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Have you ever thought about how you think?
Thinking is something we do automatically. You could say we think without thinking about it.
The way that you’ve programmed your brain to think matters, especially in marketing.
As a marketer, you’re regularly confronted with different types of questions, data and obstacles. These challenges require deep thinking, understanding and then action.
Thought and action are inseparable. You perceive an activity in your mind before you actually commit to performing that action.
The most successful marketing campaigns aren’t developed out of luck or accident. It’s a product of deep thinking and the blending of different mindsets.
This discussion will look at how your thinking impacts digital marketing. You’ll also learn strategies aimed at adopting new mindsets for tackling your marketing and PPC objectives.
Your brain does a lot of thinking throughout the day, but it only has a finite amount of willpower.
The number of decisions you make in a single day and the complexity of those decisions consume brain power.
Lazy thinking is what happens when your brain starts to run low on this willpower. You begin making decisions without thinking as much.
An easy example to understand lazy thinking occurs when you’re trying to diet. It’s easy to avoid junk food in the morning and afternoon. Your brain still has the fuel to make the diet-friendly choice to eat healthy foods.
It’s a different story when it’s the end of the day and your mind has been running nonstop since morning. Now, those sweet and salty snacks are almost impossible to avoid.
Everyone has experienced this in some capacity, diet or no diet. You get home from work after a long day and you opt to order takeout instead of cooking. Often, it isn’t because you’re physically exhausted, but rather mentally drained.
Your brain doesn’t want to keep making decisions or actively thinking. So, you perform lazy thinking.
This is particularly dangerous when lazy thinking masquerades as efficient thinking. You may decide that making quick decisions is the best way to maximize the use of your time.
However, if you don’t think through each decision you’re making, it will hurt you in the long-term. You’ll end up jumping to snap judgments and recognizing patterns that don’t actually exist because your brain is in a rush.
When you follow unverified patterns or jump to inaccurate conclusions, it can have disastrous effects.
You think you’re making a decision based on data, which means your resulting actions are taken with high confidence. “How can my insights be wrong?” you say, pushing all your chips to the center of the table.
Once you realize the error, it can be extremely challenging to rebound and correct the damage.
In marketing, lazy thinking is almost always linear. This is not inherently wrong. A lot of problems are successfully solved with linear thinking.
What is linear thinking? Linear thinking is logical and orderly. It follows a straight path with a definite start and end.
This thinking style looks for patterns, formulas and other tools to help make sense of the information.
Again, there are many cases where applying linear thinking is the right path.
Unfortunately, linear thinking can often create lazy, quick thinking tendencies that lead to mistakes in your thought process.
You recognize what you think is a pattern and you jump to a conclusion.
For example, you are playing poker and notice a player is sweating and scratching their ear. You decide these are patterns and cues that this person is bluffing.
In reality, they could be completely unrelated events.
Linear thinking can also be thought of as lazy because it is orderly. When there is a sequence or pattern in the thought process, there is a certain rigid predictability about it.
Logic is great for solving non-emotional problems. However, marketing is definitely non-emotional. It is immensely creative.
Your marketing messages should invoke an emotional response!
This means that you need to think non-linearly. Only when you start thinking outside of this logical process can you find the exciting, fresh strategies that lead to long-term, exponential growth.
Critical thinking is another way of approaching a marketing mindset. Critical thinking is self-guided and self-disciplined. It attempts to use reason to approach problems in a rational, fair and empathic manner.
This is a style of thinking best used when analyzing, assessing and looking for ways to improve. Critical thinkers are experts at recognizing the various angles, needs and other components involved in a process.
Thus, it is a superb mindset for marketers.
One of the problems with the linear approach is that it doesn’t account for random events or changes from happening.
These types of events are common in marketing. There are always trends and shifts affecting your business and the market.
You need a critical thinking mindset that is prepared for disorder to happen!
Critical thinking can be thought of as a three-part process.
By working through this process, you’ll produce more successful marketing campaigns built for long-term success.
Thinking allows you to make sense of, interpret, understand, represent or model any information. It is a perpetual activity that enables you to make decisions and predict things about the world around you.
Your marketing strategies have needs, objectives and desires. Thinking allows you to make decisions that help accomplish these goals. It’s about getting you in the right direction!
Ideally, you should align your mindset with your marketing goals. This will help you make the right decisions that further your progress towards reaching those objectives.
For instance, if your goal is to identify seasonal trends, a linear mindset isn’t bad. Seasonality follows repeating patterns, which will appeal to the linear thinking process.
However, if you’re looking for new ways to generate customers, you need to ditch your linear thinking for a more non-linear approach.
