Steps Toward Building Emotional Connections with Your Audiences and Increasing Revenue

A fully engaged customer or donor who feels emotionally connected to your organization is key to increased revenue. You need to know who your audience is and what will motivate them to engage. The insights for building those emotional connections that drive loyalty and advocacy for your organization or brand may be hidden in your database, or you could need research.  How do you know?

It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that a good database manager can provide all the insights needed. But, to get those insights, you need more. You need a team of data experts and an experienced strategist to orchestrate what data is collected, how it is analyzed, decide if research is needed and to extract actionable insights. 

Let’s take a look at the different skill sets needed on your data team. 

The Conductor
Like an orchestra conductor, you need someone with strategic vision to lead the team and oversee all the different activity. The Conductor knows how to bring team members together and get them speaking the same language. The Conductor not only understands the potential of data but has a strong understanding of business objectives and the need to drive revenue. 

This strategic thinker knows that the best place to start planning is at the end, with the objective. By working backwards from the objective, the Conductor ensures there are processes for accessing and collecting the right data, storing the data, analyzing and reporting the data. Ultimately, the Conductor is responsible for translating the insights into creative direction for the development of an action plan with marketing tactics that will resonate with your audiences, make them feel more connected and motivate them to engage with your organization.     

The Wrangler
A knowledgeable data manager is needed to design the processes for the collection and storage of data that make it possible to maintain data hygiene and issue reports that can be used to create engaging customer and donor experiences. The Wrangler needs a strong understanding of database management and an awareness of different management systems. Streamlining systems, building templates and repeatable processes, the Wrangler is responsible for ensuring that useable data is available and accessible to the rest of the team.

The Analyst
Knowing how to look for and find the nuggets of information that are useful in building emotional connections is the work of the Analyst. In addition to the math and coding skills typically associated with this job function, the Analyst needs strong critical thinking skills and the ability to set and test hypotheses against business objectives.

The Visualizer
Tabled data (columns and rows) is rarely the best way to show data in a presentation, it’s just too much detail for most people to absorb. Data Visualizers look for patterns and trends hidden in the numbers and transform them into visuals that make the information more accessible and understandable. Common examples include:

• heat maps to illustrate geographical concentrations
• pie charts to illustrate proportion of interest
• bar charts to illustrate differences between audience segments
• line charts to illustrate trends over time

All of these can make it easier to understand how communications can be personalized, localized and made more relevant to audiences, building stronger, more emotional connections. 

The Creative
In the end, even the best orchestrating, wrangling, analyzing and visualizing of data can still fail to help you start building emotional connections with your audience without someone to translate the insights into direct mail that gets opened, emails that get clicked, events that are attended, advertising that gets noticed and other marketing tactics that engage your audiences.

The right team is worth the investment
There are a lot of organizational benefits to having a well-oiled data machine. Aside from the operational benefits of streamlined, more efficient processes, greater agility and more consistent, predictable performance, great data management can help you engage with audiences, making them feel more emotionally connected to your organization or brand. That translates into audiences that are more loyal and more likely to make recommendations or referrals. And that drives revenue. 

If your organization isn’t already talking about how to use your data to build emotional connections with your target audience and drive revenue, now is the time to start. 

Take a look at the case studies at phoenixinnovate.com. Phoenix Innovate has been helping organizations of all sizes manage and analyze their data for more than 10 years to build stronger, emotional connections with audiences and achieve astonishingly good results.

We would welcome the opportunity to talk about how we can help your organization. 

Phoenix Innovate is Detroit’s only marketing firm guaranteeing results. We focus on understanding, finding and keeping audiences. The results are transformative and sustainable. Our immersive approach harnesses a powerful combination of research, data, vision and creativity to build emotionally-engaged, lasting relationships for our non-profit and for-profit clients. We call this Authentic Marketing.