How do you create a marketing plan that adapts to changing customer needs and preferences?

In addition to creating detailed customer personas, having a deep understanding of each persona's customer experience is key. This can be achieved through customer journey maps that should be revised at least every two years. Great customer journey maps go beyond simply documenting the preferred sales funnel. They include details like the emotional state of your customer at each phase and key challenges they may be experiencing by phase. In addition, a customer journey map should consider every potential customer touchpoint, which will expand the scope far beyond the traditional AIDA sales funnel structure.

I’m my experience you also need to create a framework to outline how detailed you create these personas and how they are leveraged at each touch point. I’ve found that personalization is important, to an extent, but the ROI can quickly become negative and there is a point of diminished returns. However, I agree, understanding consumers emotions and more importantly their beliefs that drive these emotions help to uncover better understanding, predict behavior, and allows for us to identify problems consumers themselves may not even know exist. With this information we can go beyond relevancy to necessity and connection. Ultimately, if you don’t understand people, you don’t understand business.

It is important to understand macro CULTURAL trends that influence more than purchase behavior as these will have longevity and reach across all consumer segments, yet manifest differently for each segment. Understanding these trends allows us to personalize messages, tailor content and leverage relevant channels to reach the consumer. “The right message, for the right consumer, on the right channel at the right time” is personalization at scale. Influencer and social media marketing can be an effective tool if leveraged properly. Ensuring the content and message delivered is authentic or native to the platform is key. You want to engage the consumer not interrupt them. In addition, ensuring the right KPIs for each tool is essential.

To set the right goals to measure success and effectiveness of a campaign you need to segment measurable KPIs into two groups; impact and means. 1) Impact KPI should be your ultimate goal, sales lift, market share, brand health lift = campaign success, 2) Means KPIs, click through rate, likes, breakthrough, message retention, reach, engagement = effectiveness. The means helps us understand WHY or HOW the individual components (channels, creative, media spend, message) enabled or prevented success in order to either optimize or cancel. Additionally, its also essential to ensure you’re measuring the right KPIs for each touch point. Example, Trade programs drive immediate sales, vs. influencer content drives brand health & awareness.