Anticipating

The greatest influencer of your next marketing strategy isn’t the shiny new piece of technology, webware or filming equipment you just acquired. It isn’t the demographic or psychographic information available to you. It is influenced by past performance and shopping trends, but even that is relegated to data reporting and year over year comparisons. The greatest influence on your next strategy is what you know of your customer’s needs.

But even that amount of activity was cumbersome. We’d become spoiled by the propulsion forward, effectively generating the crises for big name movie rental places overnight. And Netflix wasn’t finished.

Enter, video streaming. Real time selection and real time watching. I can choose my movie and watch it immediately. Instant gratification was the key to anticipating and answering the customer’s changing needs.

Look no further than search. Keyword frequencies, particularly when reviewed by smaller geographies, are telling. The Midwest US, for instance, has a 16 week window for summer. Searches for decking, deck accessories and the like obvious tick up dramatically as the weather breaks. If you are watching search behaviors and applying your findings to your content strategy—especially video—you’re learning in real time the exact question asked. It may be too late, but you know more than from other testing.

A review of your Google Analytics will describe what is most influential to your audience. You’ll know based on the time spent with certain content types, the number of those returning to similar pages, and the number of shares. If you have a video content stream/strategy and use YouTube, Vimeo or another tool to house that content, you’ll likely better understand the “browsing” that your audiences are doing to reach your content. In YouTube, the community tab is even allowing creators to ask fans what kinds of content they want, and which are their favorites.

If you have a nice blend of “give versus ask” on your social media feeds, you have already made the effort to minimize intrusive calls to action, opting instead to relegate milder versions to your paid rather than organic channels. But what can be gleaned by a review of post interactions and shares, video views and the like can’t be understated. Define what worked—and make future content decisions based on what garnered the greatest response.

Evaluating your User Experience as a whole, while noting content around where the largest interactions took place and aligning these with what the user is seeking on your own site and searching for, will serve you well. Repeat this activity at regular intervals. Netflix may still hold the first place trophy, but you’ll be making wiser marketing decisions as a result.