Using Data Science and Artificial Intelligence to Augment Marketing Automation And Marketing Strategies
A walkthrough of the launch of ‘Untitled Comb’ an assumed hypothetical everyday use BtoC product.
We are approaching mid-2020 and no vaccine has hit the shelves yet but there are hopes. On top of that WHO officials recently announced that Coronavirus is never leaving us. Earlier, there were speculations of a post-pandemic era, of hopeful presumptions that Covid-19 will be eradicated if not soon but it won’t be long. Now what! If we have to live with Covid-19, people can work from home, our children can study online and the economy can thrive. Yes, the economy will thrive with no more handshakes and no more business cards, and with the help of companies offering innovative online products and services incorporating artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques for marketing automation, marketing strategies automation and much needed demand for advanced personalization. And yes, of course, everything needs to be organic as well: be it products or services, marketing strategy, video, email, storytelling, landing page, blogging, social media or SEO keywords.
Marketing Automation
Before we proceed further let’s understand an old school question — what is marketing and what is sales? A sale is a one time process/happening and marketing is an ongoing process that gives sales repeatedly and continuously otherwise one will be out of the market soon. Marketing automation takes the help of software/s and implementation of a strategic marketing plan to be successful. Many executives use auto generated content which doesn’t hold much weight. Content needs to be created and content needs to be organic.
Let’s launch the BtoC product — a comb titled ‘Untitled Comb.’
The target audience: Bald people.
Why target bald people for a comb?
Simple. Because, bald people value hair and they would also appreciate being valued. And needless to say, they will pay attention to this very reason positively and curiously. There might be cases of individualistic negative response.
Choosing bald people as the target audience is a mere intuitive understanding but so much more can be derived from data science for any niche market. On top of that data science also helps in the identification of the niche market.
Now, let’s do the homework. If one has to sell a comb to a bald person how will one sell it to him or her? Simple principle — by identifying a need or by creating a need and turning that need into the want. Mind you, one can fool a person, say — you will get hair if you will use Untitled Comb for a year. This will work if the person is innocent and has been dreaming of a magic comb. But, how many people are innocent nowadays? Instantly any person (even the innocent once) will Google, find out the competitors’ rates and dig into the claims made by Untitled Comb.
What if we create an organic need?
The Untitled Comb provides acupressure points as the user holds it. Our hands have the acupressure points of all the organs of our body. There are double benefits of combing daily with Untitled Combs- acupressure of the hands and gentle massage in the head and henceforth relief from the stress. MAYBE the customer gets hair. If you are not convinced you can give it to someone you love, someone who got hair, so they comb their hair a hundred times in the night before going to bed. They can also do the reverse counting from 100 to 1 to sharpen their memory and keep dementia at bay. Add another USP — the Untitled Comb comes in pretty colors. You will feel powerful to hold your favorite colored Untitled Comb in hand.
The cost is the average cost of the combs sold.
Let’s launch the Untitled Comb before mother’s day. As you must have guessed, this strategy has a double advantage. Bald people value the hair of their mom. And mothers would be glad and appreciate it if their child gives it a shot. The target audience and location are all the bald people in California state. Make a video advertisement and send it to your friends on WhatsApp and other social media accounts. Have those initial users and feedback.
Simply the very basic automation in your marketing funnel at this stage is to make an excel sheet of all the contacts and add at what date and time you have sent them the video of Untitled Comb. You may also start with a text message or an email or a blog post as well.
Study Target Market
With the help of data science, pattern matching, AI and machine learning.
We do know there is a global pandemic. And there are three categories of bald people(can be more):
1- Those who have lost jobs. Their stress levels are higher than people having jobs (Must check with the data. If the boss had been a pain in the ass then it’s a relief from the everyday stress).
2- Those bald people who have jobs. For them, we can have two strategies a) Buy one and get one at 50% cost. Or better buy three and get one free. (Do the math)
b) Point 4 and 5 show the philanthropic approach started by Tom. Untitled Comb can choose to go Tom’s way if strategy five is considered. Plan 4 will give a loss if there is a shipping cost involved. If there is no shipping cost and no inventory — it can be a no profit no loss corporation. But, the reason Tom became a successful brand swiftly was because there were profits though it had an organic story and philanthropic approach — buy one, donate one. For every pair bought, Bombas, the socks company will donate one pair of socks to someone in need.
Right now, 1kproject.org is doing much more by connecting two families, providing genuine helping hands to families and single mothers in need across the US. One family or person acts as a giver and another family acts as a receiver.
Untitled Comb can be bought by one family and given to another. To be profitable and have a philanthropic gain, four Untitled Combs needs to be bought by the same buyer. A bald person with the dough can easily do that as this philanthropic approach gives a sense of humanity. Giving brings a feeling of happiness as that is very human nature.
3- There is a third kind of bald person — one who is saving money. Not spending on what is not required. Is the Untitled Comb of some genuine organic benefit to them given many are not even changing clothes?
Yes, people can be spendthrifts or otherwise, people can be spending lavishly or not, spending on luxurious brands, spending on hair care products, doing anything to get a haircut, etc. Some people place orders once in a month or once every fortnight. How loyal they are to a brand? How often do they switch? How much do they spend on toiletries? With data science, we can dig further even at their cleanliness habit as cleanliness is important in times of pandemic. With the help of data science and customized AI algorithms, we can find a pattern of the buying behavior and hence take care of customer segmentation, customer data integration and campaign management.
