How can they be prepared for what promises to be an uneven recovery?
Broad national campaigns are of limited use if much of the country is unable or reluctant to purchase your product or service. Given the current uncertainty, state-by-state campaign management is unlikely to provide enough granularity and focus to be truly effective.
The uneven impact of COVID-19 has highlighted the critical importance of being able to identify surges in local demand.
There are good reasons for marketers to be optimistic, though. Because today it is possible for marketers to identify, find and act on insights in real time and at scale, while respecting people’s privacy preferences.
The patchy impact of COVID-19 highlighted the critical importance of being able to identify local demand surges, as well as the ability to flex both your marketing and your product offering to catch them.
Companies that have managed to adapt in this way are not only better able to cope with short-term fluctuations, but also better prepared and ready for whatever comes next.
►Rely on data to refine your focus on demand
A well-known restaurant chain that had previously run national campaigns realized that with such an uneven landscape unfolding across the country, it was worth shifting to a more limited geographic focus.
The restaurant’s brand team refined its focus on demand by responding to a surge in searches for “when are restaurants reopening?”
They began treating each restaurant as a distinct location with a specific radius line database around it. If interest in that location began to increase, the chain took that as a strong indicator that people were emerging from lockdown and used automation to trigger advertising campaigns. If interest waned, advertising stopped.
While this may seem simple, the chain in question has over 700 locations in the US alone. Managing such a strategy manually at that scale would have been impossible. By using automation, they were prepared to respond quickly to local demand signals, wherever and whenever they arose.
This example also serves to show how insights generated through local marketing activity can be valuable to the broader business. Using search as a barometer of demand helped the chain understand which locations could be opened profitably and how to staff them accordingly.
No single data source, no matter how robust, can provide all the answers. The key for marketers is to combine the information they have with other sources to generate better insights.
Making intelligent use of your customer data – on pricing, loyalty and seasonality, for example – can help provide a much deeper understanding of what consumers are searching for. With a broader set of data points, machine learning solutions can better identify insights into consumer patterns.
