How can the Royal Bank of Scotland leverage Big Data in Marketing?
This article covers potential ways Royal Bank of Scotland can leverage Big Data to optimize Marketing efforts and dollars.
Ways to Improve Marketing
- Customer journey mapping & experience measurements: Rather than focus on marketing everything to everyone, persona-specific marketing campaigns would appeal to target customer segments based on their life stage needs resulting in higher ROI on marketing dollars. Customer experience could be enhanced by personalizing. Eg. marketing with a newborn arrival, graduation, midlife, or retirement.
- Aligning operational metrics with financial measures, shifting from transactional measures to relational measures by facilitating a customer-centric & continuous improvement mindset: RBS should adopt a customer-centric mindset, requiring a cultural & operational shift starting with leadership influence across all levels of the organization. Addressing infrastructure enhancement and scaling needs in areas of training staff, gathering & analyzing metrics. Additionally, weaving feedback loops from the frontline with innovation at a portfolio level. This could provide valuable insights to determine product enhancements, decommissioning decisions sunset, and expansion to new markets/new products. It would help economically allocate financial institution’s budgets to operational excellence. In short, tying customer experience measurements to a value-creation.
Suggested Approach Royal Bank of Scotland could take for Leveraging Big Data in Marketing
- Mining data: RBS could potentially use everything they know about their customers to offer better products and match to customer fit, eliminating waste during the transformation. Sales & marketing data can reveal a wealth of insights that could be leveraged for a “Personology” based customer approach to implement real-time decisions to its 17M customers across 21 sales channels. These actionable insights could help improve acquisition and retention levels, increase customer satisfaction, deepen market penetration and reduce wasteful ad impressions. In short, insights could be used to reinvent customer journeys across channels and address customer experience holistically.
- Positioning in the marketplace: For being relevant in the marketplace, organizations must have a clear understanding of their product’s value proposition and how it caters to different customer segments as well those that it does not. Given that customers are spending more time on mobile apps and smartphones, RBS could invest their marketing dollars by geo-targeted marketing campaigns with Facebook as their lead source for connecting conversions to media touchpoints across channels, devices, and browsers. RBS could expand its customer base by understanding the needs of newer customer segments, untapped markets as well as optimizing its channels. Newer channels like Apple Watch could be explored.
- Engaging with staff & stakeholders: Alignment at all levels of the financial institution is the secret sauce of strategy execution, realizing vision, and regaining trust. Engaging staff, key partners, and stakeholders by breaking silos and enabling continuous feedback loops. Frontline feedback should guide strategy. Embedding a customer-centric culture and keeping the momentum could help RBS to reimagine its business model. It could emerge as a “helpful banking” where customers not only get transaction-based needs met but are educated on financial areas.
References:
Gordon, J., Grüntges, V., Smith, V., & Staack, Y. (2016, November). New insights for new growth: What it takes to understand your customers today. Retrieved August 7, 2019, from https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/marketing-and-sales/our-insights/new-insights-for-new-growth-what-it-takes-to-understand-your-customers-today
Fanderl, H., Neher, K., & Pulido, A. (2016, March). Are you really listening to what your customers are saying? Retrieved August, 2019, from https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/operations/our-insights/are-you-really-listening-to-what-your-customers-are-saying
Atkins, C., Valdivieso De Uster, M., Mahhdavian, M., & Yee, L. (2016, December). Unlocking the power of data in sales. Retrieved August, 2019, from https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/marketing-and-sales/our-insights/unlocking-the-power-of-data-in-sales
Four ways to share customer experience measurement for impact, McKinsey, https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/operations/our-insights/four-ways-to-shape-customer-experience-measurement-for-impact
