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 Lfanaras@mill.agency or call 877-873-7445.