For marketers who walk the walk

We all have a fascination with pictures. After all, they tell a thousand words or in the Sun’s case maybe a few less. But has our use of imagery overshadowed the real basis of business communication – namely our customer data? Can we get away with just using high impact visuals or are we becoming numb to the brain-draining dearth of images and messages that assault our limited mental storage capacity?The speed of software development and the capability to create mind-blowing imagery is certainly staggering. Such is the progress of digital techniques the boundary between reality and the imaginary is fuzzy at best and undecipherable at worst. Photographs in magazines are transformed to such an extent that we can no longer trust that what we are seeing is a true reflection of the subject matter anymore. Nevertheless, we continue to be duped and put up and succumb to brand and celebrity associations. In the commercial world we spend hard earned cash to stimulate our customer’s imaginations and should consider the importance of the balance between the visual and tangible. Let’s take a look at what I believe both bring to the table (being visual here!).
So much for consumer leisure advertising but what about business to business – what is more important, the creative in your message or your message in the creative? Please excuse my rhetorical point, as we all know that business marketing propositions would be best served with a slice of both message accuracy and eye popping, jaw dropping creative – subject to it being legal and moral. Sadly, this isn’t my experience and the marriage of the two rarely gets as far as the church steps, let alone a harmonious marriage. This is a missed opportunity because we need to engage creativity in business from both a visual creative and targeted data perspective to prompt an attention grabbing response from our customers and prospects when they receive our communication. There are always exceptions and we are all familiar with the relatively new concept of viral marketing which frequently taps into the voyeuristic tendencies of the human psyche. But in this technique you just let your message loose and have little control over who will be looking at your text, images, video or listening to audio footage. This can certainly be fun and can be immensely powerful but conversely, can’t generally be relied on. To attain some certainty in our business to business communications strategy we need to deal with what we know and what we have gathered – that is powerful business intelligence – in order to assert control over business destiny. Only then can we understand what our creative represents and how effective it is likely to be in prompting positive responses.
What does this mean to the layman (or woman) or seasoned professional marketer? If I can put it this way – sometimes you need to step back to move forward. And businesses will be positioned at various points along a spectrum of data awareness. The first and most important action is to learn as much as you can about your customers first, foremost and last. I can’t emphasise this point strongly enough and also the realisation that this is a never ending dynamic process, a way of commercial life. Data collection forms the basis of any focused business looking to optimise performance and differentiate its brand. A good starting point is to engage with a company that can gather your data together by a process of data aggregation from both online and offline sources. This will ultimately help you to achieve a single customer view which can then be matched against a much larger ‘reference’ database that can fill in any important gaps of information that may enrich your customer understanding further. Updates can then be obtained on a regular basis to maintain the integrity of your customer database.
The next step involves segmenting the customers you have so that you can address them in a targeted and personalised fashion. What we are looking for here is to identify where you should be spending your time, effort and money in working with the most profitable customers. And this might mean you choose to lose a few in the process! But don’t worry, this will save you time, money and resource in the long term. Finally, we may now be in a position to undertake customer engagement mapping which will help you to determine which strategies to adopt for the markets and customers you work with. This creates resonance with those customers you develop a true affinity with, boosting relationships and sales, reducing expenditure and developing loyalty. Now you are empowered with all this data intelligence you can be sure that your communications with your customer will be focused, personalised and appropriate – nothing more than your customers would like to expect! This list of benefits is endless.
Now to the creative – I hadn’t forgotten. And I don’t diminish the importance of getting the image and visual message right. For me it’s the icing on the cake – the essential element that ties the whole communication together. If thought through it should immediately help the recipient to make sense of the message a millisecond after it’s viewed. So, when we talk about the need to be creative this should encompass a complete proposition, intelligently thought through and underpinned by a dynamic data strategy. Imagery is great but it’s no substitute for knowing your customers.

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