Now that you have felt the dire need of automation, let us understand the need for communication automation as the basis of any relationship is communication.
Email automation
I do not like too many emails and too much content. Just convey to me the point. Just think about it. Communicate only what is required. Empathize with me. And I will be pissed off if the needed information wasn’t communicated to me and on time. But, some people want emails daily.
Personalized email automation is key. Don’t ask too much. Ask and observe from the data. How many times a person has responded to the email? What actions are taken by the hot, cold or warm prospects?
Mass email as automation is a stupid and outdated step. Maybe there is something like FLASH SALE and where it is required.
Email sequence can be enhanced further. The content of the email needs to be personalized.
What value proposition Untitled Comb can offer to the toughest nut to crack? This case study will provide an innovative way to enhance email personalization. Say someone who has always browsed the website ten times, spending an hour almost every time but has never bought the Untitled Comb and is purchasing the regular combs every quarter.
AI Chatbots
More personalized the chats are, much better is the empathy scale of a chatbot. Untitled Comb chatbot’s intelligence also incorporated psychologists’ view, linguistics, and machine learning capabilities which will be helpful in the expansion in the longer run. Henceforth, transitioning from the bald community to people with the hair community will be easy.
Let’s add more value to the Untitled Comb.
Provide Untitled Combs with personalized messages. This, when automated, will provide a far better data insight as it is text-based and selected or customized by the customer.
From the landing page of the website of Untitled Comb — we got the engagement data of the prospect — location, how much time spent on viewing, communication method, etc.
Marketing Strategy Automation
The success of most of the business strategies involves a successful marketing strategy.
Google is Google because of its marketing strategy. There were better search engines. Facebook is Facebook because of a marketing strategy. Amazon is amazon because of the marketing strategy. But, those days are gone. Yes. Covid-19 pandemic has helped them grow because people didn’t have options. As people are getting aware of capitalism and the harm of monopolistic conglomerates, people are looking for options and that’s a big opportunity.
So selling Untitled Comb directly BtoC without Amazon, Facebook and Google is very easy and possible. What did WhatsApp do?
Organic marketing strategy is the key. Superhuman has made ways into the hearts of top executives at $30/month despite the extensive AI research of Gmail. Duckduckgo and Brave have users.
Before doing a SWOT for the Untitled Comb, let’s look at today’s customer. They are astute customers. They not only want a real value but they value an authentic proposition. If resonated, a warm prospect is curious to know what you are offering, why are you offering, how is key as social distancing and philanthropic aspects matter too to the customer. And that impacts when and where are you offering.
SWOT analysis
Competitor’s Strategy
When a product or service is really good it’s well accepted by the customers. Competition sets in and customers are bombarded with options. With so many options the decisions are always challenging and time consuming.
Marketing strategies to retain customers with the help of data science can provide a guideline in picking the right move.
What Untitled Comb needs to do?
There are decades-old players and new players with all sorts of combs of all shapes and sizes. There are beard combs, there are long hair combs, there are combs for curly hair and more. Many will innovate and find new combs. But, there will be many who will succumb in the longer run. As Untitled Comb is a patent product the factories can be opened as franchise based factories. And the inventory of the other combs can be cleared in a strategy, something like — buy two Untitled combs and get two other combs for free. Or provide a free Untitled Comb on the purchase of three regular combs. This move will save jobs. And competitors will survive as a franchise — by making the same amount of dough or more or less but they will be there in the business.
Advanced Personalization
With social distancing personalization needs have grown multi-fold. Individual attention to the detail without playing with privacy is the key. And happiness is the key. Fooling won’t take you places anymore. Where is Herbalife?
There will be more pandemic. It is inevitable. Hence online retail and eCommerce are going to surge. AR/VR will surge as well as it will save the time of commuting and will provide real-time feeling say for example — dress trial or a hairdo or makeup. Anyone with a viable product/s can go places if technology and marketing are used to solve a problem.
Word of mouth
In the current digital age word of mouth travels at lightspeed. The envious and jealous strategy will only invite narcissists and that’s a big problem as they are never brand loyal. They are with the brand for a time period. The moment they see the brand as powerless they will leave. For them, love is not power. Anything human is not power. A rising and shining brand is power with which they can relate. A brand seen as power is power and of course, it never lasts long.
Understand buyers and empathize with them. And if one fakes it or forces a product to be used — it won’t work at all now. Say engineers know Unix is a far better platform than windows and soon the time will come that most organizations will leave windows. It is still used because most of the customized software is built using windows.
Can Marketing strategy be automated?
It can never be fully automated but it is the best recommender system. Finding many solutions for a given problem. As time changes so do the strategies. And which one is working and which one is not working is the key.
Market Expansion for Untitled Combs
Go for BtoB tie-ups:
Target bald founders and CEOs and top executives to give as a gift to the employees for cleanliness and stress buster.
After capturing the bald people tie-up with shampoo cos or perfume cos or bread combs cos for cross-selling.
Now that Untitled Combs are successful, let’s introduce a new product. There is data science, prospects list and behavior, and implemented marketing automation and a recommend-er system of marketing strategies for the new product.
