Creative Marketing: How Data Helps You Ask Your Customers to Tango

“The price of light is less than the cost of darkness.”
-Arthur C. Nielsen, Market Researcher & Founder of ACNielsen

So, you know nothing about the TANGO, and may ask "what does dancing have to do with customer acquisition?"  

The answer is:  everything.   

Whether you know it or not, you are involved in a long, intricate dance with every customer prospect you’ve never met.  They are checking out your moves on your website and they’re wondering if you’re going to step on their feet or if you’re going to float them across the floor like a regular Fred Astaire.  But if you don’t see them noticing you from the punch table, how are you ever going to sweep them off their feet?

 Not sold yet?  Let’s explore some statistics (conveniently provided by HubSpot)

• 131 billion searches are conducted per month worldwide on the web (Interconnected World: Shopping and Personal Finance, 2012)
• 70% of the links search users click on are organic, not paid (Marketing Sherpa, February 2007)
• Jeff Ernst of Forrester Research, Inc., estimates that only about 5% of marketers use a full-featured marketing automation solution (Forrester Research)
• 79% of marketing leads never convert into sales. Lack of lead nurturing is the common cause of this poor performance. (MarketingSherpa) 

That last statistic should scare you.  It scares me.  Do you know why we can’t seal the deal?  It’s one of the same reasons why we’re not asking our customers to dance:  we don’t know the first thing about who they are or what they need.  We don’t know that they’re looking over to us just HOPING that someone will ask them to dance. 

One of the first things you need to do (right now) as a marketer is to go ahead and purchase some marketing automation software.  Go ahead, I’ll wait.   What’s that?  It’s too expensive?  Look at the quote at the top of this blog post and then let’s talk again.  The beginning of a truly creative marketing campaign starts with data.  It begins with knowing what your customers are looking at on your site.  Where do they spend their time?  What are they clicking on?   You need to start analyzing their behaviors. 

Find out everything you can about your prospects.  How old are they?  How many kids do they have?   What do they worry about in the middle of the night? 

Explore.  Ask.  Compile.  Analyze. 

And what do we after spending our nights pouring over data?  Well, that’s simple:  we ask them to dance.

So what? 

Statistics are boring, right?  No.  Statistics give us solid evidence of what’s happening in our worlds and in our customer’s heads.  Data.  Data.  Data.  But here’s the kicker:  you have to USE the data you collect.  Stay tuned.