如何利用正确的心态来设计以人们需求为中心的解决方案，在营销中发挥作用？

Have you ever wondered how you think? Thinking is something we do automatically. You can say we think without even thinking about it. The way you program your brain is crucial, especially in marketing. As a marketer, you often encounter different types of problems, data, and obstacles. These challenges require deep thinking, understanding, and action. Thoughts and actions are inseparable. Before you truly commit to taking action, you perceive an activity mentally. The most successful marketing campaigns are not a result of luck or coincidence. They are a product of deep thinking and the fusion of different ways of thinking. This discussion will focus on how your thoughts influence digital marketing. You will also learn strategies aimed at adopting new ways of thinking to achieve your marketing and PPC goals.

What is Lazy Thinking?

Your brain does a lot of thinking all day long, but it has limited willpower. The number of decisions you make in a day and the complexity of those decisions can deplete your mental energy. When your brain starts to lack this willpower, lazy thinking occurs. You start making decisions without much thought. A simple example of understanding lazy thinking is when you try to diet. It’s easy to avoid junk food in the morning and afternoon. Your brain still has enough fuel to make diet-friendly choices to eat healthy food. However, as the day progresses and your mind has been busy since the morning, things change. Now those sweet and salty snacks are almost unavoidable. Everyone has experienced this situation in some form, whether dieting or not. After a long day, when you get home from work, you choose takeout instead of cooking. Usually, this is not because you are physically tired, but mentally exhausted. Your brain doesn’t want to continue making decisions or actively thinking. So, you engage in lazy thinking.   When lazy thinking masquerades as efficient thinking, it is particularly dangerous. You might think that making quick decisions is the best way to maximize your time. However, if you don’t consider each decision you make, in the long run, it will harm you. You will quickly make judgments and identify patterns that don’t actually exist because your brain is busy. When you follow untested patterns or jump to inaccurate conclusions, the impact can be disastrous. You think you are making decisions based on data, which means you will take corresponding actions with high confidence. “How could my insights be wrong?” you say, pushing all your chips to the center of the table. Once the error is realized, the rebound and correcting the damage can be challenging.

Lazy Thinking Is Essentially Linear

In marketing, lazy thinking is almost always linear. There’s nothing wrong with that in itself. Many problems have been successfully solved using linear thinking. What is linear thinking? Linear thinking is logically ordered. It follows a straight line path with a clear starting and ending point. This way of thinking looks for patterns, formulas, and other tools to help understand information. In many cases, applying linear thinking is the right path. Unfortunately, linear thinking often leads to lazy, quick thinking tendencies, resulting in errors in the thinking process. You notice what you think is a pattern and then draw a conclusion. For example, you are playing poker and notice a player sweating and scratching their ear. You think these are signs of this person bluffing. In reality, they could be entirely unrelated events. Linear thinking can also be considered lazy because it is orderly. When there is a sequence or pattern in the thinking process, it has a certain degree of strict predictability. Logic is great for solving non-emotional problems. However, marketing is absolutely non-emotional. It is highly creative. Your marketing messages should evoke emotional responses! This means you need to engage in non-linear thinking. Only when you start thinking beyond this logical process can you find exciting, fresh strategies that lead to long-term, exponential growth.  

What Is Critical Thinking?

Critical thinking is another way of approaching marketing thinking. It is self-guided and disciplined. It tries to address issues with reason, fairness, and empathy. It is the best way to approach a thinking process when analyzing, evaluating, and finding ways to improve. Critical thinkers are experts in identifying various perspectives, needs, and other components involved in the process. Therefore, this is an excellent mindset for marketers. One of the issues with the linear approach is that it does not consider random events or changes that occur. These types of events are common in marketing. There are always trends and changes that affect your business and the market. You need a critical thinking mindset to be prepared for the chaos that unfolds! Critical thinking can be said to be a three-part process. Consciously recognizing that there is a problem to solve. Considering all the facts involved in the problem. What is true? What is the emotional aspect of the problem? How do your emotions affect your thought process, and how can you overcome these feelings? Through this process, you will create more successful marketing campaigns to achieve long-term success.

