What that means, ultimately, is that the field of marketing is as diverse as the audiences it seeks to reach. This is why, now more than ever, savvy marketers seeking new ways to reach their ideal customers aren’t just looking to tried-and-true methods. Instead, they’re drawing on concepts and practices prevalent in other industries to innovate their own marketing campaigns.
This article describes how looking beyond the marketing industry for strategic and creative inspiration can help you develop marketing campaigns and collaterals that help you reach your target in profound new ways.
Getting Technical with Behavior Analytics
User behavior analytics have become ubiquitous in the tech industry, helping tech innovators understand not only just who their end users are but also what they do. This helps technologists devise products and services that truly meet the needs, wants, and expectations of a vast and ever-evolving client base.
The same tools that help technologists create the devices that consumers crave can also help marketers create campaigns and materials that audiences can’t resist.
For example, behavior analytics may reveal that your target audience often scans through multiple color and pattern options before selecting a garment to purchase and that they often fail to complete a purchase when they find they do not have multiple options to peruse first.
Armed with this insight, you might decide to create a marketing campaign that celebrates (and heavily promotes) the diverse colors and styles a particular line of apparel comes in. Best of all, you can do this by marrying traditional clothes shopping with tech innovation by using virtual reality (VR) marketing.
You may, for instance, offer platforms that allow your target audience to virtually “try on” garments in an array of designs using VR goggles or even a simple smartphone app. The key here is to learn what your target customers do when they are considering a product, service, or brand and then integrate those habitual customer behaviors into your marketing materials.
Insights from the Field of Medicine
The field of technology is by no means the only one with marketers looking to increase their effectiveness through innovation. Indeed, the healthcare field, with its people-focused ethos, has a great deal to offer ambitious marketers.
For instance, clinicians, particularly those working in the arena of mental health, are increasingly recognizing the necessity of reaching traditionally marginalized and underserved patient populations. They are also endeavoring to discover effective strategies for overcoming these exclusionary practices, particularly through the cultivation of cultural competence.
In the medical field, cultural competence refers to a healthcare provider’s capacity to understand, empathize with, and respect the unique cultural perspectives and experiences every patient brings with them. These cultural experiences inform not only how patients perceive health, wellness, and medicine but also how they behave in regard to them. Only when clinicians recognize that perspectives on critical issues such as quality of life or death and dying can they hope to provide the personalized and empathic care that all patients deserve but that minority patients have too often been denied.
Marketers can benefit from learning similar lessons and practices insofar as the arena of marketing has also often disenfranchised certain demographic groups, from persons of color to persons with disabilities to members of the LGBTQIA+ community.
Healthcare providers, for instance, are cultivating cultural competence through practices such as the community survey, which enables them to better understand the lived experiences of patients belonging to cultures different from their own.
Marketers seeking to innovate their strategies would benefit from adopting a similar approach. This might include not only researching and engaging with these communities but also soliciting input and content from persons belonging to them. Indeed, soliciting under-generated content on social media can be an outstanding way to survey all the communities represented by your audience, enabling you to craft materials both made for and inspired by them.
The Takeaway
Marketing is about both business and relationships. It has always combined the best of both business worlds, the human and the commercial. Today, however, effective marketers are drawing on a host of influences beyond the domain of traditional marketing in an effort to craft innovative campaigns and materials that speak to audiences in new and exciting ways. This includes, for instance, taking a cue from the field of information technology by unleashing the power of user analytics to meet the evolving needs and expectations of the target market. Similarly, marketers are taking inspiration from the field of healthcare to cultivate cultural competence as a means to reach historically marginalized and underserved populations.
