All businesses face challenges, and we see it as our job to solve them. At The Walk, we believe that things don’t have to be complicated to be effective. This is why we use a straightforward approach to helping clients that’s focused on taking on problems and driving outcomes.
Agencies, businesses and people use different processes to get work done. What’s special about The Walk is how our clients benefit from our conscious decision-making based on data, insights and experience. It’s how we operate our services to deliver great marketing campaigns.
It’s a process, it’s an attitude
This process isn’t simply steps that we follow; it’s a part of who we are. We take our clients with us on the journey through planning, implementation and analysis, moving through the steps together in concert and conversation.
Our process can be captured in three stages. First, insights help us define a problem. Next, we craft a strategic plan to overcome the problem. Lastly, we use content to execute our strategy. Although this approach seems simple, it’s important to understand how each stage helps us get proven results for our clients.
Insights
Everything we do starts with insights. We use research, analytics, even gut instinct developed from years of award winning marketing experience to define and understand the complexities of the unique business problem you need solved.
It’s in the insights phase that we ask questions, investigate, and put a shape to the problem. This step isn’t only about getting to know the research and stats, but also about understanding this information in the correct context. By knowing how to cast the right lens over background information and raw data, we see things in a new light and can garner insights that are both meaningful and actionable.
To do this, we use both technical and personal processes. This two-pronged approach means that the eventual insight will be informed by the numbers, but also shaped by human smarts so it can translate into sales, customer loyalty or brand engagement. Consider our approach in the context of orienteering. We begin at a starting point, with a goal to reach a specific destination. In this context, the insight is our map; it’s what we’ll use to create a route that will lead us to the target destination.
🗺
“The strategy is the route we plan to follow in order to reach our destination”
Strategy
Insights help us gain an in-depth understanding of your problem. Based on this actionable insight, we’re able to devise a marketing strategy that’s focused and effective. This strategy may solve a problem or take advantage of a key opportunity.
In an integrated marketing solution, you’ll soon realise that the solution has the potential to move in any direction, down a range of different channels and media. The strategy phase of our process helps us determine the range of degrees our solution will use to solve the problem.
In our orienteering example, the strategy is the route we plan to follow in order to reach our destination.
Content
After we’ve used insights to understand your problem and create a bespoke marketing strategy, we need to bring this to the world and entreat action. We do this by creating creative marketing assets and experiences that bring the strategic solution to your intended audience. This is the content phase of our process. This phase is all about action, more specifically, we begin executing our marketing strategy to solve the problem.
So, what does content involve? We use a media-agnostic approach, utilising a range of mediums and tactics. Creating great content involves finding the right channel(s) to solve a problem or take an opportunity. The media channels and type of content we choose are based on the specific target audience and their affinity. After we know the target market, we can then determine which media channels and types of content will best solve the problem, always ensuring that our marketing activity is fully integrated across all channels.
The content stage also involves us tracking our actions so we can determine what is working best, so we can optimize and focus our efforts on the most effective channels.
In our orienteering scenario, content is walking the route. As we take action, we’ll move along our route efficiently, making adjustments and taking short cuts where they come up, so that we end up safely at our destination, with the problem solved.
A continuous cycle
One of the most crucial things to take away from our approach is its cyclical nature. This is not something we set and forget; we are constantly moving through the steps to adjust, change, and modify our actions. Each action we take is tracked and analysed to inform our insights, meaning our insights are constantly evolving. As our insights become more advanced, they are reapplied to our strategy and content to solve your problem more quickly and more effectively.
We pride ourselves on making this process a part of our work, every single day. It takes energy and commitment – but we have that in spades, because we believe in this process, and believe in the results.
At The Walk, we like to keep it simple. By working with you to gain insight, form a strategy and take action, we get positive results that solve your problems. If you’d like to take this process out for a spin, get in touch and let’s see what we can solve for you.
