Marketing – Begin with Intelligence
Like any good business endeavor – marketing starts with intelligence.
"You don’t know what you don’t know." ~ Socrates
"It isn’t what you don’t know that hurts you. It’s what you know that just ain’t so." ~ Mark Twain
What would Mark Twain think about being quoted next to Socrates? The quote by Socrates is really about broadening an investigation to see more sides of an issue before deciding we know what’s going on. The second, by Twain, hints at the hubris that leads us down the wrong road and underscores the need to verify information, especially information we are “sure” about. Being certain of the wrong information often results from looking at a narrow scope of information.
Intelligence gathering is both science and art. If you want good actionable data for digital marketing, your gathering needs to be quantitative. And if you want the people consuming the marketing to be engaged and persuaded, your gathering needs to be qualitative. Do you see the difficulty? Information gathering also needs to provide different things at different marketing stages. Consider how you gather intelligence differently for the different stages of marketing – attracting prospects, converting leads, and retaining customers.
Qualitative vs. quantitative
Consider how you might go about building a house. When making decisions about a house, you have decisions being made from two directions. You have one group, usually the homeowner, making decisions about the general layout, the colors, surface materials, fixtures, and so on. These are, for the most part, qualitative data points. You also have a second group, generally builders and engineers, making decisions about the size of footings needed, the dimensions and spacing of timber in the floors and walls, the type of roof trusses or rafters, the insulation, the weather proofing for the climate, and so on. These are generally quantitative decisions, driven by the requirements for the house. The decisions made by each group affect the decisions made by the other. These decisions require a lot of back and forth, because it’s important that both sides understand each other’s decisions. The engineer needs to know that the owner wants a natural stone wrapped fireplace and chimney, so the floor supports that fireplace.
You face the same thing as a marketer. You work with content creators who gather qualitative information through customer discussions. But their information also needs to be informed by data. The keywords they want to use may not be the keywords people are searching for. By going back and forth between qualitative and quantitative data, you can come to an understanding that will best serve your marketing objectives.
A huge part of this back and forth is first, a common goal and second, communication between teams. The back and forth nature of collecting and considering intelligence can lead to useful and relevant intelligence for both content creation and deployment.
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