It is one pattern for each meaningful, tangible
outcome you are trying to achieve. Identifying the
outcome you are seeking for each product, service,
division, sales unit or other meaningful
segmentation of the business will allow you to
identify the perfect customer and therefore the
profitable pattern that you should seek to mold
customers to. This sounds reasonable; this sounds
logical; the difference it actually works with today’s
social consumers.
The Take Away, or what do I do now?
Adopting this mindset and approach isn’t hard, but
it’s impossible without a process—a process that
takes you deep into how you identify that perfect
customer, the perfect pattern and then how you
mold other consumers to it. I’ll cover that in the next
installment of this column. In the meantime there
are a few things you can do.
First, understand that this isn’t personalization. It
almost flies in the face of personalization because
future marketing is about telling them what they
need to hear (so that they make the decision that you
want them to make) versus what they want to hear
(which is the mentality behind personalization in
most companies). Most people wrap their head
around future marketing more quickly when they
think of it as a sales technique instead of what we
typically think of as marketing. So look at your
approach through an honest lens and ask yourself
if you are controlling consumer impression and
response or just doing more “me too” content
marketing.
Second, there is a blend of the old and new that does
work. American car companies have done a good
job at this. They include hashtags and other triggers
within their traditional marketing that allows
consumers to immediately interact with them. What
makes this work is that these companies understand
and have created a process that allows them to
uniquely identify every consumer that they touch
through this medium.
They then put them through the process I’ll explain
in the next edition of this column (see Big Social
Mobile for a deeper case study on the automobile
industry).
Lastly, many companies can’t even identify their
most profitable customer. Individual customer
profitability is the top of the data food chain and
most executives aren’t eating healthy. But don’t let
this stop you for now. Identify your highest revenue
customer, the one that converted the quickest, had
the highest market basket or bought the best
combination of products and services which you
believe to be most profitable. The important thing
to do is adopt the new mindset and reexamine your
marketing efforts.
I’ll be with you again in two months. If you could
identify the perfect customer for each meaningful
segment of your business and get a good sense of
each individual interaction you had with them from
first touch to last, between now and then, you’ll be
in a good position to pick it up where we are now
leaving off.
David F. Giannetto helps organizations leverage technology—
providing both the technical and business insight necessary to
create, understand and utilize it to improve performance. He
is SVP of Services at Astea
International, the leader in
service management and
mobile workforce technology.
He is author of Big Social
Mobile: How Digital Initiatives
can Reshape the Enterprise
and Create Business Value
(Palgrave Macmillan 2014),
the first enterprise-level
methodology
that
helps
organizations integrate social
media, mobile technology and
big data into their core people,
processes,
technology,
information and strategy to
create tangible improvements in revenue and profit. Visit his
site at www.giannetto.com
Strictly Marketing Magazine March/April 2016
17