Marketing, Interrupted

by Dave Sutton

  engage with, many different types of content and messages at every stage and each interaction impacts the total result, for example:

  • Social “likes” and reviews are factored into search rank

  • Brand advertising increases click-through rates on search

  • Bylined articles in targeted publications drive thought leadership and brand awareness

  • Reviews increase confidence and influences organic search

  • Blogging attracts more website visitors

  During the Awareness stage, customers are beginning to form opinions about their needs and considering what we refer to here as “Cost of Entry benefits.” How can my problem be solved? What kind of outcomes do I need or expect? Should I even include your brand in my consideration set?

  In the Consideration stage, customers have a better understanding of their specific needs and they are seeking to understand the “Differentiating benefits” of your brand—What makes you different from your competitors? What makes you different from the status quo?

  And in the Decision stage, customers are judging their alternatives and the “Preference benefits” that help your brand come to the top of their short list— What’s the difference in cost? How long will it take to get results? What are your customers saying about you?

  In the Post-Sale “Advocate and Repeat” stage, customers seek not just

  satisfaction, but innovation, communication and support. What are the latest service and product updates? Are my questions being answered? What do I need to know to stay ahead of industry trends and best practices?

  Each stage in your Customer BuyWay requires getting the right person, the right message, at the right time. Nothing is more frustrating to customers than spending countless hours doing research only to find themselves back at square one with your company’s representative in an introductory conversation. According to CEB, buyers are 57 percent of the way through their purchase pro- cess before they even reach out to talk to someone at a company. These frustra- tions are caused by a lack of Strategy and insight into the behavior of prospective customers.

  In order to be truly transformational and interrupt marketing as usual, you must establish a clear strategy to tell a simple, clear and aligned story to the right person, at the right time, through the proper channel.

  Chapter 9

  Personifying Your Strategy

  had Thevenot, Executive Director of The Institute for Humane Studies (IHS), believes in the power of freedom to enable people to unleash their unique potential and help create a more just, peaceful and thriving world. Now

  that’s a powerful personal “why” statement!

  Under Chad’s leadership, IHS inspires students and professors to engage with the ideas of freedom. Furthermore, IHS supports people in advancing the principles and practices of freedom in their careers and connects them to a community of individu- als committed to the power of freedom, open inquiry and idea exchange. The overall goal is to broaden on-campus conversations and encourage the exploration of ideas beyond the current perceived bias toward liberalism at Universities.

  The target audience for IHS programs and offerings includes undergradu- ates who have demonstrated an interest in their studies to pursue a career in higher education. They also target graduate students who are on a career path in

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  The IHS Brand Story

  academia, as well as “freedom-friendly” faculty members who are seeking sup- port and a broader platform for sharing their ideas. Concurrently, IHS targets like-minded organizations and individuals for their financial support of these candidates and the organization’s programs that support both the students and the academic institutions.

  With a simple, clear and compelling brand story to tell, Chad’s attention shifted to formulating a strategy for IHS to reach the right target at the right time, with the right message to trigger the right behaviors.

  IHS had conducted traditional market segmentation studies in the past to gain a deeper understanding of students, faculty and donors. However, the data generated from those studies had not been particularly useful. A lot of interest- ing facts were generated but few actionable insights. General demographic data about the different segments was helpful for targeting, but the research yielded very little with regard to what actually drives people’s behaviors in their academic and professional careers.

  No, traditional marketing research just wasn’t going to cut it. So, Chad decided to take a different approach.

  He aimed to “personify” each segment of the IHS audience to truly reveal their preferences and the subtle distinctions in their behaviors. With fully devel- oped personas, Chad knew that IHS would be able to tailor its messaging to be more relevant and authentic to the needs and wants of the individual. Moreover, Chad wanted to gain a deeper understand of their decision-making journey (i.e. BuyWay). And as appropriate, IHS could create experiences to engage them and make the IHS brand story a part of their own personal academic stories.

  The output of this important work had to be actionable and answer several key questions like:

  • What motivates the target to learn?

  • Where do their interests lead them?

  • What does IHS have to offer?

  • How do they make decisions?

  • Where are they in their journey?

  • What do we need to say or offer to engage them?

  • What should we be measuring to evaluate performance?

  Alex

  The Liberty Leader—very aligned with IHS brand story What motivates Alex to learn?

  • Getting to learn about personally interesting topics, networking, and having the opportunity to learn on campus

  Where do his interests lead him?

  • On his mobile phone

  • Leading a campus group

  What does IHS have to offer to Alex?

