Heads or Tails? In Marketing, we need to make many choices. Which ones do you make?

[Former Member]

Wednesday evening 19.46h. Just finished dinner. My 9-year-old daughter came to me asking for my wallet. If my 16-year-old son asked this, I would be more suspicious…but this time I felt quite comfortable.

She took my wallet and grabbed a coin. “Daddy? Heads or tails?” I chose wrong but she was kind enough to give me another chance…



The conversation continued and she asked me: “Why do you like your job in marketing so much?” The answer was simple. It all falls back to the two sides of this coin.

The everlasting challenge to choose between heads or tails makes me passionate about marketing and communication! Especially because it’s never this black and white. You constantly need to make decisions based upon a mix of data insights, experience and gut feeling.

Sharing 5 dimensions of the coin:

1:1 versus 1:N
Let me start with one of my favorite topics: the ‘segment of one’. As marketers, we always aim to create an exciting customer experience in every interaction across the digital marketing channels. Personalization is the key to accomplish this 1:1 interaction, while on the other hand we need to reach a wider audience with 1:N instruments. If you can combine the two, you will win.

LOCAL versus GLOBAL
Local effectiveness versus global scalability. Whereas ROMI is not always easy to calculate, we know that relevant messaging increases if you are closer to the audience. But is it worthwhile to reinvent the wheel? Or invest heavily in localization? Test, measure & decide!

WORDS versus VISUALS
Critical information overload. We all know that feeling. The sheer volume of e-mails, the unstoppable amount of content being produced. That’s why visualization is so powerful. Infographics show data in a consumable format. And as we know, also 1 photo can tell more than 1000 words…

STRATEGY versus EXECUTION
Most marketers love ‘out of the box’ strategies & concepts. But no award has been won with just a big idea. The power of bringing it to execution goes hand in hand with this. Unlike the chicken and egg discussion, I favor innovative ideas. The ones that make you smile. The ones that create a nice stickiness effect.

MARKETING versus SALES
Do you coincidently have some spare golf balls? Can you organize a round table in two weeks? All marketers receive these questions from sales colleagues…With the right benchmark data marketers can advise which instruments to choose and show the related impact in Awareness, Demand Generation or Pipeline Acceleration. Above all, we should secure a close connection between both teams to run better together!  

Throw your coin!
What is your perspective? Do you dare to take the challenge and add your Head & Tail? I wonder how many dimensions we have in marketing. Enough to enter the Guinness book of records with 100 or 1000? Over to you. Just throw your coin and keep it simple!

 

[chris_green01]

Great post Cees and it really opens up the discussion as to how there are two sides to everything. For example the marketing mix and Online and Offline. How do we use our online domains to interact with customers and how can we merge this with the Offline. It links back to some of your points.

1. Digital is now the biggest way to interact with our clients and provides a powerful base to talk to our customers and prospects. .
2. Offline has been the place where, historically, its been easier to “convert” and so has made up a large portion of the marketing mix.
3. Digital can help drive our customers and prospects to those events, using the powerful tools we have around segmentation and targeting.
4. Digital also provides a platform to Stream the event to people who can’t visit on the day and provide quality content and follow up after the event.

The distinction between the two are now blurred as technology brings everything to our audience. However, both are still very much needed as part of that marketing mix.

[maggie1]

 

hi Cees,

A very interesting discussion, and you can not be more right, there are many dimensions in marketing, worth exploring and reading other 'brothers-in-arms' perspectives. .

However, being a doer myself, I like your point of no-one being awarded for  just a big Big Idea! Ideas, even the great ones are cheap! The hard work is to bring them to live

There is a famous quote from Thomas Alva Edison: In every Invention there is 1 % or inspiration, and 99% of Perspiration. . 🙂

[PilarNR]

Great post! I see one more “Head & Tail” dimension: Paid versus Organic Search. Both drive traffic to web pages. But which one provides more value? And where should you invest? Organic, or natural search results, appear because of their relevance to the search terms. It provides visibility to the business, credibility and valuable website traffic in a cost effective way. Paid Search in contrast, is paid ranking in search engines, and so paid traffic to your website. However, as opposed to organic, paid search delivers top ranking and results very fast, and also gives you more control and more space to deliver your marketing messages in search engines. Which one to choose? Based upon experience the right combination of both is what brings the highest value; in terms of higher number of visits, page views, time spend and engagement!