A helpful metaphor for an important question 

If we think of human beings as living nuclei - little in size but giants in their own particularities, it's easy to deduce the places where they agglomerate are, by nature, plural. This heterogeneity fits the family group, personal relationships, and work routine, and gets more intense as globalization makes societies more inclusive and horizontal.

In the corporate sphere, managing the Organizational Diversity is like the spoon that keeps all the ingredients moving without letting them stick to the bottom of the pan and burn. This is exemplified in a publicity agency that, as time went by, diversified its staff - reproducing an expressive global trend.

A useful example 

Developing this example, we can picture a company no longer composed of employees with the same physical features and converging subjectivities. The variety of genders, ethnicities, positions, and skills drew a new profile for the organization in such a natural way that, although perceived, the new brand's identity wasn't managed. Over time, social bubbles and conflicts of coexistence were formed, and maintaining a culture of distance, the agency began to be threatened by the deficit in human treatment.

The plurality of the corporate environment

Well, organizations are, above all, conglomerates of pieces that, to coexist, need to be cohesively gathered. The first step to avoiding a problem to expand is to understand it, and Organizational Climate research ends up being a great deal to identify the existing conflicts and their causes. Evaluating the agency's internal environment can be divided into phases, such as investigation, communication, implementation, and monitoring. The process isn't finished when it ends, but must be continuous.

Data collection is also important both because consistency between values and actions is essential to retain stakeholders and because aligned purposes between companies and employees are nothing less than vital. Preventing conflicts requires management systems that allow open discussions with various points of view, especially if they are different.

Clear solutions

Once the initial assessment is made, it's time to process information and decide what to do to increase the team's integration and consequent productivity. The proposal is to awake or stimulate in the "boat crew" the sense of belonging. We can start from policies of valuing individuality and turning differences into creative solutions.

To get there, managers will promote conversation wheels between "opponent" groups to debate matters like gender, generational conflicts, and ethnic differences. Intranet and internal information murals, more than being a vertical communication channel, will be a place of social exchange. Still, dynamics and lectures will present to each sector the work developed by the other teams, disclosing the particularities that make each one brilliant.

The maturation of the Organizational Culture takes time, but it starts with the perception that diversity, in fact, was the spice that the organization lacked.

Well, thinking about these two careers, there are still activities they can't share with the other team - such as coding or producing an advertising piece following unknown legal and technical standards. However, not only marketers are rational and programmers have hearts, with each passing day, their work dialogues, and are even mixed in many points.

The beginning of the osmosis

The merge of both professions is a trend that gets clear as the digital revolution requires from advertisers typical hard skills of programming and, from computer engineers, among many other things, some marketing industry skills. When we talk about startups that bring new products and services to digital customers or completely redesign an existing service - optimizing it -, the user experience and customer satisfaction are everything at the end (and beginning) of the day.

If you seat every day at your chair in the IT room of your BYOD company and receives regular briefings to develop specific apps, make yourself this question: for how long will companies of the future be interested in professionals who know only how to write codes, but do not have the cognitive maturity to interpret the end user's needs and the business intelligence to devise interfaces with greater usability than those of competitors?

If you're a professional Product Designer, will your business really be real to what people want if you always rely on your friend from Marketing to explain to you terms like UGC, Bounce Rate, CTR, Sales Funnel, Traffic, Big Data, and Scaneability?

And what if Digital Marketing is your thing? How far will you go in your career if you can't manage (or aren't open to learning) how to design a project for your enterprise to develop a mobile application that would allow your costumers to finalize their purchases much quicker than through the website?

Beyond other things, planning a simple Social Media Calendar ends up being a complex task if you're not able to track your buyer persona's behavior, to understand your own Data Architecture, or to save your files in the cloud. Are we right?

You can overcome boundaries!

Thinking a lot about it in the last days, it's clear we'll always need to have a focus, but the market asks for multitasking. We can follow Octavia Spencer in "Hidden Figures" (20th Century FOX, 2016): by seeing the IBM Structure coming and realizing the threat of substitution, her character was successful in adapting.

Reflect on that: day by day, there are a lot of professionals and fewer and fewer job vacancies as we know them. Professional profiles are changing. Many current professions are being replaced by machines. So what would differentiate us all in the near future that actually seems like today? Well, in case you didn't hear yet, Uber already promised flying cars for 2023.

Let's get some answers

I'll give it a try: combine the best of the machine to that one thing not even the AI with the best rapport technique could offer: the ability to dominate the engine plus the sensitivity to interpret people's humanity. Is it much pretentious? We call it necessary.

