You will custom email messages (personalization
on steroids), website callouts and adverts, and
content served to them via any digital or physical
medium to point them directly at the next action
you want them to take. One foot in front of the other
and soon they will be… you get it.
You can also see the strength of the relationship and
the potential of the associated target market. Marketers use this relationship to uncover pockets of
consumers who will be easier targets—and more
easily molded to think the way you want them to.
This is the technique I call associative marketing.
Personalization is a very simple form of this approach. Sophisticated companies use every aspect
of their company and all of its resources (not just
marketing) to convince consumers to behave the
way they want them to. This is the driving force
behind the need to incorporate SMEs from other
areas of your organization into digital marketing.
Sometimes customer service is perfectly positioned
to prompt the next desired action; sometimes it
takes deeper content from operations, an engineer
or product designer to convince a prospect to take
that next step.
Chances are your company is using some of these
individual techniques or analysis right now. And
chances are you aren’t combining them the way
today’s best companies are. But doing so isn’t as
challenging as it seems. Start small. Identify the
perfect customer for one specific product, or one
specific application of your product. Then identify
a small groups of like consumers and compare the
interactions your company has had with them to the
interactions you had with that perfect customer. You
can do this in excel but I prefer to do it on a
whiteboard with people who are learning it for the
first time because it will then allow you to tie specific
pieces of marketing material—advertisements, web
pages, videos, social posts, etc.—directly to the
journey so that you can gauge their effectiveness and
revise them to be more effective at driving
consumers towards the next step (most marketing
pieces are designed for general purposes and lack
focus on a specific, actionable next step—you will
need to add that to them). From here you can take
an external view and see how you can leverage
individual aspects of the journey to connect with
other groups of consumers who share similar
interest, building content that will interest them and
start them on this new journey with your company.
Taxonomy Analysis: You can now identify who is
perfect and measure new consumers against that
perfect profile, and you can force consumers to
follow the perfect pattern that will generate high
value customers. But, you will feel you aren’t very
effective. This is because it is easier to convince
consumers with an immediate need that your
company can satisfy to become a perfect customer
than someone who has an interest, but no immediate
need. This is done using a taxonomy analysis.
A taxonomy classifies things into like categories
and shows the relationship between them. It is the
market facing version of a like-kind analysis, and
shows how groups think about topics and how they
related them to each another. It is created by measuring statistical distances, averages and deviations. Fortunately the complex math has already
been done by companies such as eContext
(www.econtext.com). Using their taxonomy you
can see the relationship between your product and
services, and general topics that range from competitive products, vendors, interests, activities or
even topical news stories.
5 Strictly Marketing Magazine September/October 2014
To view this process in action visit
www.bigsocialmobile.com/strictlymarketing. It will
be a good prep for the next edition where we’ll go
deeper into journey mapping and how it ties out to
both the physical and digital actions your
organization is taking so that you can identify and
use real triggers to alert you when a consumer is
vulnerable to your marketing manipulations.
David Giannetto is the Author of Big Social Mobile. Visit
his site at http://www.giannetto.com