When I look back on what has pre­oc­cu­pied me over the last 12 months, I will say that much of it has been spent “step­ping back” and try­ing to look at the big­ger pic­ture. As online inter­ac­tions have taken a big­ger and big­ger chunk of our lives (you’ll notice that both of the recre­ational options I men­tioned have online com­po­nents woven into them), try­ing to under­stand how our actions play out against a broader online back­drop has been the thing I think about most often.

We dig­i­tal mar­keters tend to take that “big­ger pic­ture” and break it into pieces, try­ing to make sense of it by focus­ing on one small piece. Dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing lends itself to this minute focal depth because of the rich­ness of each piece. Even the small­est chunk of an online inter­ac­tion has a lot to explore, with a cor­re­spond­ing mound of data to ana­lyze. We could spend hours drilling into how peo­ple use Linked In, or Twit­ter, or Google+ or Face­book.  We could dig into the depths of the Panda update or how local results show up on Bing and never come up for air.

But think back to what, at one time, was another hol­i­day sea­son pas­time. Some of us remem­ber when we used to get a jig­saw puz­zle for Christ­mas. You’d dump out all 5000 of those lit­tle pho­to­graphic morsels and then begin to piece it together into a coher­ent image of some­thing (usu­ally a land­scape involv­ing a barn or a cov­ered bridge). Suc­cess lie not only in exam­in­ing each piece, but also in using the image on the box top to help under­stand how each piece fit into the big­ger pic­ture. With­out under­stand­ing what that big­ger pic­ture was sup­posed to look like, you could exam­ine each piece until the cows came home (again, often a topic for jig­saw art).

So, much of my 2011 was spent try­ing to under­stand what the pic­ture on the top of the puz­zle box was sup­posed to look like. What would ulti­mately tie all the pieces together?  In physics terms, I guess you could say I’m been look­ing for the Uni­fied Field The­ory of online mar­ket­ing. And you know what I found? You won’t find it by focus­ing on tech­nol­ogy, no mat­ter how cool it is. Foursquare mar­ket­ing or search retar­get­ing or hyper­local opti­miza­tion are all just pieces of a much big­ger puz­zle. The real pic­ture emerges when you look at how peo­ple nav­i­gate the events of their lives and the deci­sions they must make. It’s there where the big pic­ture emerges.

A few weeks ago I was speak­ing to a group of mar­keters about the emerg­ing role of mobile. This was no group of dig­i­tal slouches. They knew their mobile stuff. They had tested var­i­ous cam­paign approaches and honed their tac­tics. But the results were uneven. Some were hits but more were misses. They knew a lot about the pieces, but didn’t have the box top pic­ture to guide them.

My mes­sage (for those that know me) was not a sur­pris­ing one – under­stand how to lever­age mobile by first under­stand­ing how peo­ple use mobile to do they things they intend to do.  Don’t jump on a QR code cam­paign sim­ply because you read some­where that QR codes are a red hot mar­ket­ing tool. See first if QR codes fit in the big pic­ture in any pos­si­ble way. If you do that, you might find that QR codes are a puz­zle piece that actu­ally belongs in another box.

After deliv­er­ing my ser­mon about the impor­tance of under­stand­ing their respec­tive big pic­tures, I asked my favorite ques­tion: “How many of you have done any sub­stan­tial qual­i­ta­tive research with your cus­tomers in the past year?” Not one hand went up. This was a group of puz­zle assem­blers work­ing with­out any box top pic­ture to guide them.

If you want to sum up my past year and fit it into one final para­graph for 2011, it’s this: Under­stand your Cus­tomer! Spend a good part of 2012 dig­ging deep into their deci­sion process and their online paths. Make it per­sonal. Stalk if nec­es­sary. Ask ques­tions that start with “why.” Observe. Make notes. Broaden your online read­ing list to include blogs like Sci­ence Daily, Futu­rity, Neu­ro­science Mar­ket­ing and Homo Con­sumer­i­cus. At some point, the big­ger pic­ture will begin to emerge. And I bet it will be much more inter­est­ing than a land­scape with a barn and some cows in it.

Orig­i­nally pub­lished in Mediapost’s Search Insider December 29, 2011


Biography / Resume : Gord Hotchkiss is the founder and senior vice president of Enquiro, now part of Mediative. He is renowned in the industry for his expertise when it comes to understanding online user and search behaviour. He and the Enquiro team have built a solid reputation for being the leading experts when it comes to understanding what happens on a search portal and why. Before Enquiro, Gord was chairman and director of SEMPO (The Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization), he worked as a columnist for MediaPost and Search Engine Land, and he was a regular speaker at industry conferences and events. Gord is also the author of The BuyerSphere Project: How Business Buys from Business in a digital marketplace.