You can be sure many of us already are told we should choose a single area of expertise and specialize only in it, not looking to the other side. But what would we say when asked what Marketing has to do with Programming? "Simply everything".

"To become useful and be turned into information, data need to be processed until they get intelligible". 

When well used, they can do wonders for our annual revenues. If you are allowed to develop your administrative skills in a business platform, you probably already know that sales results not only are but rely on numbers. All right, data about our clients, competitors, and market share are important. But here come some questions. What does it mean to become "intelligible"? How to guarantee that data will turn into information and arrive at your Manager's desk ready to support his decisions? And, most of all, what's the turning point when data become information and how to navigate through it masterfully?

The human touch

First of all, alphanumerics need to be extractable from the base in which they were stored. That implies a trained team and an agile system. Imagine that your team offers professional customer service and, by following a sales script, make all the right questions. The next step is to type their answers on a keyboard and, then, they go to a memory device to be analyzed later.

When that "later" comes, will the company's employees be prepared to access what they're looking for on the database? Does the chosen platform offer intuitive tools and allow them to rank data by specific categories? And one more question: in the way they'd been organized on the base, are the letters and numbers transferable to a platform like Excel, for example?

IT is key - but not enough

The second point is to encourage a growth mindset in the IT staff as well. Why is it vital? Because, as your enterprise gets bigger, the larger is its database, and the more efficient it must be the computer solutions to process what is stored in that. Sometimes, you'll have a major discovery to make and simply won't reach it because, whenever you try to download data, your system hangs up. Let it be no more than a probability.

Last but not least, data analysis is an investigative process idealized to help companies to achieve goals (as successful branding, expansion, improvement in customer relationships, and increased sales) in a more strategic and assertive way. However, itself, it makes no miracles. You must be aware of where you wanna go to find how will you get there and if you're getting closer. Before looking at an organized collection of data, it's worth questioning: "right now, I'm gonna find all kinds of answers for many questions we'd make, but what is the one I'm looking for?".

The Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) can help you in this mission. Stay tuned to learn all about them soon!

The funnel's structure

Visualize the top of this structure - it’s larger and there’s where the process starts: with a great number of prospects. As they turn into leads and we head to the bottom of the funnel, the number of potential clients decreases and the width also decreases.

From the top to the bottom, the Purchase Funnel is divided into six main phases: Awareness, Interest, Consideration, Intent, Evaluation, and Purchase. Some theorists estimate there is still a seventh phase: the Retention.

Mapping the customer's behavior

Before buying anything from your enterprise, people must know it exists, of course. Will they discover your business through a friend’s indication, a podcast, or a full banner in an online newspaper, for example? That’s the Awareness phase. It’s very important to let people get to know you without being invasive, and that’s the stage when occurs the lead generation - people give information like name and email address in exchange for some benefits.

During the entire Interest and Consideration phases, and part of the Intent one, we work mostly on the lead nurturing - although this tactic can be applied in the entire funnel. We have a new expression in the area! Lead nurturing is a series of strategic actions to build trust, arouse desire, and help your potential clients to increase self-awareness - establishing strong relationships.

An example to facilitate association is a series of emails offering relevant materials for your leads, like ebooks and free courses. But it’s very important to point this valuable content must relate to the lead’s personal experience.

Imagine someone who has just discovered the importance of exercising. It might not be interesting to offer a discount coupon for your gym membership, but a suitable article comparing the pros and cons of exercising at home and at a gym.

Respectively, the Interest, Consideration, and Intent phases explore the leads’ interest in your brand, consideration of buying from you, and intent of buying from you (even placing something in the shopping cart). Do you realize how subtle the differences are? Marketing requires sensitivity in understanding people.

The Evaluation stage reflects a feature that stands out a lot in the digital consumer: a high level of demand and criticism. The Purchase Funnel comes to a point where your leads are almost ready to pay for your products or services, but they still need a final check. Beyond a great balance between quality and price, what’s the element X that makes you unique and better than your competition - or, at least, the better choice? It’s time to show it.

This journey certainly doesn’t end here but the Purchase phase is placed at the bottom of the funnel. After turning your leads into actual customers, retaining them means to delight them by delivering what you promised, offering excellent after-sales service, and keeping to nurture your buyers with relevant content.

A strategy that brings results

How to be assertive through the entire Purchase Funnel? By extracting, organizing, and interpreting data on the online customer behavior - specific for your target. If you can’t hire a data analyst any time soon, there are a lot of free and paid tools to help you in those tasks, especially in predictive and exploratory analysis to support your decisions.