  • Share our more intensive Learn Liberty products

  What do we need to say to Alex to engage him?

  • We represent a safe place to express, openly debate, and cultivate ideas

  Through this strategic work, IHS was able to identify a highly actionable segment of their target audience on college campuses today who they called the “Liberty Leader.” Here is a brief overview of the persona that they developed for Alex:

  Alex is energetic and enthusiastic, and carries this passion into the learn- ing environment. He has a strong sense of personal responsibility and accountability. He likes being on campus and enjoys interacting with his fellow students and professors.

  He is equally as comfortable participating in classroom lectures and workshops, as watching an educational video online in his dorm room. He is passionate about his beliefs, which are often influenced by his immigrant family background, and is typically among the first to offer an opinion or lead a classroom discussion.

  He is active on social media, and relies heavily on mobile technology to keep pace with his busy day. If something needs to get done, Alex is your go-to-guy.

  Armed with this deeper level of insight, Chad’s marketing team at IHS was able to create far more relevant and engaging messaging for Alex on college cam- puses across the country. By understanding Alex’s journey and communication preferences with greater precision, IHS could create experiences for Alex that are more relevant to him. Rather than interrupting Alex with irrelevant or unneces- sary messages, IHS could give Alex precisely what he needed in order to move him to the next phase of his journey.

  By building out personas, Chad’s marketing team also discovered that there are people on college campuses today that are just not a good fit for the IHS brand story. Identifying these audience members meant that the organiza- tion did not have to waste precious time and resources trying to “persuade the unpersuadable.”

  Chad and his team have now applied the new personification strategy to all of their target audiences—undergraduates, graduates, faculty and donors.

  As a result, IHS cam
paigns are highly efficient, differentiated and tailored for each persona within each target segment. Personas embody not only what people say they want, but also reveal what truly motivates their behavior to take

  action. IHS is creating remarkable experiences for their customer by giving them a highly personalized reason to care, a reason to engage, a reason to openly share the ideas of freedom and a reason to advocate for the organization.

  How Do You Personify Your Marketing Strategy?

  As we saw with the IHS case, traditional market segmentation didn’t go far enough to give Chad and his team actionable insight to drive student, faculty and donor engagement.

  The traditional statistical approach to developing targeted segments through marketing research requires only a basic understanding of statistics and relies heavily on the responses that consumers or customer provide to survey questions.

  What’s wrong with that?

  At its heart, there’s nothing wrong with developing targeted segments based on how your consumers or customers respond to surveys. For many companies, even this step can represent a quantum leap from simply guessing at demograph- ics or relying on anecdotes.

  However, for transformative marketers who have a more sophisticated grasp of the two powerful levers of segmentation and differentiation, transformational approaches to segmentation offer a lot more.

  After you’ve performed a more traditional segmentation, you realize that you’re playing with only a small set of information about your target audience and there’s great risk that you’re going to go far astray from the actionable insights that you are seeking.

  Your customers and consumers might be in a bad mood when they take the survey. Or, worse, they’re just pre-occupied, or maybe gaming the system, or just trying to tell you what you want to here. Maybe you’re only getting the people that are in the mood to complete surveys or have a lot of spare time.

  The one thing that your customers or prospects can’t hide? Their behavior.

  Segmenting by behavior opens up a constellation of possibilities for marketers. Instead of putting your consumers or customers into immutable segments based

  on who they are or how they think, it’s infinitely better to create changeable seg- ments based on how your consumer or customers behave.

  Enough with a handful of static segments, why aren’t you and your company creating hundreds of segments and corresponding personas, permitting your customers to move from segment to segment based on their specific behaviors and where they happen to be in their decision-making journey? What you will discover is that your customer’s actual behaviors will put them into specific seg- ments that will demand a very specific marketing response. You’ll also see your marketing effectiveness increase dramatically as you stop interrupting people and instead, meet them on their terms with timely and relevant messaging.

  Segmentation by behavior and developing unique personas—getting beyond simplistic, survey-driven segments—will give you the understanding of your cus- tomers to deliver the right message, to the right target, at the right time. In other words, it’s critical to maximizing your return on marketing investments. Why invest in communicating your brand story to people that are never going to buy? Likewise, why alienate the right buyers by assuming that all people in a certain segment want to engage with you in the same way?

