The 8 “SIMPLE” questions every data-driven Brand Marketer or Product Manager needs to ask themselves about their strategy in order to build proper tactics.  When it comes to digital marketing & strategy – the best flashlight is a well-formed question. Below are a few “simple questions” that cross both product and business applicability to help you achieve your goals.

1. Who are you talking to?

Create buyer personas so that you understand WHO they are.  Don’t forget that you will most likely have more than 1 persona.

2. What role does your company and its products play in the customer’s life?

Create Customer Journey Maps to understand WHY your customer needs your brand or product.  Do they need a ¼” drill or do they really need a ¼” hole and the drill is the tool?

3. What do you already know about the customer that can help you better serve them?

Research – Look around your organization. Do you have data about your customers already? Just a simple list of customer zip/postcodes can tell you a lot.  Are you currently spending your time and money marketing to the wrong geo or are your marketing messages speaking in the right voice?  Even simple zip code analysis can help you learn more about your customer.  Imagine what else you could learn if you have other data sources already in your company.

4. How does our marketing material/content reinforce the role you play in their life?

Be relevant – if you understand their persona and you understand their journey to you.  Then create your marketing materials and consumer content based on those findings.  Marketing and Advertising are not intrusive – if they are relevant to the needs and journey of your customers.

5. What else can you show them?

Create contextual content based on their Purchase Funnel Stage. Understand #4 above and the journey that they take to purchase from you that you learn in question #2 – then apply the needs of the consumer at different levels on their journey to create content that is relevant to their needs at that stage.  Meet your customer where they are so that you can lead them where they want to go anyway.

6. What did others like them do in the past?

Simple: Test & Measure.  As you do you will gain insights that will help you in refining both your strategy and your tactics.  Especially when you get to #8 below.

7. What did they actually do?

Rinse & Repeat  – Test & measure… Rinse & Repeat  – Test & measure…

Rinse & Repeat  – Test & measure… Rinse & Repeat  – Test & measure…

8. What are they likely to do next?

Use all of the above data and find a data scientist to create a predictive model that will help you predict some next steps, (or reach out to us and we can help you using our Advanced Analytics Engine).

Look at the data, use it to confirm or deny some initiatives – but don’t forget to try a few hunches along the way. To innovate you must also trust yourself.  If you are learning from your customers then insights will come.  Don’t ignore your “gut”.  Just don’t rely upon it alone.  Test your hypothesis by going back to #1 above and following on down, but on a smaller scale before you roll it out on a larger scale.  Better to test & learn than crash and burn.

You can contact us if you have any questions.