How Your Thinking Process Affects Decision Making

Thinking enables you to understand, explain, interpret, represent, or simulate any information. It is a permanent activity that allows you to make decisions and predict things happening around your world. Your marketing strategies have needs, goals, and desires. Thinking allows you to make decisions that contribute to achieving these goals. This is to keep you moving in the right direction! Ideally, you should align your way of thinking with your marketing goals. This will help you make the right decisions to further achieve these goals. For example, if your goal is to identify seasonal trends, a linear way of thinking may work well. Seasonal trends follow repetitive patterns that attract linear thinking processes. However, if you are looking for new ways to generate leads, you need to abandon linear thinking and adopt a more non-linear approach. This will provide you with creative, out-of-the-box thinking that you need to invent new ways to attract new audiences. When you passively monitor the performance of your advertising series, a critical thinking approach is the best. This way of thinking focuses on all factors and conditions to critically analyze why changes occur and which changes need to be responded to. The challenge is being able to balance these different mindsets and switch between them. Often, humans are set in a linear way of thinking as it is the most logical. This natural tendency makes it difficult for people to adopt new problem-solving methods. You may think you are thinking non-linearly, but in reality, you are still stuck in the natural linear trend.  

Thinking Needs to Be Customer-Centric

Regardless of the mindset you find yourself in, you need to consider your customers. In other words, don’t think about improving marketing just to boost performance. Instead, your mission should be to enhance your marketing to provide the best possible experience for your customers. The question is not: “How do I get more customers?” The question is: “How do I create an amazing experience that makes customers want to engage?” Answering these questions requires data, creativity, and intuition. You need to know what works, what doesn’t, and what can be improved. This is why critical thinking is so effective for marketers. It considers the feelings and behaviors of customers, as well as the implications suggested by your own expertise and data. You may need more information and data on what customers want and need. These crucial details will help you deliver an exceptional experience. To get this information, the best strategy is to ask. Surveys, social media interactions, feedback forms, and direct conversations are the best ways to understand customers. When you truly understand your customers, it will reflect in your activities and marketing messages.

Customer-Centric Strategies Are Top-Notch

The importance of customer-centric strategies cannot be overstated. It’s not just a matter of considering customer needs in your decisions. The ultimate goal is to provide a personalized marketing experience for everyone. This is the focus of digital marketing in this age. It’s also what customers expect. If you can’t meet expectations and view customers as individuals, they will look for other companies that can provide this personalized experience. This is another reason why marketers need to be cautious of linear thinking. This mindset often views customers as a whole audience rather than individual viewers. Customers have a keen sense of what types of marketing messages are relevant, personalized, and valuable to them. When an email misses these markers, it is considered spam. The problem is creating personalized marketing messages for everyone. First, you need a lot of data. This is data from verified sources that have been cleaned, filtered, collected, and organized. After collecting and cleaning the data, you need tools to analyze this massive amount of information. Analysis requires thorough and timely action. If you can’t filter all this data in real-time, you will struggle to meet the latest needs of customers. Third-party tools provide great help, especially those equipped with artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities. If you can automate the tedious part of collecting, filtering, and analyzing data, you can focus all your attention on customers and their needs.  

Creative Thinking and Customer-Centric Approach

The final element required to provide the customer experience expected by today’s consumers is creative thinking. While logical thinking and critical thinking have their advantages, they don’t work well when developing customer-centric approaches. On the other hand, a creative mindset can help you think like your customers and think about what they want. Through this way of thinking, you can design innovative ways to attract customers. In an era where customers are bombarded with marketing messages and brand content from all angles, standing out is a real challenge. Your customers are wary of marketing efforts that are irrelevant or lack value to them. Any content that is seen as spam will be ignored. At the same time, they are interested in new experiences they have never seen before. When you can meet this expectation, the rewards are huge. Not only will you grab their attention, but when audiences engage with new and exciting things, they are more likely to share them with others. It’s about creating an emotional response. If you can make your audience feel something and appeal to their emotions, you will have a lifelong supporter. When thinking creatively about providing this type of experience, there are a few things to keep in mind.  

Create with Customers, Not Just for Them

With social media platforms, customers are not just consumers but active participants in your business. They interact, comment, share, submit content, and have a keen interest in your business’s success. They want to be involved. Being customer-centric means creating strategies that make consumers feel involved. When your business succeeds, they succeed too.

Make Everyone Part of the Team

Successful creative marketing requires a village—or at least a creative team. Your marketing should not rely on one person or a single strategy. Instead, it should get your entire team involved and see these people as an extension of your marketing department. When you involve more people in the brainstorming process, you will come up with more creative conclusions! Additionally, you will gain insights and expertise from various fields within the business. This will give you a comprehensive understanding of who your customers are and what they care about most.

Injecting Creativity into Your Brand Identity

You can use many channels, content formats, platforms, media types, and other tools to develop your brand experience and identity. Leverage all of these to have the most powerful experience. Each piece of work will add to the creativity of your brand identity and overall existence. The more channels and strategies you add, the more unique and creative ways you can package and deliver your messages. This also provides you with more places to attract potential customers. An essential part of successful, customer-centric strategies is allowing the audience to engage where they like.

