Last month I got the chance to go back on Tasty Trade, Bootstrapping in America and talk about digital marketing changes and trends. We shot this quick and fun 3 in 3 segment, where I list the 3 marketing principles critical to businesses today. It’s really important that businesses get these three areas in order. If you want to stay competitive you have to pay attention to customer, data and digital. 

1. Listen to your customers

Everybody talks about it, but you are not listening! I talk to hundreds of business owners every year and a majority of them have only a slight idea of what their customers need. They think they know what the customers are saying, based on messages they receive. But when we ask them what motivates their target audiences, there’s rarely a good answer.

What are your customers into? Are you guessing or do you know because you asked them? You need to get the information from them. It’s a scary proposition – what if they criticise you? But what if they

do anyway, and you don’t know because you didn’t ask?

And ask more. Find out:

• What motivates them – ask, what helps them stay motivated?
• How would you describe us to friends and family?
• What would you miss most if you couldn’t use our product/service?

Also heed the comments they make and questions they ask on social networks. Forums, in particular, are a gem when it comes to learning what your audiences need.

And if you’re wondering what to blog about, just search on industry forums or look on quora to see what people are asking about your industry. Then write articles answering those questions. Show that you’re listening and you’ll get even more useful information from your customers.

2. Build a culture of data-driven marketing

This doesn’t mean endless discussions about ROI. Or only paying attentions to numbers to the detriment of communication. It means allowing data to tell stories and guide marketing.

Look at this as another way to

know your customers’ behaviors.

There are probably 100+ tips on how to build a data-driven culture, but here are just a few essentials to get you started.

Collect and store data

Most companies look for data when someone asks. The rest of the time data remains forgotten. And then the question comes up again and everyone scrambles to find the numbers. The ideal practice is to collect data into one location, a database or even just a spreadsheet. Whether you need it today or not, store the data. Also keep month-end data summaries.

You can download a sample digital marketing analytics dashboard here.

Close the loop

Are your marketers and salespeople tracking data separately and differently? How about customer service? Can you, in one place, graph

your website traffic trends and your offline sales trends?

You need to come up with a standardized way to track data throughout the company. You should be able to close the loop and connect all the dots.

Hire people who can tell stories with data

Hire people who get it and are able to translate data into stories.  Anyone can pluck data out of a system and “report” it. What you want are people who can interpret data. Give them a simple data example and ask them to tell you a story.

Here’s an example: Visitors coming from Facebook spend less than a minute on the website but those coming from Pinterest spend 3 minutes on average. What does that mean?

Watch for the questions they ask, also, not just the answers they give. Are they willing and able to dig further into the situation to come up with a well-informed story?

3. Make digital part of your organization’s DNA

OK, I hope you have a website. Then, make sure your website converts visitors into contacts and/or buyers. And email your contacts regularly (at least once a month). Show the “shop” is open by posting regularly to your social media accounts. If you do these, you’re barely doing the minimum required.

Being digitally-minded goes beyond digital assets.  At every level of the organization it’s important that your leadership and your employees understand how your customers’ worlds work. And it’s a digital world.

Americans spend an average of 4.7 hours a day on their smartphones and check social networks 17 times a day. If you still think that your customers are not online, you’re fooling yourself. Your customers are there, it’s just a matter of finding them.

Here are some things you can do to make your organization more digitally mindful:

Offer training not just policies:

Every organization should offer social media training to all employees. Many companies have social media policies that attempt to limit what the employees do on social networks.

A more effective strategy is to teach employees how to be spokespeople for your organization. Your best marketers are your employees. Encourage them to be online and to share your organization’s news.

Support your employees online:

Offer employees suggested copy for their social media profiles, especially LinkedIn. Host “headshot” days where employees can have professional headshots done. Guide the photo taking process so that the pictures are taken in line with your brand. If your company is into the outdoors, make sure the photos are taken outside. If your environment is casual, the photos should also be casual.

Get the executive team online:

According to a CEO.com report, “61% of CEOs have no social presence whatsoever.” That statistic just blows my mind. It’s reasonable to think that it may not be effective for all CEOs to generate content and interact with customers online. But to not even be there, at least to appear like you exist, is shocking.

Studies have shown that being “social” is seen as an important leadership trait. According to a Weber Shandwick report, “among a list of nine leadership attributes, social CEOs get better grades than unsocial CEOs on eight attributes, and some significantly better.” Additionally, “Social CEOs are much more likely to be seen as good communicators than unsocial CEOs (55% vs. 38%, respectively).”

Kudos to executives who get it! Here are a few I follow:

• Jack Salzwedel, Chairman, CEO & President of American Family Mutual Insurance Company. According to CEO.com Jack is the most active Fortune 500 CEO on Twitter. He also uses LinkedIn Publisher.
• Ram Krishnan, Chief Customer Officer & SVP/General Manager of Global Sales @ PepsiCo, who is active on Twitter and LinkedIn, and uses the LinkedIn publisher. We both share a fascination with Snapchat.
• Mary Barra, Chairman and CEO of GM. Mary also uses LinkedIn Publisher.

Set aside resources for innovation:

Digitally-minded organizations stay on top of trends and are constantly innovating. In fact Chief Innovation Office is becoming an increasingly popular job title.  According to a Gartner survey, “the number of organizations that set aside a discreet innovation budget jumped from 64 percent to 71 percent between 2014 and 2015.  Of those organizations that have innovation budgets, over 90 percent are either assessing, piloting or actively using technologies such as Internet of Things, real-time social listening tools, marketing analytics and digital marketing hubs.”

What are your top marketing considerations for this day and age?