Marketing: Right Place, Right Time
Strawberry Pop-Tarts®. If you live in Florida, you know there is a strong likelihood that you will at some point have to contend with a hurricane. Several went through Florida in 2004 and Wal-Mart decided to study its product sales during those periods. What the data revealed was interesting. According to a QualityDigest article, Wal-Mart expected to see a significant jump in the sales of water, diapers, flashlights, batteries, plywood, generators and the like. Instead what they found was strawberry Pop-Tarts® were purchased 700 times the rate of any other product during the hurricane season that year.
As David Steinberg points out in Entrepreneur, our job as marketers is to “get out the right message, in front of the right audience, at the right time, to drive the right (desired) consumer behavior.” Now more than ever, in today’s technology driven, digital realm we need data to do that. And with just seven seconds to connect and convert, data insights are important on the creative side as well. Hurricane season begins June 1. Pop-Tarts® anyone?
While data can tell us much about what, when, where and how often consumers buy based on past purchases, you still have to sell the product or service you are offering. This is where the creative side of marketing comes in, and connects the dots to why they purchase. Here are a few points to ponder as you look to efficiently and effectively marry data and creative in your digital and content marketing.
Mining Your Data
The biggest driver of data digital marketing according to an article and infographic in AdWeek is to be more customer-centric, targeting messages and offerings for a more personalized customer experience. Customers have grown to expect that you know more about them, whether online or off, and they want brand consistency throughout their journey. That’s why customer service and satisfaction data have become paramount from hospitality to healthcare. In addition to wanting to know when, where and why you chose a particular product or service, marketers want to know how you felt about it. Much of this consumer engagement information is culled from websites, mobile apps, social media and call centers, and serves as the foundation for future campaigns.
Creative That Connects
However, numbers don’t tell the whole story. You still have to play into peoples’ emotions, what’s trending and rise to the surface among a sea of competing messages. Packaging still matters, and as mentioned previously, you have mere seconds to have impact. As Robert Glazer talks about in his post on Convince & Convert, good marketing ideas take risks and more than half of any campaign’s sales impact comes from the creative, not data. This is not to say anyone should design in a vacuum. Testing messages before rolling out a campaign is by no means a new idea, and that feedback data helps hone the right message to be delivered to the right customer.
Visual Storytelling
Now that you have key customer data in-step with killer creative, traffic is your next goal. From a B2C perspective you want to drive sales and growth. In the B2B world you want to demonstrate your expertise and be the go-to authority on key trends and issues. This is where data can be cultivated to exemplify your experience and marketing acumen based on success.
At the end of the day you are working to create affinity and top-of-mind awareness with your brand. One of the best ways to achieve this is through show and tell. You show that you have what consumers want and need based on supporting data that is visually appealing, easily consumable and actionable (strawberry Pop-tarts® are coated with frosting and have multicolored sprinkles). Then engage consumers and encourage them tell you how your product(s) made a difference in their everyday—or in the case of hurricane season, no so everyday—lives.
Need a Partner?
Are you ready to improve your performance on the digital dance floor? Millennium can partner with you to mine your data, gain insight on your customers’ preferences and engagement and develop a creative campaign that connects. Email me at [email protected] or call 877-873-7445.
The New Meaning of the Word “Mentor”
Google the word mentor and you come up with a definition that reads: to advise or train (someone, especially a younger colleague).
Passing on skills and knowledge from seasoned professionals to those who are up and coming is the traditional view of mentoring. That being said, the technology, skills and knowledge necessary for success in business today aren’t intrinsic to most leaders, but they are to the digital natives, also known as Millennials. Want to create a truly dynamic organization where everyone growths together? Ask not only what you can teach, but what you can learn.
Called reverse mentoring, mentoring-up or reciprocal mentoring, the idea is that today’s mentoring isn’t about advising or training someone younger, but learning from one another through collaboration, integration and cooperation up and down the corporate ladder. This is not a new idea, as Beth Ann Kaminkow wrote in her January 2011 article in Advertising Age and it remains true today:
Never before have the diverse generations within the work force had so many unique competencies and strengths to offer each other. We are living in a time when a youthful understanding and comfort level with technology and merging media/devices trumps, in some instances, years of experience and knowledge. Reciprocal mentoring offers a developmental bridge that narrows the divide and eases an organization’s progression through change.
Having your organization take a more holistic approach to mentoring not only helps the bottom line by creating greater alignment with your mission, it also bridges the gap between generations.
4 Ways to Improve the Way You Mentor
As noted by MindTools, an online management and leadership training company, “Baby Boomers, Generation X and Millennials have experienced vastly different social and cultural situations, which has resulted in varied work ethics, mindsets and attitudes.” A holistic approach to mentoring can create mutual understanding through open communication and shared learning, united under one mission over time.
Whether formal or informal, focus in on these four key points to establish or retool your mentoring program:
Open Communication. At its core, mentoring is about communication and connecting more senior level and junior executives face-to-face. While the main focus is on professional growth, you can’t foster that without personal understanding. This includes background, education, passions and goals. Everyone has a story to tell. Listen. It will provide greater insight on where you can connect and grow together.
Shared Learning. Mentoring isn’t about status and power. It is about sharing, not showboating. Senior employees have greater work experience and understanding of organizational culture that is critical intellectual capital. You have to understand where you’ve been in order to know where you are going. At the same time, digitally savvy junior employees can help explain and integrate new technologies to more efficiently achieve operational goals.
Clear Mission. Having a clear mission is critical to the success of any organization. Greater alignment and articulation of that mission can be achieved through mentoring. Mentoring is about cultivating leaders, and true leadership is about cultivating individual strengths to create collective success. As Liz Ryan describes in a recent article for Forbes: “A leader and his or her team have a mission. They all know what the mission is and they know their piece in it. Leaders allow people to design their own jobs as much as possible and to put their own stamp on their jobs.”
Time. Mentoring takes time. A senior employee can’t impart all their experience over a one-hour lunch. And a junior employee is going to quickly realize “older folks” don’t necessarily catch on to the new operating system or digital application in mere seconds. Holistic mentoring is about mutual growth over the long-term, not simply career advancement in the here and now. This should be a relationship that develops over time and builds trust.
As Lee Colon notes in Inc., for your organization to move forward it may need to shift into reverse, and mentor up, not just down. And the ideal mentor may not be inside your organization, it may be outside.
Ready to Mentor Up?
Need more insight on how to technologically advance your marketing and connect your content online? Our digital natives are always up for a chat and willing to share their knowledge and experience. Give us a call at 877-873-7445 or email [email protected].