This will give you the creative, out-of-the-box mindset that you need to invent fresh ways to attract new audiences.
When you’re passively monitoring your campaign performance, the critical mindset is best. This way of thinking looks at all factors and conditions to critically analyze why changes occur and which ones require a response.
The challenge is being able to juggle these different mindsets and shift between them. Typically, human beings are set in the linear way of thinking because it is the most logical.
This natural inclination can make it hard to adopt new ways of problem-solving. You may think you’re thinking non-linearly, when really you’re still falling into natural, linear tendencies.
No matter what mindset you find yourself in, you need to be thinking about your customers.
In other words, don’t think about improving your marketing for the sake of increasing performance. Instead, your mission should be to improve your marketing to give customers the best experience possible.
The question is not: “How do I acquire more customers?”
The question is: “How do I create an amazing experience that makes customers want to engage?”
Answering these questions requires data, creativity and intuition. You need to answer what’s working, what isn’t and what improvements can be made.
This is why critical thinking is so effective for marketers. It takes into account customer feelings and behaviors, as well as your own know-how and what the data is suggesting.
You may need more information and data regarding what customers want and need. These are vital details that will help you deliver this exceptional experience.
To acquire this information, the best strategy is to ask. Surveys, social media interactions, feedback forms and direct conversations are some of the best ways to understand your customers.
When you truly understand your customers, it comes through in your campaigns and marketing messages.
The importance of customer-focused strategies can’t be overstated. It’s not just a matter of accounting for customer needs in your decision-making.
The end goal is to deliver personalized marketing experiences for each individual. This is the focus of marketing in the Digital Age. It’s also an expectation that customers have.
If you’re unable to meet the expectation and treat customers as individuals, they will seek out other companies that can offer this personalized experience.
This is another reason why marketers need to be careful with linear thinking. This mindset typically thinks of customers as a whole audience, instead of individual ones.
Customers have a keen sense of what types of marketing messages are relevant, personalized and valuable to them. When messages miss the mark on these traits, it comes across as spam.
The problem is creating personalized marketing messages for each individual is exceptionally challenging.
First, you need large volumes of data. This is data that comes from verified sources and has been cleaned, filtered, collected and organized.
With the data collected and cleaned, you need tools to analyze this huge volume of information. Analysis needs to be thorough and timely.
If you don’t have the ability to sift through all this data in real-time, you’ll struggle to meet customers’ latest needs.
Third-party tools help tremendously, especially those equipped with AI and machine learning capabilities. If you can automate the tedious parts of collecting, filtering and analyzing your data, you can focus all of your attention on the customer and their needs.
The final piece you need to deliver the customer experience that today’s consumers expect is creative thinking.
Logical and critical thinking have their advantages, but they don’t serve well when developing a customer-centric approach. On the other hand, a creative mindset allows you to think like the customer and put yourself in their shoes.
With this mental approach, you can devise innovative, fresh ways to engage customers.
In an age where customers are hit with marketing messages and branded content from all angles, standing out is a real challenge.
Your customers have their guard up against marketing efforts that are not relevant or valuable to them. Anything that comes across as spam is ignored.
At the same time, they are interested in new experiences that they haven’t seen before. When you can deliver on this expectation, the returns are tremendous.
Not only will you draw their attention in, but, when audiences engage with something new and exciting, they are more likely to share it with others.
It’s about creating an emotional response. If you can make an audience feel something and appeal to their emotions, you’ll have their business for life.
There are a few points to keep in mind when creatively thinking about delivering this type of experience.
Thanks to social media sites, customers are not just consumers, but also active participants in your business. They interact, comment, share, submit content and have an invested interest in your company’s success.
They want to be involved.
Being customer-centric means developing strategies that make the consumer feel involved. When your business succeeds, they also succeed.
Successful creative marketing takes a village – or at least a team of creative professionals.
Your marketing shouldn’t rely on a single person or a single strategy. Instead, it should involve your entire team and treat these individuals as extensions of your marketing department.
You reach more creative conclusions when you include more people in the brainstorming process!
Plus, you’ll have insights and expertise coming from all areas of your business. This will give you a complete view of who the customer is and what they care about the most.
There are so many channels, content formats, platforms, media types and other tools that you can use to develop your brand experience and identity.
Take advantage of all of these to make the most robust experience. Each piece will add to the overall creativity of your brand identity and presence.
The more channels and strategies you add, the more unique and creative ways you have at your disposal to package and send your messages.
This also gives you more places to engage potential customers. A significant component of a successful, customer-centric approach is engaging audiences on their preferred channels.