But pay extra attention to my words. Right now, I’m going to share with you a detail super important to understand the Purchase Funnel. The consumer’s trajectory is not always linear, but often fluid. What does it mean?

Nothing prevents the customer’s journey from starting with the Intent phase, for example. Also, the journey doesn’t always follow the order established on a traditional Purchase Funnel. The lead can skip phases, repeat a specific step, and make a back-and-forth motion.

Increasingly, the importance of understanding consumer behavior gets clearer. As your approach must be consistent with people’s expectations (including their absence), you need to become an expert on the other side to adapt to it, and data will be your best friend at this moment.

Take some good advice

Always have numbers and quality data by your side to give you directions and help you identify what applies to your specific case. Something marketers use to do a lot can help you go further into your comprehension of the Purchase Funnel, and it is to calculate some conversion rates.

Basically, we look to phase after phase and to the number of prospects that find themselves in each one. It’s really about picturing the image of a funnel and schematizing the number of people who pass through one stage and move on to the next.

Then, we calculate the percentage of people who went from the Awareness phase to the Interest one, from the Interest phase to the Consideration stage, and so on. For a specific campaign, this simple action can give you some insights and tips on people’s behavior.

If you have a very low rate when comparing one phase with the one immediately after, a red light can be turned on: what could be preventing these potential customers from moving on to the next phase? Let’s test new strategies and consider new titles, CTAs, colors, and see what works best with your audience.

I just gave you a picture of one of the main digital marketing strategies in the world, but there is a lot more to discover and you must continue your studies. What is it for? The Purchase Funnel helps you visualize, track, and drive the evolution of your potential clients from the status of complete strangers to the buyers' role.

I said the Awareness phase is the stage of lead generation and the interval between the Interest phase and the middle of the Intent stage is the moment to focus on lead nurturing. So, what happens with the second half of the Intent phase onwards? A new keyword stands out here: sales.

At this point, the Marketing and Sales teams start to work side by side, the performance of one talking to the others. However, the limits between the specific tasks of each group generate historical controversies. In some companies, the division of responsibilities is blurred and the integration between hard & soft skills is not well worked out.

Smarketing: when Sales meets Marketing

A deep synergy between the Marketing and Sales teams is the ultimate articulation for a successful Inbound strategy. This way, you will now know about the perfect mix of both: Smarketing.

One thing is to talk about the leads who are not ready to buy yet, a group we define as the exclusive responsibility of the Marketing team, the Marketing-Qualified Leads, or MQLs. However, as you noticed in the Purchase Funnel structure, there is a point where your company can allow itself to talk about products and services with them. This specific audience becomes Sales-Qualified Leads (SQLs).

At first glance, the role of both teams may seem different but, at the end of the day, they are part of a complex Inbound strategy whose goal is to generate revenue. One team depends on the other so that the proposed sales increase ends up being the reward of all the work, after all.

According to Hubspot, Smarketing is the “alignment between your sales and marketing teams created through frequent and direct communication between the two”. Very important to point is that “Marketing might have a mutually agreed upon leads Service Level Agreement (SLA) to hit, and Sales must agree to follow up with a certain amount of those leads”.

This can help you to understand better how the process works. Marketing provides qualified leads to Sales, a target with way more chances to finalize the purchase than a heterogeneous and broad audience achieved by the Interruption Marketing, for example.

On the other hand, through channels like chats, email, or any other type of online CRM, the Sales team’s tasks evolve turning the leads who already represent opportunities in actual clients. The professionals from both teams have specific skills to work. Beyond that, their abilities are complementary.

So how to integrate them and make this synergy real? Tips like having sales and marketing meet frequently, mixing marketing and sales desks together, agreeing on terminology, and stimulating mutual feedbacks between the teams are given by The Marketing Squad.

Go further with the Closed-Loop Reporting

Also, have you ever heard about “Closed-Loop” Reporting? This model “means ‘closing the loop’ between the data that marketing is collecting — usually in a marketing automation system — and the data that the sales team is collecting, which is generally seen in a CRM”, as pointed by the New Breed Marketing agency.

That’s an additional way of making your Purchase Funnel more assertive and transforming your sales process. As this course has been showing, what could be more reliable to support decisions when it comes to investing your money on boosting sales than data? For an impeccable Inbound Strategy, it’s worthy to mix a great Inbound Marketing with a powerful Inbound Sales, but the latter is a topic for an upcoming meeting.

Woohoo! Now, you have a great view on how to attract online customers to you instead of entering their lives interrupting their routines. This is a trend that is definitely here to stay!

