This is the third and final installment of the Business Intelligence for Marketing series. As in the previous installments, I look at the business intelligence needed to make informed decisions about marketing. Today I focus on how to make business intelligence accessible and understandable to marketers.
When it comes to making marketing decisions, most marketers are good about asking themselves these 3 questions: what do I know about my market, what are my assumptions about my market, and what are my biases? Each of these questions can be answered by a simple Google search or, even better, a blog post. While it’s true that every market has some biases, it’s also true that every market has some assumptions.
I think this is particularly important for marketing in the physical world. There are many things that marketers assume or make assumptions about that can be difficult to test. One assumption that I’ve noticed is that most marketing is done in isolation. The vast majority of marketing today is done in isolation. Most consumers don’t research every product or service before buying it. This is not only a mistake, but it also limits the effectiveness of marketing.
The challenge for marketers is to not assume or make assumptions about consumers. In marketing we see this as marketing is a collaborative process. The only way to effectively market a product is to get your message to consumers in a format that they can relate to. The best way to do this is by listening to your target market. Listen to what they are talking about, and make an informed decision based on their input.
So, how do you listen to people? Are you paying attention to the tone of their voice? Do they speak in paragraphs? Do they have a lot of dialogue? Are they using adjectives correctly? If you pay attention to their voice, you can figure out what they are thinking. You can also determine who the target market is. You can determine whether they are an individual or a group, and what kind of people they are. To determine this, you have to listen to their voice.
The most important part of this process is listening. Being able to listen to people can help you decide whether they will be a good candidate for a marketing campaign and what kind of message they should be sending. To give you an example, I am a product manager for a company called Adtech. We had a huge marketing campaign in the last six months.
I listened to the voice of all three kinds of people: the sales people, the account managers, and the marketing managers. I could tell from the tone of each voice that a majority of them were sales people. The account managers were the most concerned with their product. The marketing managers seemed to be more concerned with the people who were selling the product.
This is a very different type of person to the typical sales person. They may be sales people, but they are not sales people. They are marketing people, and if they are not paying attention to the product they are selling or the marketing, then they are not paying attention, and that’s bad. This is why a marketing manager in my company was getting more calls from customers who wanted to return the unused Adtech products to their accounts than my sales manager ever would.
When I say “paid attention to” I mean actually paying attention to what your customer is saying. You need to be listening for the words you’re trying to use. The typical salesperson is very good at this because they’re good at hearing their customer, and they are good at responding to their customer. Marketing people tend to be very good at this because they are good at listening to what customers say and putting it into their marketing.
The best salespeople try to listen to what theyre customers are saying, but the typical salesperson often ends up sounding like a sales-talk machine if they do. I know its hard to change a sales person, but I’m not sure you can change a sales talker. Even in a business context, it’s worth a try.
