What is the marketing signal?

Quotes

• “I think of marketing signal as like the history of sales. If you have the best information possible on a potential prospect or client, it’s like the hand-to-hand combat of a salesperson. They go up to the person, create a relationship, they understand their want and need, and fundamentally there is a relationship and trust there and that’s really expensive.” -Guest 1 “If you’re selling a product online for $5.00 you don’t have the time to have the hand-to-hand combat relationship and build that time so you need to find other signals or other things that are correlated with the intention that they have that need and they have that want. So it’s really like an abstraction of an actual conversation and you have to find things that are correlated to that person who actually wanted that product or service.” -Guest 1“The thing that sticks to my mind is the word intent. When I think about marketing data and you mentioned you are talking about sales but whether you are prospecting in a B2B business or whether you are trying to define and attract your target market in a B2C business, a lot of us think about demographic, geographic data, and intent data and marketing signals are the most sophisticated way.” -Ben“There’s a difference between data and signals. Data, when you talk about demographics and who people are, is different than their actions and intentions that they have out of a specific moment in time. So when you put in a search engine that you want to buy a pair of red pants, that’s a signal that at this point in time, you would be willing to take that action and buy the product. The fact that you are a woman or a man of a certain age isn’t so much as a signal as a data point.” -Guest 2“So demographics or understanding who a person is, and geographics is understanding where they are and then we get into consumer intent and one of the big things that most effective marketers think about is whether somebody is actually in the market or not.” -Ben “If someone takes an action, there is an event. The signal in that event is the ability to interpret that action as something that you can act upon. So the signal is the ability to know that when someone clicks on your article, that means that they are interested in buying a product and you can derive the intent to buy the product out of that action.” -Guest 2 “We work at a company that I would say is one of the best at marketing in the world. They have a whole marketing platform and the signal that they look at is new hires because when a new hire comes into a company, they have aout 90-days to prove to the person who hired them that they should be on the team and they provide more value than they cost.” -Guest 1“They also usually have budget. No one says no when a new hire wants too buy a software because a new hire is usually brought to come in to make a change. And that person also wants to usually get a new job to prove that they can take on more responsibility and have a higher role in a company so they are driven to take an action.” -Guest 1“That’s a great point that it’s not just about understanding the signal but also being able to act appropriately to market to the customer. Like, ‘Hey, this person is a new hire and the marketing tactic that we are taking is, congratulating them on the new job.” -Ben“That’s what makes it so powerful because people sometimes don’t even know what the actual event is going to be. Like the famous Target story.” -Guest 2 “Target actually sends out templates to every single house and you think they are the same ones but it is very highly personalized and I think they changed it from, ‘Congratulations on your new baby’ to sticking a pamphlet in the middle that has some baby stuff and you think since everybody is getting it, I guess it’s okay that I got this one page with baby stuff. I’m not going to buy it but, ‘oh I am actually pregnant maybe I should buy it’ which is less creepy.” -Guest 1