The MacKellar Memo | February 2023

Hope Springs Eternal

Spring is always a wonderful time in Colorado. You get to experience 15 different seasons within a single hour, spring skiing is just around the corner, and hope springs eternal ahead of the new Rockies season (and crashes down by the second day of the season).

Our upcoming shift from winter into spring is always enjoyable (except for all the muddy dogs that must now be wiped off), but it’s also illustrative from a marketing perspective. Just as we experience shifts in our daily lives as we move from one period of the year into another, so too do our client’s prospects. 

Yes, we’re pivoting this post within 3 sentences from the crushing doom of being a Rockies fan into buying seasons and trends for marketing. People say miracles can’t happen. When they do, show them this post. 

But in all seriousness, the changing seasons can provide us a good point to briefly touch on the importance of understanding our target audiences. In fact, it’s one of the things CSG prides itself on the most — the industry expertise that comes with living and breathing your industry on a daily basis means we gain unique insights into our clients’ prospects that your average digital marketer simply won’t have. Those insights can be the difference between an okay campaign and a lights out campaign. 

With advances in technology, anyone with access to Muck Rack can find a reporter’s contact information, or can use demographic targeting through a third-party data provider within a DSP.  But what those platforms and technology can’t tell us is what those prospects are doing and thinking on a daily basis. Technology can’t tell you that as good as Meta’s targeting might be, banking an entire campaign on reaching teachers during the day probably isn’t the best approach given they can’t access the platform during working hours when school is in session, but during breaks it’s your go-to. 

Spending the time to understand the seasonal trends for prospects isn’t as simple as just Googling [INDUSTRY] buying cycle. Yes, you can definitely Google and find a rough set of answers to your question, but that’s not a blanket answer. What else can you do to gather additional information?

One spot to start is by talking to real-world customers. Yes, actually talk to real life customers (and, ideally, former customers). They can give you some incredibly valuable insights into how their buying processes evolves throughout the year, especially if the client sells repeat products based on an predictable budget cycle, like school districts or government contracts. 

You can also send yourself through the sales process to experience it first-hand. See how long it takes to go through the sales process from start to finish, and make sure that timing lines up with what the client is telling lines up with the real-world amount of time needed to move through the process.

Just another thing to keep in mind to ensure your next campaign springs forward (I’ll see myself out now…).