Not only has the lifestyle of today's professionals changed but the watchword for most of our activities is "agility". After all, we need to fit a much wider range of responsibilities in a single day.

Several factors contributed to building this accelerated reality, such as globalization, the growing offer of technologies, and the greater demand for multi-tasking professionals. We can say for now that, well, the scenario is certainly challenging, but for the ones who do not fear the battlefield, it provides almost every tool needed to win. The possibility of studying anytime from any country in any language is a major example of that.

We are talking about e-Learning, a study model defined by the Oxford Dictionary as a "learning conducted via electronic media, typically on the Internet". To understand why this method is increasingly successful worldwide and why you should bring it to your routine today, just imagine learning almost anything in the comfort of your home or office, at the time that works best for you, fastly and in your own way. Have you pictured it and gotten some self-motivation to start? Then, join me to check out the five reasons why I believe you shouldn't let this opportunity go:

First: Many platforms allow you to start for free

That's right! If you're looking for a job, or maybe a promotion, and neither classroom nor online classes fit your budget at the moment, the web provides many websites that offer free courses (certified or not) to increase your chances. Just to give an example, Global Sparks offers access to over 15,100 free online classes and more than 187,000 low-cost classes from trainers, entrepreneurs, teachers, and universities from all over the world.

Second: Formats such as webinars break all geographical barriers

From lessons with the best professors in Asia to complete mentoring with American trainers, live webinars and recorded classes can lead you to a whole new level in your career. Initiatives like the GoGLOBAL Business School, for example, have a growing range of Signature Transformational Programs and free content focused on empowering global business leaders, entrepreneurs, and youth, and you can check out here their webinars calendar.

Third: It takes you deeper into the consciousness of humanity and yourself

The e-Learning experience can put you in touch with many different cultures, nationalities, and people, showing the world is bigger than what our vision can catch. Besides that, it will require you strong discipline and self-motivation. If you're applying for tests like Toefl or IELTS, the platform Cambridge English offers more than 80 activities to practice. By the end of the journey, you'll be surprised by your capacity of overcoming obstacles!

Fourth: It saves you very much time and money!

I gave a preview of this topic in the article beginning, but it's worth it to explore the subject a little more. Most online classes have a much lower cost than classroom lessons, mainly because you won't have spent on displacement from one place to another and also for the reason that producing content once and distributing it is much less expensive than keeping all expenses of physical space. You benefit from an excellent discount on your studies!

Fifth: It's the present (and future!) of learning

As much as many companies are having to adapt to a home office model, as we are seeing a lot these days in a common movement to combat coronavirus, we'll also watch a big growth in adherence to e-learning not only at this historical moment but after it. People's habits are changing and the tendency is they choose practicality more and more.

Ready to make a difference in people's lives, including yours? Prepared to embrace the energy and start this movement? So, let's go!

The Green Trend

In today's cosmetics market, driven by technologies that give transparency to the productive chain of beauty articles, a movement that illustrates this transformation of values is gaining strength. For many customers, achieving the desired beauty is no longer an end that justifies the means. Many more people seek to know the origin of the products, how they are produced, what effects they can bring to health, and how they contribute to preserving the natural environment. In fact, a whole new category of green products arises.

Relating to this global trend, the beauty industry talks about a general awakening of environmental awareness at a time when production and consumption practices are influenced by demographic changes and population growth. The strengthening of ecological awareness meets the rapid scarcity of environmental resources.

Taking as an example the cosmetics sector, a new market niche materializes to meet the demand of a new group of ecologically conscious consumers: that of bio cosmetics, products for aesthetic treatment with vegetable ingredients, without artificial preservatives or components of animal origin.

It's worth noting that the new class of products that would take the taste of potential clients would go far beyond its vegetable matrix. Increasingly, it should be produced in order to preserve the sources of its raw material and guarantee not only the aesthetic transformation but the health of the users' skin.

Self-care, beauty, and branding

It's in this growing context of self-care, beauty combined with health, and the preservation of natural resources that sustainability in the production chain and in the composition of cosmetics gradually took on an air of innovation and became a true brand value.

Taking advantage of the vast vegetable area, some brands have absorbed, for themselves, causes related to the environment. That's the example of companies like Natura and the youngest Simple Organic Beauty that, in addition to the constant association with nature on and offline, illustrate another very interesting phenomenon in this market: the defense of “real”, natural beauty, closely linked to self-love.

The relationship between the phenomenon and the development of products with plant origin that value the health of the body and promise the enhancement of a beauty that customers, of course, already possessed, is in realizing that, in the field of beauty products, a current is taking hold where the purchase is preceded by an ideology - either in the companies' discourse or during the purchase decision.

