Author|Michael Farmer
Source: www.mediavillage.com, February 2022
Do you have the bandwidth for digital and social? That’s so simp. Meta is the latest thumb-stop. You know Meta, right? It’s the thing itself. It’s seeing the thing from a higher perspective instead of from within the thing. It’s like transparency — self-internally clear because the finite space has a countably infinite number of liminal layers. But you already know this.
I’m faking buzzword proficiency. I confess to my ignorance about whether integrated marketing works and whether it can really drive brand growth. I’m always on the outlook for experts who claim to have this understanding.
Recently, I discovered a marketing consulting firm that (according to its website) helps clients achieve sustainable growth by transforming their marketing practices. Eureka!
I hastened to contact them to set up a Zoom meeting. I wanted to learn more about what they do. Here, in part, is what they told me in a recorded conversation. I hope it helps you as much as it helped me.
Michael Farmer: I read about your practice on your website, and we set up this Zoom so I could learn what you do and how you go about it.
Consultant 1: The end result is content, right? So, we try to understand basically swim lanes for a customer as they go in any segment based of higher order needs that then go into a solution set. So, we start to understand that piece of the journey.
Michael Farmer: I don’t understand that. What does that mean?
Consultant 2: Think about a cluster analysis, right? I think one of the challenges we see in organizations today is that people hear the word personalization. They hear “centralize the conversation around the customer,” and then their mind starts to go berserk, right? We have enterprise and mid-market and SMB, and these are the industries we go after. And before you know it, you’re multiplying numbers together. And the idea of having personalized conversations with a customer seems overwhelming, right? But we go through and do a cluster analysis to look at common themes that we can bubble up because there are things regardless of the differences in all these different variables — there are commonalities at each key stage of a buying journey of things that people need to accomplish.
Consultant 2 (continuing): They need to understand, feel comfortable moving through that buying process. And that’s the cluster analysis that we do to develop what we call these conversation tracks which are just common threads of issues and conversations that we can have — value-based conversations across that buying journey that we can have with groups of buyers — that are really based on two-way conversations and bringing more value and really understanding what they need. Does that make sense?
Michael Farmer: No. I’ve heard swim lanes, bubble up, journeys, conversation. What do you do?
Photo credit: Trevor Hoey, The New Yorker, The Cartoon Bank. With permission
