The most powerful analytic tool a practitioner of contextual marketing can master is conjoint analysis. This tool unlocks the soft emotional attributes about your customers so you can produce content that is more relevant and useful … and therefore more likely to build trust, loyalty and transactional ROI.
Conjoint analytics considers two or more factors jointly to build a model of human behavior. By measuring preference for factors, the customer is in essence trading off one attribute to get another. By causing the customer to trade-off competing values and needs, the customer reveals important motivations.
Conjoint is used to determine such vital business decisions as price point, product specifications, who will buy these specifications, and why they will buy. That’s all traditional market research kind of stuff for product development. And, yes, it can be a powerful ally to marketers for this purpose.
But that’s not where I see this playing its powerful role in contextual marketing. Remember, contextual marketing is all about message content. What messages will be most relevant to a customer at any particular stage of the buying cycle?
In the hands of direct marketers then conjoint is played a bit differently than in traditional market research.
Every outbound initiative – be it a mailer, an email, a phone call or a web page – should attempt to learn something new about the prospect. So you always provide two options in your messaging that will reveal an attribute about the prospect. For example, find out if the prospect is shopping for best price or best value. Find out if the prospect is a senior manager or a user. Find out if the prospect is technical or non-technical.
A web page can provide two links. One link to information about how your product leads to cost reduction and the other link to information about how your product leads to greater effectiveness (value). When the prospect makes the selection, this attribute is captured and added to the prospect’s profile in your database.
Fairly simple technique to use if you plan ahead. What factors do you want to know about the prospect that will help you shift your messaging for increased relevance? Then insert the choices into your outbound initiatives. Capture them, Score them. Use them.
This post has been included in the 5th edition of the Carnival of Business Analysts which has been published at Better Projects.
The Carnival is a series of blog posts that collect other quality blog posts on topics themed around the BABOK knowledge areas. Edition 5 is on Requirements Analysis.
Read the Carnival of Business Analysts at Better Projects.
Posted by: Craig Brown | December 16, 2007 at 06:07 AM