Doing good as a competitive differential

For companies looking for success in the online environment, understanding Social Networks as the place where their customers are and, above all, taking advantage of all the resources of Networks to get to know their audience - almost at an anthropological level - is, more and more, a matter of survival. Today, Green Marketing (Environmental Marketing, Ecologically Correct, or Ecomarketing) is more than a brand positioning. It's a trend that becomes a qualitative differential.

This is a current reflection for professionals in the area, with emphasis on a point of attention. The application of Ecomarketing is faced with limitations in scientific knowledge - in order to offer, in fact, the promised natural product - and the consumer's checking power should not be underestimated.

Like people, brands have an identity, personality, and, based on the social context that guides them, they can position themselves on different issues. Shared by Simple Organic on its Instagram profile, the expression “More beauty, less garbage” is, for example, a possible reflection of the way the company positions itself on the environment. The simple offer of good products at a fair price is no longer a factor to determine sales. Today, it also requires ideological compatibility with the public's personal values.

Brand Persona is the brand if it could be represented by a real person - with personality, beliefs, behavioral traits, and a life story.

As time goes by, be "real" becomes more essential when it comes to branding, especially in the digital environment. Focusing on the corporate scope, be real "to the bone" means to reproduce some of the things that give men their humanity: empathy, openness to dialogue, rationality, support for socio-environmental causes, and adaptation to harmonious coexistence in society.

At the heart of this context, that it is proposed to focus on the case of the restaurant Vegan for Love, an enterprise that aims to sell its products to a specific - but emerging - market niche. After a brief period of exclusive activity in the offline environment, the business chooses to expand its activities for the promising online space.

Business Insights

One question is made immediately: how could the brand management strategy, in particular, the digital branding, contribute to expanding the restaurant's visibility in digital environments? By taking advantage of the best the Internet has to offer and building what the web is the perfect scenario for - connections and relationships.

This is not, however, a vertical relationship between brand and consumer, the former being above the latter. Progressively, power is in the hands of both and they place themselves in an equal position, with digital users, today, being classified as prosumers - at the same time, producers and consumers of bits and bytes.

To build strong connections like the covalent bonds borrowed from Chemistry and stand out in the midst of extensive online competition, it would be up to Vegan for Love to invest in values such as visibility, reputation, popularity, and authority online.

Aligning expectations

But how to make yourself more visible in the sea of information that permeates social networks? How to build a positive, solid, and lasting reputation despite the multifaceted risks of making mistakes and gaining an international negative visibility? What characteristics make a brand popular among people who follow it? How to prove authority in your industry and gain the confidence that precedes the purchase act?

These questions can be answered by describing a very assertive flow though for Kotler in 1998. First, strategic brand planning must be structured based on a precise understanding of the audience's profile and behavior.

Every business is certainly the apple of the eye of its creator. However, for each Marketing strategy to achieve its goals - from the most glamorous event to the calendar of institutional and promotional posts -, a perfect balance between the brand promise and the expectations/needs of the buyer persona must be found.

This end is attainable through research, measurement metrics, specific tools, data studies, and various analytical procedures available to understand the logic of consumer steps.

Brand positioning

In addition to that, the content produced and shared by the food company's official channels must always be consistent with each other, confirm the brand's values, stimulate public engagement, show transparency, be flexible to speak the customers' language as far as possible and generate utility for people's lives.

Words & images are powerful when they touch eyes and ears. From the inventors of the first dialects to the most modern apps, man's evolutionary history proves his interest in communicating.

In the digital age, it is no different: people want to be heard, seen, and, above all, to feel they are understood. The dissemination of humanized content, related to green values of preserving the environment and adequated to the new generation of consumers, would be an excellent starting point for Vegan for Love to generate, more than sales, personal identification.

More branding solutions

Infographics on veganism, videos showing the positive impacts of vegan production, questions, quizzes, free downloadable materials, and conversations one-to-one through email are some of the proposals to boost this brand. A brand manual with the Vegan for Love's manifest, graphic specifications, rules of behavior & brand citation, and the company's values/purpose/promise would also be extremely helpful to ensure the employees would be well aligned with the branding guidelines.

Finally, as the relationship between company and customer is established, it becomes a valuable two-way street that benefits both participants. On the one hand, the loyal customer receives progressive benefits and is able to identify himself in the brand he loves. On the other hand, the digital establishment receives a perennial source of feedback, inspiration, encouragement, and information to continue to grow. The restaurant, effectively, only tends to win with this new beginning!