Smaller companies tend to regard their size as a disadvantage. A small business has less budget and fewer resources than large enterprises.
However, they do have one advantage: agility.
You can change your strategies and adjust your tactics at a moment’s notice. Large corporations, on the other hand, have to review and approve every change closely. This means they are sluggish in responding to market changes.
When customers develop new interests or behaviors, a smaller company can be the first to adapt to meet these needs. Use this to your advantage!
Delivering the perfect customer experience is a process. There is no real finish line because customers are always changing.
To achieve a customer-first approach to marketing, you should always be revising your definition of what makes an amazing customer experience. How can you make it better?
The more effort you put into this process of perfecting the customer experience, the closer you’ll get to the mark.
Customers will notice your dedication to creating new and creative experiences.
Data plays a substantial role in your company’s ability to provide personalized experiences to customers.
Marketers need to know what data to collect, what it means and why it matters. This is rarely easy because data can be incredibly complex, especially in large quantities.
Take a PPC account, for example. A medium-sized Google Ads campaign may have 100 different ad groups, each with 10+ keywords. If you have 25 campaigns running simultaneously, then you’re looking at data for over 25,000 keywords.
That’s a lot of information to collect, digest and understand.
Again, there’s the element of timing. If you can’t process all of this data swiftly, you’ll be reacting to old changes and missing out on valuable opportunities or allowing potential risks to go undetected.
The best way to improve the performance of your PPC campaigns is to minimize this complexity. Before you can do this, you need to understand just how complex your campaigns actually are.
This means figuring out how many combinations of metrics and dimensions exist in your campaigns. Unless you want to count these thousands or even millions of combinations yourself, you need the help of a tool.
The Combinations Calculator by PPCexpo takes your Google Ads account and quickly reveals how many data combinations exist.
You can access Combination Calculator here.
When you make changes to your Google Ads account, you can see the impact it has on the number of combinations. This helps you learn what makes your data more or less complicated.
As mentioned, one of the essentials to delivering an outstanding, customer-focused marketing experience is the use of third-party tools.
Specifically, implementing third-party tools with AI and machine learning capabilities. These software solutions are quickly becoming a necessity because they are the only ways to handle the size and complexity of marketing data promptly.
Remember, your marketing data is always changing. You need to look at month-to-month, week-to-week, day-to-day and even hour-by-hour changes.
This is impossible to handle manually. Even if you have a team capable of monitoring data 24/7, it would be a massive waste of resources and a collective headache for everyone involved.
With an automated solution, you can conquer this complexity. This frees up valuable time that can then be spent on more critical activities, like improving your customer-first approach.
Not to mention, you’ll have a steady stream of marketing opportunities to pursue and risks to avoid. This makes optimizing your PPC campaigns and marketing strategies much simpler.
PPC Signal is one of the best third-party PPC marketing tools you can invest in. It ensures that you have that critical thinking mindset when analyzing your paid marketing.
PPC Signal provides that always-on, always-alert monitoring system that you need to identify new ways to improve your campaigns.
The system monitors your account for any substantial shifts, trends, outliers or other patterns. As these changes develop, it tracks and logs them for you.
When one of these trends becomes significant enough to warrant attention, PPC Signal alerts you to the change.
Then, you can investigate further to see what’s happening. PPC Signal provides you with all of the information you need. It even recommends a follow-up action!
You can look at all signals at once, or filter the results based on what metrics are most critical to your goals.
For example, let’s say you noticed your campaigns are generating fewer conversions than usual. You select to filter signals by conversion rate.
Immediately, PPC Signal shows you the following insights:
In both cases, conversion rates are trending downwards. PPC Signal shows you what campaign, keyword and time-of-day are involved, as well as how significant the negative change is.
This allows you to quickly get to the bottom of each signal, whether positive or negative.
You can click the Explore button to see a more detailed view of the signal.
This is the expanded view for the selected signal:
Using this visualization, you can see the entire timeline of the change. You can also click to view the information as a table.
When you’re ready to correct this negative downturn, you have two options.
Data is an unavoidable hurdle.
Whether you want to improve your marketing messages, develop a more customer-centric approach, produce more sales or achieve any other marketing goal, you need data and insights to guide you.
PPC Signal offers the ability to automate the time-consuming steps in the data analysis process. It delivers finished insights that are ready for action.
This allows you to take a proactive role in your management. You’ll have more time to dedicate to the tasks that matter the most, like creating an unbelievable customer experience!
No matter what mindset or type of thinking you apply to your marketing, one thing is clear – PPC Signal provides tremendous value.
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