What Marketers Can Learn From Lenses

Every marketer knows that the power of segmenting lies in using more than just a couple of variables. The more layers you can add to your segments, the deeper and more meaningful insights you uncover. 

We love to think about segmenting differently and use some unusual methods to make them smarter, easier, and more accurate. Here are some ideas:

Takeaways
1. Visual Engagement: Incorporating visual elements in marketing can enhance engagement and communication with the audience.
2. Different Perspectives: Learning from the concept of lenses, marketers can benefit from adopting different perspectives and angles to approach their strategies.
3. Focused Targeting: Just as lenses focus on specific details, marketers can improve targeting by focusing on their ideal audience segments.
4. Clarity and Precision: Lenses provide clarity and precision; similarly, marketers should aim for clear and concise messaging to convey their brand’s value effectively.
5. Zooming In and Out: Marketers can learn to zoom in on specific details (micro level) while also zooming out to understand the bigger picture (macro level) for well-rounded strategies.

Be Aware Of Biases And Blind Spots

Marketing is a lens we are all wearing. It’s not just for marketers; it’s for everyone. And it’s not just about marketing; it’s about how we see the world and make decisions in our daily lives.

The good news is, because of this, you can change your lens or switch to a new one that may help you see things differently so that they can work better for you. Here are some examples of how our senses affect how we see the world:

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Change The Lens You Are Looking Through

To change the lens you are looking through, look at something in your everyday life. If a problem arises, ask yourself how someone else might view it. Then, try to see things from that person’s point of view what would they think?

For example, You’re having trouble getting your customers to trust you and buy from you. How could they feel when they don’t trust someone? 

They wouldn’t feel good about themselves or the company they’re working with because no one wants to be associated with something shady and suspicious. 

So maybe instead of trying to get them to like your product or service more than their current provider (like most companies will do), focus on earning their trust by showing them how trustworthy and professional you can be! 

This way people won’t just say “they’ve done this before so I’ll give them another chance” but rather “I trust this company because I know that if I have any issues there will be someone who cares about helping me out.”

Lenses Can Help You Take A Fresh Look At Your Business

Lenses are a way to see things in a new way, and marketing leaders can use them to take fresh looks at their businesses.

Using lenses is like looking through a special pair of glasses or an opera-glass. It allows you to see things that you might otherwise miss or overlook. This can help you identify new opportunities, problems, and solutions and they can be applied to all areas of your business!

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Change The Lens To See Common Problems In New Ways

Here are some examples of changing lenses and their effect on your perspective:

Changing the “this is the way it’s always been” lens to “I don’t understand why this is the way it’s always been” enables you to identify patterns that are no longer useful, like using a fax machine when you have email access. 

This gives you new ways of solving problems, like using an app to send documents or paying someone on Fiverr to transcribe audio files into text format (they’re fast).

Changing the “this is what happened” lens with a “how do I change my behavior?” approach invites reflection about how you react to situations that happen over time. 

For example, if your company lost $100 million due to poor business decisions made by upper management many years ago, asking yourself how you could change your behavior might lead you towards one of two paths: 

1) finding new ways for current management teams at all levels within your organization not to make similar mistakes again (i.e., implement compliance training programs); or 

2) finding ways for future generations who grew up knowing nothing but digital technology will still rely heavily on printed materials because it provides better explanations than any website could offer (i.e., print books).

To Change The Lens, Ask Different Questions

When you have a problem, you can ask the same question over and over and get different answers. That’s because the question itself is part of the problem. 

Changing your questions to get new answers requires asking yourself some fundamental questions: What assumptions are you making about your customers? Why are you asking these questions? What would happen if we asked them differently?

There are two ways to change your lens: by asking different questions or by changing your point of view. The first approach is easier for marketers because we’re used to asking people what they think about something (or how they feel about it). 

But those kinds of surveys often lead us astray because they’re usually focused on getting people to talk about themselves which leads them away from thinking critically about their attitudes toward products or services and more toward seeing things through their unique lenses. 

