The Age of the Customer requires a different approach to marketing. Decisions are driven by research and data. Data is the currency of today’s approach.

Success depends on deep, long-term relationships with commitment and trust from our clients. The real way to achieve that is to seek a deeper business partnership through empathy – experiencing our clients’ businesses from the inside, and developing a dialogue that enables a better exchange of information resulting in a clearer understanding of problems to solve.

If you really understand the problems, you can build strategies and propose tactics to help solve them.

Our industry has so much opportunity and so many capabilities. We are putting ourselves in a position where we can best utilise all of our resources to build business for our partners by inviting clients in to our Bee Lab for business strategy discussions.

Research has never been more important. The value we bring goes beyond a readership metric – beyond readership – to measuring engagement. The new currency is not the exposures you offer, but the engagement you drive.

We have what we need, but we must do a better job. Tell our story better, manage existing business better, and restructure our operations and communication to continuously improve what we can bring to our clients. 

The engagement we can drive is unparalleled and comes from a variety of channels that can complement and work together to achieve success against the client’s goals and objectives.

We need to educate our advertisers on our actual value. What is more important: The number of people you expose to a client’s advertising, or the actual amount of desired behaviours you drive?

Get in front of your clients today with a meaningful, business-building conversation. Put mechanisms in place to measure results. Report your results to clients frequently, and adjust campaigns to improve as necessary. They will thank you (and pay you for it).

We can’t afford not to. It works.

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