Zero-in: Next Level of Channel Marketing Driven by Data
A company’s success often is solely measured by sales while not knowing what drives sales and for what reason. True to the motto that it’s always been working this way, no actions or changes seem to be required.
While it’s less of a question whether the brand is successful, it’s often not clear how well the products perform and to what extent. Not knowing what’s happening on the market and missing out on competitor’s performance builds a disadvantage of one’s own strategy. This seems to be especially true for successful enterprises as they are in general pleased with the sales numbers as they know they are one of the main players on the market, yet they barely know their brand’s performance.
Latest when one competitor is more successful the question arises, how to stay ahead of the competition. What does the eShelf on the eTailers look like- where are the competitor products ranking and what marketing actions were taken by the competition? The lack of knowledge often lies in the lack of manpower within the team as well as the neglect of usage of any data into a brand’s strategy.
Continuous Data Tracking Made Easy
Often, the performance is tracked manually and only on special occasions like product launches or Black Friday. This way, it’s quite time consuming to track the eShelfs across the markets as well as the marketing activities on the market. Further, this doesn’t represent to market situation but only gives a snapshot. Especially on highly dynamic eTailers where product rankings and banners change with every refresh. Therefore, companies often fear huge costs for a little outcome.
As there is a high demand for eCommerce insights, there are many tools on the market promising to deliver this valuable data. The problem with those tools is first, that the vast majority only focus on Amazon, secondly only scrape data once a day without refreshing the website, thirdly are self-service tools delivering huge excel-like data lists without processing anything upfront and fourthly only focuses on product placements, neglecting any marketing activities. Most tools only deliver insufficient results which in deed require already a deep knowledge and consuming many capacities, Cheil worked on a solution that delivers both: highest data quality and a versatile solution tailor made for your daily workflow.
These requirements resulted in a modular platform for data driven marketing: Zero-in.
The aspiration was to create a single KPI for the brand – the Share of Brand – by calculating the marketing investment and eShelf ranking, representing the brand’s visibility and comparing it with the competition in order to create a benchmark. This way one can easily track every change in category product rankings and even keyword search results to verify the search strategy.
Further, every marketing activity like display banners and any kind of sponsored placement gets tracked. Thereby, not only the own brand can be monitored, but of every competitor and product listed on the eTailer. In order to reflect the eTailers realistically, Zero-in aggregates the data up to 24 times a day and process the raw data by undergoing a sophisticated data processing architecture. The integration of additional data sets helps us to explain the brand’s performance and those of the competition.
This way, Zero-in developed into a scalable holistic platform that does not only accumulate eRetail and eCommmerce data – but also media and campaign, retail, field force, sales and customer information. This extensive database is being processed by our custom AI algorithms in order to make predictions, for product sell-out, price trends and stock level development and other business scenarios.