Your team knows your product inside out. They know your market, and they know what the data says on how to target them. But there is a bias there, a human bias that exists no matter how much you turn to statistics. How to understand this bias, navigate it and even use it to your advantage?
Your team is a unit of people for a reason – they work cohesively towards the same goal of selling products to your market. And it works well.
But we argue that this very same characteristic causes the kind of bias you don’t want in your marketing campaigns. Without external critique or ideas, your team’s ideas will be limited by what they understand about the product they are already marketing.
Questions, ideas, criticisms, all discussed through the same lens and often repeated time and time again.
This bias limits your team’s ability to truly, effectively understand how your market will receive their messaging. Your team only understands their marketing efforts from their own perspective. But they aren’t targeting themselves.
Imagine you are talking to a friend. You know that in the past your friend has expressed interest in discussing basketball. You have monitored how many text messages they send on the topic, how detailed they are, and whether they then respond to your discussion by playing or watching the sport. And you assess that talking about basketball will make them happy.
But what you don’t know is the ‘why’ behind your friend’s supposed interest in basketball. Are they talking about it because it makes them happy, or because they think you want to talk about it? Or perhaps they want to fit in, or they wish they were good at the sport, or they want to be a part of the culture around the sport?
You have no way of knowing how they receive your discussion about the sport unless you ask them. The same principle applies to your marketing work – how do you really know how your audience receives your campaigns unless you ask them, or someone outside your team who has less of a biased point of view?
The easiest way to combat this bias is to do exactly that – ask someone who is not in your team what they think of your campaigns.
You could ask your target market. Send out polls, questionnaires, get them interacting in that way. But this often falls flat – people are busy, they might not want to share, the polls and questionnaires may not even reach them.
You could ask friends and family, but they are often biased themselves. They will probably tell you what they think you want to hear – they don’t want to upset you.
This is where SenseCheck comes in. Through our platform, you can ask colleagues in marketing what they think of your ideas, campaigns, assets, content and more. We offer a panel of marketing experts of different specialisations who will give you honest, constructive feedback, from an outsider’s point of view.
Check out our How it Works page for more information, or sign up here to try it out for yourself.
