe market to be investing in sales and marketing and ensuring your business is best placed to support your customers in the manner of their choosing – which might not be the way they operated in 2019. Understanding the needs of your customers is key, and voice of the customer surveys and feedback are essential tools to help discover what your customers need to keep buying from you.
tED magazine: How should marketing departments operate over the next 6-12 months in terms of creating and sharing messages internally so everyone associated with the operation understands and uses the correct messaging?
Mark McGready: Internal communication is as important as external, as the internal team are there to reinforce marketing efforts. Therefore sharing findings, strategy and results internally should be a key initiative. And I expect that there will be a need to stay nimble in marketing, which might mean changing strategies as the numbers and data changes. As such strong internal communications become even more important.
Marketing should get in the habit of communicating internally at least monthly, and in sharing what it’s doing and why it’s doing it. Marketing is there to stir up demand, if sales don’t know what’s being stirred there’s a good chance they’ll miss out when opportunity comes their way.
tED magazine: What are some of the key analytics marketing departments should be focusing on this summer?
Mark McGready: Organic vs price growth, new vs existing customers, customer wallet & mix share, customer buying pattern trending, quote hit rate and dividing your customers based on business opportunity are all important gauges of what’s happening in the company. Data analytics is about looking at a lot of sources and using them to identify the opportunity situations. If you think about all the warnings signs your car might have, it’s monitoring everything but only lets you know when something important surfaces – need an oil change or tire pressure is low. You don’t need to look at displays with all this data – your car will tell you which one is important. So to it is with data analytics. You should have lots of sources, but you share the important indicators. These could be measures like a drop in margin, or a change in mix, or a lower hit rates on open quotes, or flagging customers who’s purchase rate has dropped. There’s a lot there, and in truth what gets flagged should reflect the company strategy and business plan.
With data analytics you can’t expect every employee to be able to look at a spreadsheet and understand what to look for and how to respond. Rather the preference is to use your data analytics to identify that for them, and in turn tell them what it means and what they need to do. That’s the cornerstone of a data driven culture, which I think will be critical capability for all businesses in the years to come.
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