How Investing Makes for a Better Marketer

How Investing Makes for a Better Marketer

I started investing at the end of 2019 but increased my time exponentially last year.  As I spent more and more time dissecting companies and the market, I realized I was learning skills that helped me become a better marketer. Putting money into investing requires a certain time spent to ensure that the investment profits over time. It’s like joining a gym in the sense that the monthly cost encourages participation.

One of the most important skills of any performance marketer is the ability to analyze data and turn that analysis into insight. Analyzing corporate financial reports and forecasting that company’s increase or decline using key performance metrics is an extremely analogous skill. While performance marketing is dependent on consumer response, investing is based on investor response. Having a broad sense of what C-suite executives are looking for to attract investors and how those overlap or don’t with the KPIs being used to track success in your own department can offer additional insight. Finally, as competitors are analyzed both to determine their strengths and weaknesses, those learnings can be applied.

Employing audience-led marketing strategy requires that we first understand the audience. At the company level, this is often done by looking solely at the target audience with a propensity to buy. However, doing that sometimes misses other opportunities as consumer behavior shifts. Researching the stock market would include looking at audience behaviors more broadly addressing, for example, consumers’ desire to travel post pandemic. Focusing first on the consumer need helps explore the company fit within that need rather than in the reverse order. Doing that will continue to cultivate an audience-led marketing approach.

In a busy world of back-to-back Zoom meetings, it’s sometimes difficult to pay attention to the world. So many marketers forget the importance of opening their eyes and watching what consumers are doing right before their eyes. Taking the moment to ask questions and listen. Watching what different consumer segments in your own networks are reacting can have great value in picking up behavioral nuances that can be reacted to in marketing strategy.

In The Medici Effect, the author discusses how the learnings from one industry can motivate an innovative revelation in another. For example, an architect designed a building in Zimbabwe which didn’t need air conditioning as inspired by an ant hill and how it’s built to encourage cooling. Focusing your attention on different industries can help spark ideas for innovation.

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