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SALES & MARKETING FOUR WAYS DATA HAS CHANGED RETAIL MARKETING The turbulent retail patterns and panic buying of the coronavirus period are changing the way Australian brands and retailers make decisions both daily and strategically By Strikeforce Managing Director and CEO Matt Lloyd. The pandemic has shown one of the keys to achieving retail success is to be more data-centric – a trend that Covide-19 has accelerated. By relying on retail insights and hard data rather than guesswork, we can make smarter decisions to drive increased sales for our clients and better shopping experiences for Australian retail customers. Many larger players in the retail industry have already recognised the importance of data, but compared with other mature markets overseas, real-time SKU level sales data is hard to come by, with most of the everyday data kept in-house by retailers or at best accessible via the retailers’ data apps. Without this crucial data continuously available in real time, our industry has to look to different and disparate data sets and work with data scientists to join the dots. At Strikeforce, we have unprecedented access to retail and field marketing data and an expert team dedicated to category and insights. This allows us to combine a range of external and internal datasets to drive better results for our clients. Here, we uncover the four key ways we’re using data to drive field optimisation, in-store precision and ultimately aggregate these methods to predict and optimise field marketing ROI. 1. Field optimisation The first data-driven step is optimising the everyday movements of field marketing teams. This is as simple as using data to drive where to go, when, with what resource, to carry out what tasks and with what tools. Yet, in turn, it’s extremely sophisticated in the use of data to gain the right answers to these field marketing questions. In recent months, we’ve been able to combine our different sources of data to know where it’s best to send field teams across Australia – through integrating Covid-specific information such as hotspot data and panic buying insights into our field marketing planning, as well as using other well used data sources such as that around demographics, shoppers and consumers. This has given our team across the country the ability to indicate which 64 RETAIL WORLD OCT, 2020