I was reading a book a few weeks back, on the topic of search, and a phrase read then has continued to resonate in my mind. Although I cannot remember the exact line it was something about the winning recipe would be having the ability to understand the intent behind a query. At first glance or read, there doesn’t seem to be much ‘umph’ to such a phrase, until you read it over a few times.
Though the crux of our business is not search, I still found this phrase pertinent to what we do as digital marketers. It speaks to providing a level of intelligence behind the digital solutions we come up with, instead of giving your customers the me too or the norm products that everyone else employs. It is our job to take each ask or project and transform it into something that has staying power and long term residual impact. Our clients reach out to us because they have a product, service or message they wish to make known to a target audience and as a result, they need our help in making the exchange between them and their audience as impactful as possible.
The natural result of looking past the norm in a brand to consumer relationship and understanding the intent, is that both parties win. The brand wins as it now has an intelligent and pertinent way in which to communicate with its target audience, and the target audience now has a brand or product, engaging them in intelligent conversation. It is important to note here that we see conversation as covering several things, messages in creative images, messaging in video, social media strategies, copy strategy on your Web entities, etc…. In basic terms, it is whatever you put out to your public, as a representation of your brand. Nonetheless, intelligent conversation is your desired state. We’re not referring here to using long and complex words to give off an air of intelligence, but we’re talking about tailoring our conversations based on our audience, with some suggestive instances that looks at all that they’ve done thus far and how they’ve done it, and pulls interest points from that, that help you in guiding them to discover and explore where what you have to offer, fits nicely in their life or fills a need. It is understanding the actions, however similar or dissimilar to what you do, anticipating the needs or issues that come come up based on those actions and then being prepared to intelligently communicate how you can help.
The intent behind the query in our world of marketers still holds some similarities to the phrases original intended use. We see understanding intent as covering these things
Understanding the Clients ‘Success’: and this cannot be revenue. Revenue targets, budgets and fiscal responsibility will come up – trust me, but very rarely do we spend enough time with the client understanding action and emotion quotient success. Understanding these levels of success now aid you in starting to form your intelligent communication strategy. Intelligent and effective conversation cannot start off with a dollar figure. Could you imagine “Hello. We’re company x and we’re a fortune 500 company with annual revenues currently sitting at 125 million and our goal this year is to see an increase by 7 points. We want you to buy our clothes because they are cool and will make you cool too”. Yes, we know the example above is pretty crass, but when our conversation starts off in a random state (not specific to the audience segment), with campaign goals focusing on the wrong success quotients, it might as well sound like the above.
Understanding the Passions: of your clients audience. What they naturally take interest in, based on where and how they spend their time and the things they are most engaged with. Here too, you now start to form the beginnings of intelligent conversation, as you can draw on specifics of the audience and their lives.
This business of personalizing the query to understand, more deeply, the intent of the individual behind it will never change. It’s one of the basics in effective communication and relationship building. The unfortunate thing is that so much of us get caught up in the ‘doing’ and neglect the ‘listening’.
