Colony HQ was announced as overall innovation master in the category of business with a turnover of less than R35m at the recent Accenture Innovation Index Awards 2016. Here's more on the importance of using big data to turn campaigns into customers and knowing what your customers need before they do.
Colony HQ’s Accenture Innovation Index Award was presented in recognition for their online aggregation and database platform that translates big data into little data, allowing clients to communicate with their customers by making use of relevant messaging at the right time.
MD Marcus Stephens tells us more about what that means and the importance of commemorating industry innovation below…
1. What does the Accenture Innovation Index Award win mean to Colony HQ?
Stephens: The need to celebrate local innovators in South Africa is critical as we have so many dynamic innovators: Mark Shuttleworth, Elon Musk and Siya Xuza to name but a few. Each of these examples have their own unique road to success and that’s massively important to acknowledge, however the overarching theme is that these are our homegrown talents. Colony HQ is no different, locally born and nurtured, we have a unique product ready for global success.
We have the only product that provides broadcasters with a single view of their customers, not only on-air but digitally too, and a unique product that will drive additional commercialisation opportunities for broadcasters using their data sets.2. Interesting. Tell us more about Colony HQ and its role in the industry.
Stephens: Established in 2006, Colony is a comprehensive message aggregation tool that works across several mobile and digital platforms – giving brands the ability to manage interactions from any campaign on one easy-to-use interface. The platform is tried and trusted, with 35 million unique messages received and over R70m worth of prizes awarded through the system since 2010. Colony also tracks data garnered from various audiences through the interactions each person has with a brand/company, through multiple campaigns across platforms.
Good data means personalised communication, which in turn leads to greater success rates/responses. Colony combines a genius intelligence tool at its hub with a comprehensive collection of responsive interaction tools that affect and monitor your campaigns and audience interactions. Each feeds the other, so that you can plan campaigns better and loop your learnings to organically build the power of your base every time you use it.
3. Seems futuristic! Explain the importance of turning big data into little data.
Stephens: ‘Big data’ as a term and a concept is all the rage currently and can often be intimidating to general or traditional marketers. Colony recognises that marketers and media companies aren’t able to define the value of big data without being able to interpret data into improving advertiser or content value, so Colony does just this: We take unstructured data, like interactions responding to an on-air call-out to the audience to interact, and “translate” these non-digital connections into structured interactions that we can convert into digital data. For example, ‘Vote for your favourite South African music act on *120*34567#.’ Colony is able to pick and create key phrases and names to build a structured listener response against their mobile or social accounts. This drives additional value to advertisers and the broadcaster, which Colony helps unpack and drive additional revenue.
4. How do you effectively “turn campaigns into customers” then?
Stephens: The Colony platform seamlessly integrates campaigns across mobile, web and social media, so you can choose mechanics that suit your brand and customers. Colony interprets the big data from your campaign into meaningful pockets of small data, so performance is easy to monitor. We also provide business-relevant insights that you can understand and translate into post-campaign review and next-campaign strategy. This means you know your customer – how to reach them and what to say to them when – which secures their relationship with your brand and creates sustained sales opportunities, ultimately converting ‘spray and pray’ campaigns into meaningful customer relationships. That’s important as it costs 80% less to retain a customer than it does to acquire a new customer. Watch the video embedded below for more on the Colony campaigns platform:
5. Let us in on some of the biggest digital trends we’ll be focusing on in the latter section of 2016.
Stephens: Being able to communicate to your customer in their preferred media channel with an offer or content proposition that adds genuine value to that customer is absolutely key. As a simple example, if the weather in Johannesburg experiences heavy thunderstorms over a 24-/48-hour period, sending existing Gauteng customers a mobile/social/digital reminder to protect their vehicles from damage not only adds real value to your customer, it also delivers recency and relevance if you know this customer has had a hail damage claim in the last year. So, a number of practical suggestions and advice to reduce their exposure to hail effectively delivers the following:
- My insurance company knows my claim history – from CRM
- My insurance company cares about my vehicle and me – from regional weather predictions
- Cost savings for vehicles moved into safe/hail-free spaces save everyone money and time – from a business risk and exposure perspective, it drives real savings.
The biggest trend is thus being able to use data to deliver customer or business benefits without being asked or prompted to – you know what your customer needs before they do.
That sounds like true business innovation to me. Click here for more on the 2016 Accenture Innovation Index winners, here to find out more about the Accenture Innovation Index conference and here for more from Colony HQ on using little data in your brand strategy.
