How to Improve Your Business’
Marketing Approach
Marketing is about understanding. You need to understand the product, why and how it can be used, and who will be using it. This understanding, however, doesn’t always just come from intuition. Sometimes the most insightful trends are invisible to the human eye.
Improving your business’ marketing approach is about looking at it from new angles. The two best ways to improve your marketing approach are to diversify your workplace to bring in new ideas and new insights and to also use analytics to understand the trends that cannot be seen with the naked eye.
Improve Your Marketing with Data Science
Data science offers so many key benefits to businesses of all kinds – including marketing businesses. On top of database management, data scientists also use analysis techniques and machine learning to extract pattern information and extrapolate key recommendations that can help solve problems in ways that no human ever could normally.
Data scientists can even specialize, often in machine learning & AI, and also in Big Data. Both can help improve any marketing approach. In fact, Big Data can help marketers understand more about their approach, industry, and humanity itself than many businesses have fully realized yet.
Every marketing team could be better with a data scientist on their side, not just because of the trend information they can extract. Large businesses with a marketing department can offer better personalization and optimization simply by bringing in someone with a top online master degree data science under their belt.
Data scientists often work as analysts, business consultants, programming architects, and more. What remains consistent is their ability to gather data, sort data, and extract actionable insight from said data.
This data can be used throughout any business to improve it, including marketing. It may seem strange to quantify a relatively humanities-based field with numbers, but it is the best way to understand exactly the reach of your business and product and also the impact it makes.
The data in question doesn’t end there, however. If your customers allow access to their data, it can also be used to provide personalization and even help your R&D department develop better products or services.
Improve Your Marketing Approach through Diversity
There are so many reasons why you will want to diversify your team. The biggest, most obvious reason? You need new ideas and new insights. It may be easy for you to emotionally put yourself in the shoes of another person, but understanding their struggles, their culture, and their approach to life is something that cannot be assumed.
The best way to serve your customers better is, quite simply, to bring in people from a range of backgrounds. This doesn’t just mean on your team, either. Bringing in a data scientist is part of expanding your team’s diversity. They can offer new insights through data that those with a humanities background could never dream of.
Diversifying your team, of course, doesn’t mean that you will have every viewpoint in the world. Another great way to bring in more insight and new ideas is by learning. First, have your team choose one culture, or one field, to learn about. Then, you can have them take many free courses that will help you understand cultures from beyond your front door.
Why You Need New Insight
A good way to understand why you need these new approaches is to understand a few key concepts of the fourth dimension. First, if you are a 2D character, the third dimension is impossible to conceive. The same applies to us in the third dimension. Look at a 4-dimensional object in a computer mock-up, and it seems to move at random, disappearing and reappearing at random in no discernable way.
This is how we see the world. Some of us may have different points of view, which allows for a more complete picture.
By bringing in more people with new approaches to the same problem, you can actually see a clearer picture.
One of the things that can hold you back is your own team. You need to get everyone used to offer suggestions, even if they are silly or completely unrealistic. You never know when a bad idea will spark a good idea.
Combine the Two
Always combine the two. Data analysis, like any analysis, is key to helping you come up with new ideas and understand in easy terms how your marketing or PR campaign was received. At the same time, you want to do more than just play it safe and do what people expect. You have competition and an attention market to also consider.
Combining the two allows you to play it safe while also taking chances.
Make it Real
Data analysis helps you better understand the real customers and trends. It helps you understand this through charts, reports, and through data sets, yes, but at the end of the day, there is a real person at the end of the data.
Marketing is about reflecting an idealized world. You want to show your product or service as a better option to how people live now, but something that has been taken too far is the ideal. So, you need to dial your efforts back to show real people because showing something that is genuinely obtainable, rather than just a fantasy, will do wonders towards your marketing approach and your results.
Make it Interactive
The world is online and interacting. People can speak directly to brands through social media and can spark viral marketing campaigns instantly. Bring your customers and your audience into your marketing efforts and use data analysis to understand how they approach and engage with your interactive marketing methods.
Marketing is human, and nature is math. Combine the two, have fun, and be interactive, and you will have revolutionized your marketing approach.