Data-inspired creativity drives marketing certainty
Traditionally, media advertisers followed a model that suggested the consumer journey was a linear process, beginning with awareness and ending with action. Creating awareness was largely a mass media effort, pushing messages to a passive audience. Today, marketing executives need to have a solid understanding of how to create customer-catalyzed growth as attention splinters from content saturation delivered across a rapidly growing and fragmented landscape of delivery platforms. Achieving success requires unique strategies to break through, connect, and engage consumers in the “Attention Economy.”
At SweetScience, we treat consumer attention as a resource; a scarce resource that is in their control to be allocated. The modern consumer journey is completely asymmetrical and more personalized than ever so the breakthrough can happen almost anywhere at any time. This makes the where and the how of capturing consumer attention even more difficult.
I founded SweetScience upon the very notion of data-informed creativity – melding imagination with science. We identify and mine disparate signals into a proprietary intelligence that guide strategies to win in the Attention Economy. By blending analytics into strategy and creative design, we have the opportunity to eliminate chaos from overexposure. We call it, “The Science of Certainty.”
While the marketing strategy for every brand is specific to its unique challenges, there are a few general guidelines for improving campaign performance in the Attention Economy:
Work at the speed of ‘NOW’
Eyes and ears are in microchannels and become more micro every year. Market opportunities are here today and gone tomorrow. The speed of NOW is a strategic approach to messaging and branded content creation, production, and distribution that is dependent upon high volume, high frequency, hyperconnected execution that moves the campaign with markets in real-time. The greatest return on investment is derived from prolific and efficient content generation-based on the unique best practices of each channel or platform while aggressively monitoring, measuring, and optimizing performance at the content unit level in real-time.
Target personas, not demographics
The pathway to engaging prospects and converting them to customers is through deeper audience understanding and insights. We build upon traditional target audience definitions, usually based on demographics only, to unlock the potential of these audiences by creating richer, more textural audience personas through psychographic, ethnographic, and firmographic analysis.
Our personas enable us to understand:
How consumers think, feel, and act
Their motivations, dreams, and fears
Their relationship with technology
Their interactions with others through social media and personally.
Their association with brand
Their purchasing behavior
Time must be invested to uncover the true motivations that drive need, spark interest, influence decisions, and stimulate action.
Reduce risk through predictive modeling
While advancements in data analytics tools should be making campaigns more effective than ever, channel fragmentation, rapidly changing market dynamics, and “speed to message” is actually introducing more risk for marketers. SweetScience is a technology-forward, data-centric agency that is creating business for challenger brands because we’re more creatively inspired in all disciplines through better audience and market insights while being more accountable to campaign performance outcomes. It’s an agency where “Mad Men” meets “Moneyball.”
Building this capability required the visioning and development of new data mining platforms and analytics dashboards, powered by talent with expertise in data analysis, eCommerce and social commerce, activation marketing, and a passionate entrepreneurial desire to create something new. At a practical level, our tools and methods allow us to identify where the high-engagement, high-return elements of the campaign exist before investing client resources and budget in a full campaign rollout.
The Result: A better return on relationship, insight, and investment
“The Science of Certainty” is rooted in goals-based resource allocation to optimize return on investment over time. With agility, more sophisticated audience profiling and targeting, and predictive modeling, we can mitigate the negative effects of the ‘attention economy’ phenomenon. Our mission is to provide marketers with measurable results that over-index against the national averages on all dimensions.
It's how we grew a single addiction recovery center in Chicago into 18 facilities across five states in two years. It’s how we generated $12 million in sales for a new medical device in the first year following the launch. And it’s how we enrolled 26,000 new members in a car-sharing program for a national rental car company in less than eight months.
If your marketing team isn’t considering how to ‘manage attention’ and is only focused on messaging, creative concepts, and soft performance measurements, then you should reconsider your marketing partnerships. I believe our “Science of Certainty” philosophy is purpose-built to remove many of the risks clients often associate with marketing spend, and solves the most complex marketing challenges while delivering big results.
Contact us to future-proof for the data-defined decade ahead.
Tom is the founder and CEO of SweetScience Marketing – a full-service marketing agency based in Philadelphia with offices in NY, D.C. and Austin, TX.
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