In a first of two keynotes at i-SCOOP’s Fusion Marketing Experience Spring Edition conference 2011 in Belgium, Bryan Eisenberg challenged the audience to think about the speed of business in his marketing optimization fitness plan presentation.
The pace of consumers has changed. Has that of your business as well? Can you keep up with your customers? Enter the marketing optimization fitness plan.
Bryan Eisenberg lost quite some weight in recent years. Why am I sharing that? Because it explains the fitness part (exercise does help) but especially because most businesses could lose some weight as well. The speed of business has grown fast.
While eating less and exercising more is the obvious but – as I can testify – often difficult path towards a fitter life, your business should be able to get fit more easily as well to keep up with the behavior, preferences and needs with your customers in a fast-paced world.
Cross-channel optimization: look at the touchpoints
How? Optimize every single touch-point and act in a cross-channel way. Don’t optimize the channels, improve the contact moments. Customers don’t think in terms of channels.
They want to see a brand, and it has to be consistent. Get rid of the channel-centric approach and go for pervasive engagement. Consider the end-to-end customer experience across every interaction and customer-facing touch.
However, multichannel is not easy either, with a huge gap between vision and execution. Don’t see execution as a onetime event but as a way of life. Look at how consumers act and interact continuously. Identify and understand the touch points, be agile and engaged with your customer across all of those touch points and innovate through experimentation.
It’s the marketing optimization fitness plan approach that has stood the test of time and will continue to – at least for good marketers: step away from what Bryan once called the “WeWe” approach, put the customer at the center and take a holistic perspective with each touch point in mind.
Are you agile? Do the test – the Optimization Fitness Plan in action
As marketing changes and will continue to change in a data-driven age (beware of not letting too much tech stand in the way of relevance and putting customer first), be fast and know how to respond to change and real-time needs.
Also make sure what you stand for and how to easily express it across touch points in a way that engages customers, prospects and so forth. Where brand and culture (in a relevant and clear way without all the “WeWe” fluff speak) meet real customer needs, conversion and good marketing happen, always.
Bryan used a nice exercise, by his friend and partner Avinash Kaushik, which he called the TweetVP. Explain why anyone would do business with you in 140 characters or less. Do you know why anyone would do business with you? Think about it.
Finally: start improving now, one step at a time, working on one or more of the “5 star culture traits” of the agile and fit business.
