Who says marketing can't be scientific?

In the competitive insurance industry, effective marketing of your brand and services is a must. As technology creates more innovative marketing solutions and markets become increasingly niched, how do you choose a marketing strategy that will be effective, both in terms of cost and results?

In today's media diverse environment, efficient and effective marketing is much more difficult than before. Prices continue to increase across all major media, particularly across TV, print and radio mediums, putting pressure on financial directors to increase marketing budgets by the same percentage despite the same media continuing to fragment more and more each year.

Expensive exercise

Trying to market something to a middle-to-upper class suburban female is becoming extremely expensive when you have to place the same advert in Cosmopolitan, Sarie, Rooi Rose, Glamour, Elle, Fair Lady, Femina and so forth. When each placement potentially costs anywhere between R25 and R50k individually, suddenly one campaign can cost you well over a few hundred thousand a month, especially if you practice the law of frequency and make use of several mediums to carry your message.

Challenges abound

Add to this the challenges with the growing cost of acquisition of new customers, who tend to be very fickle with their loyalty anyway, not to mention the growing questions about accountability, and the extent to which marketers need to show a return on investment for their activities, especially abovethe-line. Suddenly you find that marketing shoes aren't as comfortable to wear today as they were yesterday.

Intelligent solutions

So where are the solutions for marketers? One solution is direct marketing. Data driven, intelligent marketing, to both new and existing customers, can enhance cross-selling, convergence and consolidation. Some have already discovered the significant benefit of using data and analytics to create marketing campaigns that use historical data intelligently to optimise marketing at a oneon-one level to achieve mass customisation.

Applying the science

Yet already I can hear the screams – "but my response rate was low!" – however, a solution has been developed which applies the science hinted at in marketing textbooks to the direct marketing process. Intelligent Marketing Solutions implement a scientific, consistent and above-all measurable approach to direct marketing campaigns.

The solution uses analytics and modeling technology to answer some very simple questions:
* Who is my customer? (target market)
* What is their risk profile? (filter out the customers inappropriate for your product or business)
* What can they afford? (assign the RIGHT product)
* Are they likely to respond? (do they already have the product I'm offering? Do they tend to respond?)
* Where or how can I reach them? (medium – have I got the correct contact details?)
* Which strategy works best? (trying different approaches, seeing where the response is and learning what works for future campaigns)

Intelligent Marketing Solutions bring to life the science behind the textbook marketing theory. Through using powerful models and analytics to optimise marketing segmentation, product assignment and campaign response, you can effectively reduce the wastage of costs and ensure that the customer being marketed to is an excellent prospect, not only from a risk perspective, but above all from a marketing context.