  Behavior driven segments can give you the advantage that you’re looking for—and analytical tools are readily available for you to bring a more modern and sophisticated approach to marketing to your targeted customers. If you’re a retailer, how much is it worth to identify customer behaviors that lead to attri- tion—and provide a window for you to invest in keeping them in the fold? If you’re a financial services company, how much is it worth to know what behav- iors indicate that consumers are in the market for specific products and services (and give you the go ahead to cross-sell products that are highly likely to be appealing)?

  Of course, you can stick with turning survey responses into segments and give them funny names like Discount Diva or Upscale Hipsters. Alternatively, you can use real customer behavior data to create behavior-based segments and personas; dispense with the funny names, and just get down to business driving sales and profits higher.

  Building behavioral segments and personas can be tricky – it’s important to have the right balance between quantitative and qualitative data to get an accu- rate and actionable profile. With an accurate buyer persona, marketers are able

  to target their message to subsets of customers with common needs and inter- ests. Sophisticated analytical techniques that can be used to identify patterns and convert unstructured data into actionable insights, allowing the creation of buyer personas for highly targeted and effective individualized marketing campaigns.

  Here is a simple example to demonstrate how this works and to highlight the power of text analytics to build personas and reveal actionable insights for marketers:

  Translating Patterns into Personas

  With the 2016 U.S. Presidential race in the rearview mirror (but still the sub- ject of hot debate on the evening news!), we thought it would be interesting to explore what, if any, patterns in the way people describe themselves could be used to identify their “political personas.” For instance, are there characteristics that might predict whether you are a Democrat or a Republican?

  For this example, OdinText, a powerful text analytics application, was used to identify several striking and statistically significant differences between the way Republicans and Democrats describe themselves.

  Let me emphasize that this exercise had nothing to do with demographics: gender, age, ethnicity, income, etc. We’re all aware of the statistical demographic differences between Republicans and Democrats. Specific demographic informa- tion people shared in describing themselves was only pertinent to the extent that it constituted a broader response pattern that could predict political affiliation.

  When it comes to self-image, there are significant differences.

  As it turns out, Republicans were significantly more likely than Democrats to say they have blonde hair. However, this does not necessarily mean that someone with blonde hair is significantly more likely to be a Republican; rather, it simply means that if you have blonde hair, you are significantly more likely to feel it noteworthy to mention when describing yourself, if you are a Republican than if you are a Democrat.

  Republicans are far more likely to include their marital status, religion, eth- nicity and education level in describing themselves, and to mention that they are charitable/generous.

  Democrats, on the other hand, are significantly more likely to describe them- selves in terms of friendships, work ethic and the quality of their smile.

  Deeper analysis turned up several predictors for party affiliation as portrayed below:

  Interestingly, this researchidentifiedquiteafewmorepredictorsfor Republicans than Democrats, suggesting that the former may be more homogeneous in terms of which aspects of their identities matter most. This translates to a somewhat higher level of confidence in predicting affinity with the Republican Party.

  For instance, if you describe yourself as both “Christian” and “married,” with- out knowing anything else about you, it can be assumed with 90 percent accuracy that you vote Republican.

  Again, this does not mean that Christians who are married are more than 90 percent likely to be Republicans, but it does mean that people who mention these two things when asked to tell a stranger about themselves are extremely likely to be Republicans.

  So what?

  Could a political campaign put this capability to work segmenting likely voters and targeting messages? Absolutely! But the application obviously extends well beyond politics.

  While this simple example was exploratory and the results should not be taken as definitive, it demonstrates that text analytics tools make it entirely possible to read between the lines and determine far more about customers than marketers previously thought
was possible.

  People are increasingly expecting brands to deliver real-time, relevant mes- sages. As a result, the discipline of marketing is rapidly transforming to personal- ized and individualized marketing, requiring marketers to understand the cus- tomer as an individual persona, quickly adapt to each customer’s changing needs, and execute marketing initiatives at a personal level.

  According to Teradata, 80 percent of marketers agree that individualized mar- keting is a top priority. However, only 43 percent of marketers say that they are delivering individualized experiences for their customers. These sophisticated predictive model techniques help close the gap between the strategy and execu- tion of an effective individualized marketing campaign.

  “Personifying your marketing strategy is not an option, it’s a customer expectation”

  With an exponentially-increasing flood of customer satisfaction data, cus- tomer experience touchpoints, CRM transactions, and consumer-generated social media text, there is no shortage of data available. The data and the tools are there. And transformative marketers are using them to predictively model all manner of customer behaviors to help them personify their marketing strate- gies. The result? They’re moving to the TopRight quadrant of performance in the markets where the choose to compete.