How do we Market you ask? (Data, Customers & Performance)

A marketing strategy is only as effective as the connections you make between what you measure, who you serve, and the results you achieve. As Kotler & Keller wrote in Marketing Management, marketing should begin with customer insights, and a marketing strategy should conclude with some kind of performance outcome. When we combine this concept with an execution framework such as the 12-Week Year, marketers can shorten the time between insights and results and thus refining their strategy and approach significantly more quickly and effectively.

Data → Customers

Data is a lot more than just dashboards; data is essentially the raw material for understanding consumer behavior. Marketers can adopt various methodologies such as segmentation, surveys, or journey mapping to understand what people want, when they want it, and how they go about making decisions.

Customers → Performance

When customer insight is clear, the customer experience becomes the new variable in a marketer's performance. Brands offer stronger levels of customer loyalty and customer conversion when they personalize content, streamline touchpoints or create customer experiences that resonate with their core motivations.

Performance → Data

Performance measures provide clarity as to whether strategies are effective. ROI, conversion rates, and customer lifetime value measures provide feedback that feeds back into the data. Performance data is used not just to determine if the strategy was effective, but to develop metrics that ensure campaigns evolved rather than simply made the same mistakes. If and when marketers successfully combine each of the three cyclical connections, they build a loop of legitimate feedback, namely; data drives strategy, customers drive execution, and performance measures performance. It is a useful cycle because marketing can become far more than just creative, it can become accountable, measurable and scalable over time.