The second approach requires marketers instead to look at other businesses that have taken similar approaches as theirs but with more success; then consider why this might be so; 

Then try out some ideas based on what they’ve learned from these other businesses’ successes.

And failures before bringing them back into their own organization’s culture as best practices that could potentially improve everything from customer satisfaction levels up to sales processes (referencing back again here: “The power of empathetic listening”).

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Use Lenses In Your Everyday Life

For marketers, the most important thing to remember is that lenses are just tools. Because they’re so easy to use, you can use them in your everyday life without even thinking about it, and once you have a lens in mind and see how it works.

You’ll start seeing the world through that lens constantly. And then one day, when your boss asks you what makes people buy products like yours instead of their competitors’, all this information will come rushing back: 

“It’s because consumers who use our product are more interested in connecting with other consumers than they are in getting the best possible deal on something new.”

Earn Trust By Looking Through Your Customers’ Lenses

Customer trust is a fundamental ingredient for building healthy relationships.

Trust is earned by showing your customers that you understand their world and that you have no intention of taking advantage of them.

As marketers, we can use this information to build better marketing campaigns. For example: if we’re selling a sweater, we might want to show how it would look on our model in different settings (e.g., at home with pajamas or at the office with a suit). 

If we’re selling shampoo, we should probably make sure that people know why they need shampoo rather than conditioner (and vice versa).

See How Your Customers Are Impacted By Other Businesses

Let’s start with the obvious: your customers are affected by other businesses. They use them and interact with them every day. You can learn a lot about your own business by watching how their relationships with those companies play out, whether they’re competitors or not.

Your customers are also affected by their own lives and goals if you think of these as “inner circles” surrounding your customer, then you can see how everything from family obligations to personal goals affects their purchasing decisions (and vice versa).

Then there are the people who work for and around your customers: these people have inner circles of their own that affect the way someone thinks about buying from you.

Their colleagues might work at competitor companies; friends might have strong opinions on certain brands; even parents might have opinions on what kids should do for fun!

Finally, there is one more circle: time itself! It can take years for someone to develop an opinion about something, which means that marketing campaigns targeting potential buyers need to be designed accordingly; 

Once they mature into loyal purchasers over time, though, it makes sense not only to maintain but also grow upon existing relationships through continued interaction after purchase so that quality remains high while costs stay low over time too!

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See How Your Customers Are Impacted By Other Parts Of Their Lives

You can also use lenses to see how your customers are impacted by other parts of their lives. For example, if you’re a fitness brand, it’s important to understand how customers feel about the food they eat. 

If they eat healthfully, they’ll have a more positive attitude toward exercise and will be more likely to stick with it. 

Or perhaps they’re passionate about their careers and want more time to focus on them instead of eating right or exercising regularly enough in which case it’s worth understanding why they don’t prioritize these things in their daily lives.

These insights don’t just give you an idea of who your customer is; they also help you find out where there’s room for improvement and what direction would work best for them in the future

Show Them What Is Possible From A New Perspective

One of the best ways to learn from lenses is to show them what is possible from a new perspective. 

A lens can provide that perspective for you by teaching you how to reach a goal, how to achieve it, and even how to create the conditions in which your customer will be able to achieve his or her goals. 

This sounds like a lot of work, but when you look at it through the lens of marketing, there are several ways in which this can be done.

Look For Ways To Help Your Customers Achieve Their Goals

To help your customers achieve their goals, you need to understand them. If you don’t know what it is they’re trying to accomplish, how can you possibly help them?

Let’s look at an example of a goal that’s not easy for many people: losing weight. There are so many ways this could be achieved running more, eating less junk food, and taking the stairs instead of the elevator.

And each one may require different methods or tools for it to happen successfully. 

An effective marketer would be able to recognize that there are many different ways that someone could approach this goal and offer products and services accordingly (for example workout DVDs vs. fitness trackers).

A great place where we see companies helping people achieve their goals is on sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo where entrepreneurs can crowdfund their business ideas instead of having to rely solely on investors who might not understand what they’re trying to do with their idea!

