15 Sep Head to Heart: A Data Driven Approach to Marketing
Greg Johnson, Director of Sales and Marketing
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Numbers tell us a story. As marketers, not only do those numbers tell a story of what happened, they can help us read the tea leaves to predict future behaviors of our guests and make smart decisions for building affinity and winning long-term loyalty with our guests.
That’s why last year when we approached our strategic planning for 2016 and beyond, we decided to move on from our old “gut feel” advertising agency and partner with Mind Ecology, which is heavily data-driven.
Mind Ecology had worked with Flix in the past. During the site selection process for our first expansion project, they created a “Match Point Study” which helped us understand different psychographic pockets in the market. From this information, we identified four primary guest persona types that comprise nearly 60% of our business (the other 40% is a mix of over 60 different groups, since Flix appeals to a broad cross-section of Americans). After developing those personas, we’ve found new and creative ways to apply that information into different marketing initiatives and to layer more data sets over that information.
As the opening of our fourth location fast approaches, we have started to develop more sophisticated metrics for understanding our market and evaluating our different marketing initiatives. One such area that is a focal point going into 2017 is how we will leverage the data living within our loyalty program, The Circle. The Circle launched in November, 2015 and now has over 20,000 members. On each transaction at Flix with loyalty, data is being aggregated in our systems regarding spend, items purchased, frequency and so on. Since each transaction is associated with a person who has given us their personal demographic data, we are able to model typical spend behavior and value derived from each of our four primary guest types.
Of course this information will be incredibly valuable for Matt Silvers as well as he looks for new sites for future Flix locations. For the near term, we can use this information to offer special limited offerings during slower periods that we know will resonate with our most frequent, highest spending guests.
In addition, our goal is to better understand the lifetime-value of our guests, which will help us make better decisions every time we evaluate an ad spend in the future.
The more data we aggregate, the better we will be able to understand our guests. As we understand our guests better we can speak to them in a manner that resonates with them with an offering that connects with their hardwired behaviors. And that invariably leads to higher affinity, stronger loyalty and top-line revenue growth.
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