In this episode Chris is live at the Work Smarter conference where he goes over his 3 step framework to create an unfair competitive advantage through your marketing efforts.

Step one: Customer Insights

It is absolutely imperative that you learn to collect insights. Insights from your team, insights from your customers, and insights from the market as a whole. Over the last decade, in large part due to martech vendors, marketers have been trained to rely solely on quantitative data. When you look at quantitative data, the thing that you don’t get is the “why”. And without the “why” you are just guessing. This is why you need to learn to collect qualitative insights. In this episode, Chris talks about how to collect qualitative customer insights at scale and in real-time.

Step two: Synthesizing the insights into strategy

Once you have all the insights you need to learn how to synthesize them. Qualitative data doesn’t fit into a spreadsheet for data analysis, so you need to learn how to take what you’ve learned and turn that into an actionable strategy. Chris talks about how he has been doing this for the past 10 years.

Step 3: Creating Demand

Creating demand is all about going out and educating the 99% of the market that aren’t ready to buy or even category aware. Most companies spend time competing for existing demand—cold calling, SEO, Google ads, etc. This is capturing demand. And when you focus on capturing demand, you compete with every other commodity player in the space. When you focus on creating demand and educating the audience with no intent to close them into a sale, it actually leads to more sales. People view you as the stand-alone expert in the category and never even compare you to other vendors.

Join us every Tuesday at 4 PM ET to ask your question on TikTok by following @chriswalker171

Megan Lott, MPH, RD, Deputy Director of Healthy Eating Research