For more than seventeen years, I have been commuting back and forth to work, 80 miles each day. Of course, with the joy of commuting comes the joy of traffic. Yes, like many of you reading this, I am one of those people sitting behind you contemplating what it would actually cost to buy Deon Sanders’ helicopter.
When I started commuting in the nineties, yes that’s the 1990’s, I didn’t have the luxury of just tapping Google Maps on my phone to give me the wizardry of “alternative routes.” Kind of amazing when you think about it. In the palm of my hand I have a device that communicates with satellites that then talk to road monitors that then gives me easy to read color coded routes to get out of the endless traffic line.
When using this awesome technology the other day, I managed to shave off about thirty minutes from the normal route I would have taken to get to my destination. So I got to thinking, this is exactly the type of technology that marketers need to drive results. Let’s be honest, most marketers have at best a printed roadmap for how to get to where they want to go – not equipped to find the alternative routes needed to drive real business results in real time.
We utilize a four phase process to help our clients build their Marketing GPS:
- Tracking – the foundational methodology to bring all marketing touch points together. This phase gives us the landmarks needed to build our map.
- Measuring – the holistic view of performance across all channels. This phase gives us a printed roadmap to success. The most efficient path to drive real marketing results.
- Targeting – the intelligence that tells us how to change our spending across marketing channels, the alternative routes we need to consider, to maximize results.
- Predicting – this phase tells us how customer behavior is changing and their response to marketing channel mix and tells us not only the road to take to get where we need to go but how long it will take us to get there.
Google wasn’t able to implement Google Maps without going through the same exact type of process I just described. They had to identify all roads available in the world, build a holistic look, build a model to dynamically provide alternatives, and expand the model to predict the time it will take you to get there. Now you can maximize your marketing investments in real time too.
So my question to you is what type of marketing GPS do you have?