How we work
Introducing the cycle of great marketing
Our clients come to us with all kinds of challenges. While each challenge is unique and deserves a unique approach, we follow a three-step process that ensures that everything we do delivers value and a return on imagination for our clients.
The Walk is an integrated marketing agency, which means we are committed to working in whichever channels or media are going to most effectively combine to solve your business problem. We say that we are media-agnostic – i.e. we don’t believe any one channel or medium is always the answer. Why? Well, how would we know what medium (or media) is going to most effectively reach your audience before we’ve uncovered the insights and defined the strategy that will meet your business challenge?
We approach our work with three steps: insights, strategy and content.
Insights
Insights are the starting blocks for any journey into integrated marketing, as where you’re starting defines both where you need to go and the route you need to travel to get there. In the insights phase we ask questions, investigate, and define the challenge. Insights are not data, or results, or a report from a system. Insights are what we decide the data is telling us about people and their behaviour.
Measurement and reporting
First up, we ensure anything which should be tracked is setup to be measured and can contribute to the overall reporting effort that is an ongoing part of any work we do. We then move on to reporting. It’s crucial to select the right information to report on, in order to glean the right insight into your audience, market or message. As an integrated, media agnostic agency, we ensure measurement and reporting are thought about offline where possible too. We’ll help you connect offline to online efforts where possible and then, with the right reporting setup, we’ll work with you to uncover the insights hidden in this data. We’ll bashfully confess that, for us, this is almost the most exciting part of marketing. The entire direction of what you do can be steered by insights.
Consumer and market research
Understanding your customers and market are crucial to making an impact with your efforts. Our research will help you understand the opportunities available and how to convert those opportunities into something tangible, like a lead or sale. Crucial with this kind of research is having up-to-date information, as both consumers and markets can change quickly, which is why we maintain a focus on fresh data, state-of-the-art data methods and a healthy dose of human touch, bringing the kind of awareness and instinct that is often lacking from purely data-driven activities.
Customer analytics
Understanding your customers has never been easier, with real-time data and deep wells of historical data available for customers at a demographic or individual level. It can be tempting to trust a single data source, but here at The Walk we like to see the entire picture, so we’ll seek out 3rd party data when required to ensure we have a good understanding of the context in which certain behaviour occurs. Through segmentation and predictive modelling, we’ll be better placed to inform your strategy when going to market, ensuring optimal return on your investment.
Segmentation and personas
Breaking down your data to a point where you start to see the individuals, the people, behind the numbers is essential if you’re to really make a connection with your marketing. We’ll leverage whatever tools we can to get there, ensuring we can see your customers’ behaviour as clearly as possible, whether that relates to broad areas of interest, media consumption habits, lifestyle interests or brand and product bias. With this level of understanding, we can create highly personalised content and experiences, increasing engagement. We’ll help you understand who your most valuable customers are and provide insights into how you can find new ones. In this, our focus is always on using whatever methods we can to yield you the greatest returns.
Strategy
Defining a clear, effective, well-structured strategy is key to success in marketing. But what does it take to craft a strategy that will deliver results?
Here at The Walk, our cyclical approach to marketing ensures we constantly refer back to insights to inform our strategy, which in turn informs our content. We start with whatever insights we can possibly glean that confirm we’re believing in the right idea and heading in the right direction, before work begins on the strategy.
Discovery
Discovery is an information gathering phase. Starting with considering what’s come before, we work with you to develop the context of your project, understanding why things were initially done the way they were, where current states fall short of expectation, and any known considerations that will affect the context in the future. The more information we uncover, the more likely we are to deliver a marketing strategy that will deliver on your picture of success.
Insights
From discovery, we like to generate fresh insights which will allow us to accurately define and contextualise the challenge ahead. This is a collaborative step, where your knowledge and experience of your business and market coupled with our expertise, enables us to develop well-informed and relevant insights.
Delivery
Now we’re ready to consider all the factors at play and develop a strategy. Because we’re media agnostic, we’ll look at executing across whatever mediums will be the most effective in influencing your audience. Whether you need a simple guiding document, a full marketing plan for one or multiple quarters, or you require creative consulting and partnership on your strategy, The Walk is here to help in whichever way best helps your marketing results align with your business objectives.
Content
Content is a big word these days. Everyone is producing content, and with good reason, because it’s with content that your brand, product or service is brought to life in the hearts and minds of your audience. And being front of mind with consumers, potential clients and customers is at the core of all marketing and communications.
So, what is content anyway? Is it a video, a blog post, social media activity, print advertising, your website, a billboard or a radio spot? Let’s delve a little deeper and discover what content really is.
Four amazing things to realise about content
It’s everywhere
The FIRST AMAZING THING about content, is that it’s made up of every interaction that a person has with your brand. Going beyond advertising, beyond marketing and content marketing, your content is also every customer experience on the shop floor, or an interaction with a sales person on the phone, every time someone gets frustrated using your website. In fact, you could almost say that by engaging with your brand, audiences are creating content.
It’s in your hands
Content is the crystallisation of your brand – the face and the voice that people see, hear and experience. The way audiences experience your brand could be cerebral, emotional, transactional, or all three. The SECOND AMAZING THING to realise about content is that each encounter audiences have with your brand, no matter what level it’s at, can and should be crafted to tell a seamless, integrated and coherent story to your audience.
It’s your own
The THIRD AMAZING THING about content is that might not be what you think it is. While content could be defined as all the tactical pieces that go out into the world like outdoor advertising, digital campaigns, articles and videos, these are in fact just the channels through which your content is distributed. What actually makes up your content is the idea, the concept, the story that you’re telling. Crucial to this is keeping the coherence of the idea and messages consistent for your segments, across channels and through the sequence of multiple audience interactions. Because content can take any shape or form and turn up where you least expect it, it’s power to influence customer behavior is incredible.
It’s a two-way street
The FOURTH AMAZING THING about content, is that even though it’s something you create and your brand projects outward, it’s what comes back at you where it becomes really interesting. Part of this is the content that you don’t create yourself – user generated content – but still becomes part of your brand. This gives you insight into how your audience sees you and forms, along with all the regular data and metrics, the raw data from which you’ll draw insights. This measurement is crucial, as the feedback, responses, results and learnings that can be garnered are what will inform the evolution of your strategy and, in turn, the next phase of content creation.
What can we do for you?
We offer the critical thinking and industry nous required to effectively give shape to a business challenge so that it can be addressed. We offer the strategic thinking and understanding necessary to craft a strategy that will guide every effort towards the eventual solution. And, we offer the experience and skills needed to produce content across channels and media that will get us there while delivering a great brand experience for your business.
Get in touch to talk to us about how we might apply our process to solving your business challenge.
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