With Reducing budgets and a fragmented market place corporations have to look at innovative mechanisms to undertake marketing. The old formula of running million dollar ad but vague outcomes to justify this investment for is no longer feasible.
But how exactly to undertake marketing in this changed paradigm marketing which gives definitive outcomes.
Undertaking this is neither to tough nor too easy. Imagine running a super bowl ad for would be mothers; what do you think the outcome of this advertisement would be, we might end up spending millions of dollars but why little positive outcomes to show.
On the other hand I remember a very controversial mechanism adopted by Target where they reached out to a teenager based on her customers spend patterns. To me this is one of the most innovative approaches of marketing though not condoning the mechanism to undertake this.
If we look at why corporations like Facebook and Google have been offer there services free of cost, we would realize the importance of data. Facebook has 800 pages of data per user and as some analyst now say data is now the new currency.
Consumer data can help corporations come to decisions which would have been very tough to answer.
How do we translate these above facts in to lean marketing. One of the first questions to answer is how well do we know our customers and how much data do we have about them.
For example; corporations know there most profitable customers, they know the cost that it took for them to acquire these customers, but do they really know that even while enjoying the most close relationship why does there client continue to work with there competitors.
Corporations run surveys and ask questions like-
a) Would you have ordered more if it included free shipping.
b) Did you get the information that you were looking for.
c) What was the purpose of your visiting our site today.
d) How was your customer support experience.
But even while running these surveys corporations are unable to truly identify there cusotmer journeys. This becomes a much more complicated task when they start building there user personas in a B2B environment.
While doing win/loss reviews in a B2B scenario questions some questions that can be asked are-
a) Which aspect of our competitors product service was superior?
b) What would we have done differently to enable buying from us?
c) How was your overall engagement experience during the whole process?
But with ever increasing buying cycle and multiple stakeholders involved in the buying process even these questions might not be helpful. To successfully engage with prospects creating buyer personas is important. For example if a corporation is into selling selling compliance software to finance executive, they should have an exact idea of the buyer profile. If this software is a SAAS product which requires minimal investment then a mid ranking finance executive who is responsible for audit process could be an ideal person to target.
On deciding the target, its equally important to design the outreach mechanism. Make the cost of customer acquisition too high and you might never make a profit and wrong targeting mechanism might lead to a lost opportunity.
