The Forgotten Role of the ‘Marketer’
Much of what we do in data and analytics and general digital marketing can seem complicated and difficult to understand or relate to. To explain the value of our offer, we must first conceptually push past the fancy titles and complicated jargon and remember what we actually do.
To do this, I use examples and frameworks we’re all familiar with and bring what we’re trying to achieve in a digital space back to the real world. An example I’ve used for years is the market stall, the grandfather of all marketing and the seed of everything we do today. That may be the first time you’ve connected marketing with markets.
Current data, analytics, and growth marketing are about achieving a human conversation at scale. We’re trying to recreate the innate customer experience of a human talking to another human about the products we sell and the price, and offering additional incentives such as promotions to buy now. In this analogy, the place is taken care of as we’re in a market. Does anyone remember the 4 P’s from school?
I’m originally from the UK, and I spent a fair amount of time selling at real markets and car boot sales. My first job at ten was helping my dad cash in on the gold rush of Beanie Babies and Pokémon cards. Back then, a Charizard went for £100. Today they cost up to £1500, and old Beanie Babies aren’t worth much more than a bag of flour.
If you are British, you’ll be familiar with your typical cockney fruit and vegetable stallholder shouting loudly about 2 kilos of bananas for two quid (£2). They start off loud and impersonal to drive awareness and bring in customers. At the stall, they start up a conversation about the weather, but being a local, quickly jump into asking about how so-and-so is doing while adding the cheap bananas, a few extras and the weekly usual repeat purchases to the bag.
For the last ten years, I’ve lived in New Zealand, and this year I had a uniquely Kiwi experience in a market down the road from me. Still, for fun, I’ll explain it in language and terminology we typically use online and professionally. I walked into a market unwittingly without interest in buying anything and left a pleased customer. Here is how it went. Just like our Wickes example, we’ll start building a profile.
Market Stall – Selling Potted Plants for Home
Exiting Customer Attributes -
Customer status: Potential New Customer
Name: Unknown
Age: 30–40 (assumed)
Interests: Likes craft beer (wearing local Epic Brewery T-shirt)
Purchase stage: Awareness
This is how much you currently know about me in your CRM system or database, or perhaps this is stored as a segment or audience in Facebook or AdWords.
So, let’s follow the interaction as I pass through the simple AIDA model.
Awareness Stage -
Seller’s content - Hey, you like craft beer, aye?
My response - Yeah, Epic is my favourite.
Interest Stage -
Seller’s content - Ever done any brewing? Begins to reveal a mysterious and intriguing plant.
My response - No, but I’d like to.
Content - I brew all the time. Look at this; it’s an actual hop plant.
Desire Stage -
Seller’s content - More interesting information about brewing with real hops and growing hop plants.
My response - Do you take cards?
It didn’t take much to sell me here. I like beer, and I like mysterious beer-smelling plants. At some point, I could imagine myself as a backyard brewer.
Action Stage -
Seller’s content - Buy now offer. No, I don’t, but there is a cash machine around the corner, and I’ll take $10 instead of $12 for easy change.
Now you know he’s good. I have a reason to go now and get the money, not put it off till later and then forget.
Post Purchase -
Seller’s content - I’ll be here next week with different hop varieties. What’s your name? Here’s my card. The card has a website, and the website has a mailing list.
What I thought was just an offline experience has now become online, and he’s allowed me to become a loyal repeat customer.
UPDATED Customer Attributes -
Customer status: Current customer
Name: Mark
Age: 30–40
Interests: Craft beer, Hop plants.
NEW - Products: Hop plant.
NEW - Payment: Cash - Card preference
NEW - CLV: $10
NEW- Location: Local
NEW Audience List:
Local beer and hop lover.
New customer.
In this interaction, I genuinely enjoyed the experience. I was happy to exchange my information for a better customer experience and the passionate and insightful knowledge I received in the transaction. I was not the typical target market (at least, I didn’t think so). Still, I have become a converted customer with a client lifetime value that I’m sure will steadily trickle up until I’m told I can’t buy any more hop plants (because they take up too much room).
Different attributes are built over the customer’s journey and lifetime to tailor personalised offers and content to specific audiences and to ensure the right message – at the right time or at least the best possible guess.
It’s hoped that one day, brands will be able to emulate this natural, free flow of communication completely; that’s what could be coming as part of Facebook’s Metaverse instead of banana-mad billboard holders chasing you around. AI companies right now are working on bots intelligent enough to make you think they are your friend and then slowly introduce product mentions and encourage you to buy them. Skynet will not enslave the human race; it will convince us to purchase convertibles instead.
For now, we should set out with these types of valuable interactions and customer journeys in mind – working, where possible, to blur the lines between offline and online across our customer touchpoints and overall customer journey.
A Jack-of-All-Trades and Master of None
Apart from my stint in the markets, I got into marketing and advertising after university, studying Business and specialising in Marketing. It seemed like a path I was destined to go down, and of course, like most potential marketers, I was excited by big branding campaigns and stories featured on Madmen – the promise of big pitches, parties, and media lunches. By the time I got into marketing, the party seemed to have moved on or was moving on, or perhaps I just wasn’t invited. A new type of marketer was crawling out from under the tables. Digital gave rise to social media, performance, and the completely mysterious search engine optimisers (SEOs) with their black and white hats. The point is that as media and marketing channels began expanding, so did the number of potential specialisations and potential hats a marketer could be expected to wear.
In digital, our challenge is compounded by the number of tools forever expanding into the market. At least with web analytics, things have been more or less contained with Google Analytics. Still, a marketing manager could be expected to know web analytics, user experience, update the website using a CMS, optimise tags for search engines, create and manage ads on Facebook and AdWords, and keep the socials moving on Instagram and Twitter. At the same time, they should set experiments in optimising tools while creating dashboards in Data Studio and all the traditional marketing functions and activities. The list of what you could or should be doing is endless, and I genuinely sympathise with business owners and marketing managers.
There is an endless stream of things that need to be done. Gone are the days of media lunches – we have work to do, and our bosses and clients expect solid, provable ROI, sales, and conversions. Of course, all this change and growth has brought tremendous opportunities, even if we struggle to keep up and often feel like a jack-of-all-trades and master of none.
As we progress through the Analytics Maturity Curve, we can feel like we don’t have time to write measurement plans and maintain our analytics. It can mean we don’t have the knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs) to do the job. As we progress through, the types of KSAs required continue to expand, and often, so does the team. We’ll cover precisely who and what KSAs might be needed in Chapter 10 – Who is Missing.