Stay Agile

Smaller companies tend to view their size as a disadvantage. Compared to large enterprises, small businesses have fewer budgets and resources. However, they do have one advantage: agility.   You can change strategies and adjust them on the fly. On the other hand, larger corporations have to carefully review and approve every change. This means they have a slower response to market changes. When customers develop new interests or behaviors, smaller companies can adapt to those needs first. Take advantage of this advantage!

Analyze and Adjust Time and Time Again

Providing the perfect customer experience is a process. There is no real finish line because customers are always evolving. To achieve a customer-centric marketing approach, you should constantly modify your definition of what an amazing customer experience is. How can you make it better? The more effort you put into perfecting the customer experience, the closer you are to the goal. Customers will notice your commitment to creating new and exciting experiences.  

The Complexity of Data Is the Real Obstacle

Data plays a crucial role in your ability to provide a personalized experience to your customers. Marketers need to know what data to collect, its meaning, and why it is important. This is not easy as data can be very complex, especially with large amounts of it. Take your PPC account, for example. A medium-sized Google Ads campaign may have 100 different ad groups, each with over 10 keywords. If you are running 25 campaigns simultaneously, you are looking at over 25,000 keywords’ worth of data. This is a lot of information to collect, digest, and understand. Similarly, time is a factor. If you can’t process all this data quickly, you will react to old changes and risk missing out on opportunities or let potential risks go unnoticed. The best way to improve the effectiveness of your PPC campaigns is to minimize this complexity. Before doing this, you need to understand how complex your campaigns actually are. This means figuring out how many metrics and dimensional combinations exist in your campaigns. Unless you want to calculate these thousands or even millions of combinations yourself, you need the help of tools. PPCexpo’s Combination Calculator uses your Google Ads account and quickly displays how many data combinations there are. You can access the Combination Calculator here. As you make changes to your Google Ads account, you can see how it affects the number of combinations. This helps you understand what makes your data more or less complex.

Simplify with Automation Using PPC Signals

As mentioned earlier, one of the essential elements of providing an exceptional, customer-centric marketing experience is using third-party tools. Specifically, implement third-party tools with artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities. These software solutions are rapidly becoming a necessity as they are the only way to rapidly deal with the scale and complexity of marketing data. Keep in mind, your marketing data is constantly changing. You need to look at changes on a monthly, weekly, daily, or even hourly basis. This is impossible to handle manually. Even if you have a team that can monitor data 24/7, it would be a massive waste of resources and cause headaches for all involved. By using automation solutions, you can overcome this complexity. This saves precious time that can then be spent on more critical activities, such as improving customer-centric methods. Not to mention, you will have a continuous stream of marketing opportunities to pursue and avoid risks. This makes optimizing your PPC campaigns and marketing strategies much simpler. PPC Signal is one of the best third-party PPC marketing tools you can invest in. It ensures you have critical thinking when analyzing paid marketing.  

What Is PPC Signal, and Why Do You Need It?

PPC Signal provides a monitoring system that is always online and always alert, allowing you to identify new ways to improve your ad campaigns. The system monitors if there are any significant changes, trends, outliers, or other patterns in your account. As these changes develop, it will track and record them for you. When one of these trends becomes important enough to warrant attention, PPC Signal alerts you to the change. You can further investigate what is happening once a trend reaches a significant level. PPC Signal provides you with all the information you need. It even suggests follow-up actions!   You can view all signals at once or filter results based on which metrics are most critical to your goals. For example, suppose you notice that the number of conversions your ad campaigns generate is lower than usual. You choose to filter signals by conversion rate. PPC Signal immediately shows you the following insights: In both cases, the conversion rate is decreasing. PPC Signal shows you the activities, keywords, and time of day involved, as well as the significance of the downward change. This allows you to quickly get to the bottom of each signal, whether it’s positive or negative. You can click on the browse button to view a more detailed view of the signal. This is the expanded view of the selected signal: With this visualization, you can see the entire timeline of the change. You can also click to view the information in table form. When you are ready to correct this negative slump, you have two options. Design solutions yourself with your critical and creative thinking. Follow the actions suggested by PPC Signal.

Wrap Up

Data is an inevitable obstacle. Whether you want to improve marketing messages, develop more customer-centric approaches, generate more sales, or achieve any other marketing goal, you need data and insights to guide you. PPC Signal can automate the time-consuming steps in the data analysis process. It provides comprehensive insights for you to act upon. This allows you to actively manage your role. You will have more time to focus on the most important tasks, such as creating incredible customer experiences! Regardless of the mindset or thinking type you adopt in marketing, one thing is clear—PPC Signal provides tremendous value. Please do not modify the img tags within the article, keep them as they are for a perfect HTML structure.