Understand Your Customer’s Needs Beyond Their Stated Needs

Lenses help us see beyond the surface of a problem, so we can understand the underlying cause. And once we understand that, it becomes easier to understand what’s causing it and how to solve it.

For example, let’s say that as a marketer you’re looking at how to improve conversions on your website. 

You might start by asking people who don’t convert why they didn’t buy something and then directly ask them if they want more information or want to make a purchase later. But that’s just one way of solving the customer experience problem you’re trying to solve.

Instead of starting with what your customer says about themselves (what their stated need is), consider starting with what their behavior tells you about themselves (their real needs). 

For example: instead of asking customers why they didn’t buy something when they visited your site last week, 

Try asking them why they were interested in visiting the website in the first place and if there was anything specific at all that led them there or even brought them back again today!

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Humanize Your Business To Help Your Customers Connect With You

You’ll want to make sure that you are humanizing your business and making it relatable to your customers. To do this effectively, there are several things you can do:

Listen

Listen to what they have to say and be empathetic in how you approach them. Don’t get caught up in the noise of other marketing tools like Facebook or AdWords; instead, focus on listening to what the customer needs from their experience with your brand.

Ask Questions

Ask questions about what they liked or didn’t like about their previous interactions with your company and why that was so important for them (or not). 

This gives insight into how people respond when making decisions about products or services, which will help inform future efforts as well as provide data points for test marketing campaigns later down the road!

Avoid Repeating Old Patterns That Don’t Work Anymore

A lens is a tool that helps you see things in a new way. It can help you understand your current situation and bring clarity to the challenges you face. 

It can also help you imagine what else might be possible beyond your current perspective, whether that’s working from home instead of commuting to an office or opening up new markets for your products.

But lenses only work if they’re used correctly and often, when we start using them, we don’t know how to use them at all! 

When many people first begin using lenses through their work with clients or in their own lives, it sometimes results in more frustration than anything else: “Why am I still having problems?” “I’m doing everything I know how.”

This section of our guide on marketing strategy development is based on lenses (which will continue tomorrow).

We’ll discuss some common reasons why people have trouble making progress toward their goals and outline some strategies for overcoming these challenges so that you can make progress with confidence rather than doubt!

Conclusion

What we like about lenses is that they can be used in any situation, with any group of people. They help you see the world as other people do and bring a fresh perspective to every challenge. 

You can use them on your own or with teams, in business meetings, and in personal relationships alike. 

Lenses give you a way of seeing things differently without being too prescriptive about what should change; instead, they empower you to play around with the world until you find the best solution for your specific situation. Let us know how it goes when you use them next time!

Further Reading

Explore these additional resources to enhance your understanding:

Understanding Complex Phenomena Through Data Analysis Short Description: Delve into the process of unraveling intricate phenomena using data analysis methodologies.

Google Lens: A Marketer’s Guide Short Description: Discover how Google Lens can revolutionize your marketing strategies, bringing visual search and recognition to the forefront.

Marketing with a Different Lens Short Description: Gain insights from various retail verticals and learn how adopting a different perspective can enhance your marketing approach.

FAQs

Here are some common questions related to the topic:

What is the significance of data analysis in understanding complex phenomena?

Data analysis plays a crucial role in deciphering intricate phenomena by extracting meaningful insights from large datasets, allowing for informed decision-making.

How can Google Lens benefit marketers in their strategies?

Google Lens empowers marketers by enabling visual search and recognition, bridging the gap between physical and digital worlds, and providing new engagement opportunities.

What can marketers learn from other retail verticals?

Marketers can gain valuable insights from diverse retail sectors, understanding unique strategies and approaches that can be adapted and applied to their own marketing efforts.

How does adopting a different perspective impact marketing strategies?

Adopting a different perspective encourages creativity and innovation in marketing strategies, potentially leading to the discovery of unconventional yet effective approaches.

How does visual content enhance consumer engagement?

Visual content captivates consumers’ attention and enhances engagement due to its immediate impact and ability to convey information more efficiently than text alone.