Michael Geisier

The proliferation of technology, evolving marketing channels and the highly competitive market place has given rise to demanding customers with huge expectations. Personalisation tops this list of expectations.

Global retailers need to think beyond the “one size fits all” brand image and customise their messaging, strategies, collateral material, promotions and customer service according to the local market. A global marketer’s top priority is to engage the local audiences and increase the relevancy of all marketing communications.

While there are several challenges involved in devising a local strategy, the biggest challenge is cracking the code of local market dynamics and devising a relevant cost/benefit model. Measuring the effectiveness of campaigns at a local level, finding informative local resources/experts, sourcing local market data and customer insights can be very daunting.

Analytics can make localisation seem effortless. Providing the right product/service at the right time with the right messaging to the right customer through the right channel is the mandate. This requires something more than experience and intuition. Analytics help brands understand their customers better than anyone or anything else. With an analytics driven marketing approach, brands can leverage huge amounts of data and extract meaningful insights to formulate more confident, localised business strategies. Analytics can therefore help in identifying potential marketing activities that can accelerate and improve customer acquisition in new markets. Each social platform comes with its own analytics tool to track local consumer behaviour.

Many analytics service providers offer customised data mining and interpretation solutions for a more thorough understanding of the customer, thereby enabling a deeper engagement strategy. In a local market leveraging the services of a local analytics service provider works well as they bring proven experience to their solution offerings.

About the author: Michael Geisier, sales director, Middle East and Africa, Capillary Technologies.