A Few General Principles and Guidelines....

As follow-up to Thursday's post, I wanted to offer a few general principals and guidelines for improving your "numbers-based" marketing.

1. Make desktop delivery of key reports automatic. This includes sales reports, online traffic logs, customer service/inquiry reports, and others. It may take some time and tinkering to find the best set of indicators and formats for your business—but keep at it. Regular, automated reports are a guard against the all-too-easy tendency to forget or put off viewing the numbers in the course of our busy week. Also, invite the person who creates your reports (or yourself) to occasionally throw in a wild-card report to keep the view fresh and see what turns up.
2. Look for trends. Let me use an analogy: Let's say your company, like many others, is swimming in sales and customer data. You have an ocean of information. Without the proper focus, this can be overwhelming. Your goal in numbers-based marketing is to find the currents. You are looking for the currents in this ocean—where and how the energy is moving things, the flow. Otherwise, you'll end up just seeing this big vast ocean that is incomprehensible. So currents (meaning trends) are what you're after—not what one fish or piece of drift wood does (the minutia). Applying this analogy, don't be too concerned with what a single product did within a certain group or market segment—look for how a series, theme, or type did. Or perhaps products that serve "X" need or fulfill "Y" brand attribute. This is particularly true in an industry like publishing, where so many factors must converge to create a successful book: theme, author, cover, timing, content, packaging, and promotion & distribution (or lack of). It’s very complex and rarely an apples-to-apples comparison when looking at a single product and trying to reproduce that generally. So don’t spend too much time looking on the details: look for currents and trends.
3. Test. This one's pretty simple: try some stuff on limited scale. Track results. Assess the effectiveness. Seems like a no-brainer, right? But it's surprising to find how little testing is actually done in marketing departments. Usually this is because marketers feel they can barely cover their bases and get their "regular work" done. But testing is a leading method for identifying successful new ways to reach and woo your audience, for making you more productive, and can greatly reduce waste (including some of that "regular work" of yours).
4. Survey. None of us are an expert—not a consultant like myself, not the guy in the corner office, not the employee that has been doing their job for three decades. The customer is the expert. So talk to them. And I don't mean just anecdotally at a conference, exhibit, or in-store function. Survey your customers in a quantifiable way that will yield data on customer mindset and behavior. Today there are many very reasonably-priced online market research options that bring down what was once a cost barrier for some companies.
5. Do #1-4 regularly.
6. Discuss findings as a team at least 2x a year. Thoughtful discussion within your team is where the rubber hits the road in numbers-based marketing. Sales data is customer behavior on paper. It reveals what actually happened and who your customer is from an action-oriented viewpoint. Market research can reveal your customer mindset. This is information is too good to keep all to yourself. Discuss this together as regularly as you can, but at least do this Monday-morning quarterbacking twice a year.
7. Involve product development. Your discussion of the data, the questions it raises, and your meaningful findings should involve your business's new product development department (be that called Editorial, Product Acquisition, R&D, or what have you at your company). Marketing that does not work collaboratively with its developmental counterparts fails in a core responsibility to adequately represent the voice of the customer to the company and advocate for customer needs. Conversely, strong interdepartmental discussion of and collaboration over your sales history and market research is what enables a company to PUT TO USE its customer insight. Resulting daily actions and decisions are what make a company truly customer-centric.