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The Deciding Factor: The Integrated Marketing All-rounders
Karen Meyers Holzer, CEO and Karen Vance, Director of Digital & Content Marketing The Deciding Factor takes a perspective that marketing success starts with brand and strategy and then utilizes digital – as well as a blend of other channels – to deliver consistent and integrated marketing to the customer and potential customer.
To this end, organizations need to strike a balance. Marketing can target digital audiences for both B2B and B2C audiences, and often The Deciding Factor often works with clients that have a multi-audience and multi-channel approach and often a complex product or service offering. As such, there is a considerable need for an integrated or blended approach. With the target audience spread across multiple channels and platforms, digital or otherwise, it has become crucial to be consistent with all marketing efforts. Consistency creates a greater chance of increasing awareness about the product/brand in question and generating sales.
The Deciding Factor helps organizations achieve a clear marketing strategy to amplify their brand. Over 19 years, this Google- and Facebook-certified marketing firm has built its expertise in:
• Marketing strategy and development
• Brand identity and logo development
• Digital marketing and advertising
• Website development
• Marketing automation and customer nurturing
• Social media consulting and implementation
• Public relations
• Content and print collateral
• Metrics and analytics tracking and visualization
Unlike other marketing firms that blindly target audiences, The Deciding Factor’s unique value proposition lies in how they leverage data to identify both the “who” and the “why” for precision targeting to potential customers most likely to make a purchase. Karen Vance, Director of Digital & Content Marketing at the company, sums this up as, “Many clients start with jumbled and disconnected marketing tactics. We integrate them to deliver a strong brand experience to tie your customer to your company. We align your marketing technology to get all of your efforts working together toward your goals and connect the dots across the customer journey.”
In an interview with CIO Applications, Karen Meyers Holzer and Karen Vance provide insights about The Deciding Factor and how its breadth of services helps clients create an effective and appealing brand presence across various integrated marketing channels.
Considering the variety of marketing platforms available, how do you approach a consistent marketing strategy for your clients? What are the fundamental tactics that you use?
We generally begin with a series of conversations with our clients. We determine if they need to strengthen their marketing strategy by developing customer personas and creating a customer journey map. Then we leverage technology to identify and target the most receptive customers. We also analyze our client’s consumer behaviour data and traffic patterns and examine their previous marketing initiatives. By learning from their prior experience and combining it with the comprehensive insights gained about the customers, we develop a custom-built marketing strategy for each client.
From a customer targeting standpoint, we maximize the use of platforms such as Google, Microsoft, LinkedIn and Facebook., We also explore the industry or trade-specific platforms that can be beneficial for specific clients.
Many clients start with jumbled and disconnected marketing tactics. We integrate them to deliver a strong brand experience to tie your customer to your company
In terms of lead generation, we are a huge proponent of database development and management, where we capture as much demographic and psychographic information about potential customers so we can deliver useful content to them. This helps in making the transition from the product awareness stage of the customer journey to the consideration stage.
The secret of our successful and consistent message delivery stems from our coordinated team. We share client insights across our team to understand the client better. This is significantly effective in producing valuable content and builds a targeted delivery program.
Could you tell us about your clientele, and how do you cater to their requirements?
Our area of expertise is to work with B2B and B2C clients who have multiple audiences. We work with a mix of clients from healthcare, medical devices, high-tech manufacturing, software and technology, and other verticals.
As our clients cater to a varied audience on often highly technical topics, we have an expert content development team that can produce content accordingly. We hire former journalists as they have an amazing ability to mold the content according to the audience’s perspective. Their inquisitive nature and ability to write clear, crisp content translates for them to be an efficient marketing writer. They can explain a technical product in the simplest yet most creative way.
For example, a medical device company needs to explain its product to doctors and patients. Our writers use different narratives for both of these persona types. This might mean using simple terminology for patients and having technical specifications for doctors. The ability of our content writing team to address content by audience, topic and delivery channel is a unique selling proposition for the company.
How would you describe the company’s portfolio of services?
In terms of service delivery, we use a wide variety of technologies. We do marketing automation, email marketing, social media marketing, pay-per-click advertising, social and digital search, earned media, and a lot more. All this helps us to drive traffic, whether it’s on mobile or desktop. For each client, we either manage their existing platform and support them in optimizing and maximizing the effectiveness of their technology platforms or we recommend the technology stack that is the best fit based on their feature needs and budget requirements.
Further, from a technology evolution standpoint, we have strengthened our roots in analytics, reporting, and building custom dashboards for our clients that address their unique KPIs. We adopt a customized approach for our clients that helps them track their progress easily and see optimizations in real time. Using and visualizing data can be a big learning curve for our clients, but it helps them understand and reach their customers better, and we’ve built dashboards in a variety of platforms from simple customizations in Google Analytics to integrated dashboards in Data Studio to multi-data source visualizations in Tableau.
As a digital marketing firm, we believe that websites are the crown jewel in marketing that continually needs to be modified and upgraded. We develop a user-friendly website that focuses on customer behavior and shortening the conversion funnel for our clients. We are also experts in integrating platforms for our clients. For example, if our clients have a marketing automation platform a CRM and a website, we integrate the platforms and ensure they work in concert with each other.
If our clients come up to us with a disjointed marketing program, we fill in the gaps and work as an extension of their team. Our breadth of services, which we have in most cases in-house or through strategic partnerships, enables us to do consistent, organized and integrated marketing.
What does the roadmap of the company look like?
For over two years, we have witnessed double-digit growth. We are constantly striving to keep the momentum by investing in new technology platforms and more importantly training and education on these platforms. We have plans to invest in geo-targeting technology and use it innovatively for our B2B clients. We also empower our clients by filtering through massive chunks of data to provide them actionable insights that help our clients best understand their customers, target more of them, all while increasing customer retention levels.
In addition to the evolving technology, it is also essential for our clients to understand cybersecurity and privacy concerns while interacting with global customers on these technology platforms. We understand the nuances and requirements – from GDPR in Europe to Australia’s Privacy Act/APPs – as well as the evolving privacy landscape in the United States and federal law to leverage evolving technologies in the most compliant manner.
Our key to success will be using a perfect blend of data, technology, innovation, and creativity to serve our clients and continue growing ahead.
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