One of the things I love about marketing now is that it’s analytical. Conducting research is faster and easier. You can track, monitor and measure almost anything. Data can be recorded, processed and interpreted in a blink of an eye.
For me, the whole reason for investing time and money in analytics is to improve your business offering and optimise your service or product, so that it provides your customer or client with what they truly need.
However, analytics for a business is just part of getting to know your customer. Nothing is better than investing time in getting to know the person behind a business – either by meeting face to face, speaking on the ‘phone, or through Skype/Zoom, if distance is a problem.
In the words of Peter Drucker, “The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.”
When I recruited a new manager for the magazine side of our business in 2012, we spent many hours discussing customer profiles – their likes/dislikes, their favourite methods of communicating, their personalities etc as part of the training/onboarding process.
Several years later, my manager told me that, whilst initially she had not understood why this was important, over time she had come to realise that those hours spent had proved to be the most helpful.
Marketing and our own business have since developed in ways that we couldn’t have imagined 7 years ago, but we still try to spend time to get to know our customers and clients today. When everyone is so busy this is not always easy, but making time for people, asking questions and really trying to help them remains at the core of our businesses.
