Marketing With Purpose Kit: Customer Connection in a Data-Driven World

**SPEAKER_1** (0:04)
The Bliss Business Podcast, the show about empathy, connection, and consciousness in business. Today's episode is brought to you by Zero Company, your paid search, social media, and programmatic ad experts.

**Michele Brasfield** (0:18)
Welcome to the Marketing With Purpose series of The Bliss Business Podcast where we explore what it really takes for marketing leaders to create impact that goes beyond the numbers. I'm Michele, and in each episode, we sit down with marketing experts to explore their leadership approach and strategies that drive performance and resonate with their audience. Together we'll dive into what's working, what's not, and how purpose and empathy can transform the way brands connect with people. Let's get started. Today I'm joined by Anna Phillips, Account Executive and trusted partner to brands navigating the complexities of digital marketing. Since 2005, Anna has worked in the agency world, helping clients across a wide range of industries, making sense of online marketing by cutting through the jargon and focusing on what truly drives results. She is known for building strong client relationships and for connecting data, strategy and execution to increase brand awareness and sales and customer growth.
We are going to explore customer connection in a data-driven world and how clear communication, thoughtful strategy and human-centered insight helps brands build relationships, even in an increasingly data-driven landscape. I'm excited to dive in. Anna, before we dive in, I'd love to hear what drew you to the idea of customer connection in a data-driven world. From your perspective, working directly with clients, why does this feel especially relevant right now?

**Anna Phillips** (1:56)
Yeah, hey, Michele, and thanks again for having me on. I think that my bio mistakenly, I think I put 2005, but it's definitely 2015
That would be kind of crazy if I had 21 years of experience. That would be something I would have in elementary school.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:13)
No, no, no, honestly.

**Anna Phillips** (2:14)
I'll fix that for next time.

**Michele Brasfield** (2:16)
That was my mistake. Apologies.

**Anna Phillips** (2:19)
No, it's all good.
That would be cool, though. But yeah, like why I chose this topic, just again, from my experience working with clients, I think that customer connection is so important. And there are so many people, like if you go on LinkedIn or even talking internally with our own team, that have so much acumen in terms of the analytics and the data. Like you had Josh on the podcast last week who is just an expert in this proving ROI and all these calculations. And I think just out of those topics, I felt like I could better speak on the customer connection portion. So yeah, super happy to dive in and talk about this topic a little bit more.

**Michele Brasfield** (2:59)
Oh, great. Great to hear. Working closely with clients day to day, how do you set expectations early on while leaving room to adapt as results and priorities evolve?

**Anna Phillips** (3:10)
Yeah, that's a great question. So yeah, I think part of setting expectations is that's something that needs to be done really early on. Like even during the onboarding process with the client, we want to set expectations of like, what are we going to be providing? What are the next steps? How are we gauging success? And then what are we doing if we don't reach those metrics or etc. So again, having a really solid onboarding process is crucial to setting expectations. And then also, what else was I going to say? Yeah, just being reasonable with the expectations you set, right? Like we don't promise that they're going to like triple their sales or have some sort of crazy results or even that we're going to be like having weekly meetings, for example, if it's maybe a smaller client. So really setting expectations that are reasonable within like the scope of what the client's looking for. And just, I guess, what's the saying? Over under promise and over deliver is what we try to do.

**Michele Brasfield** (4:11)
Oh, great. Yeah, it's clear you found a really thoughtful rhythm there. With client strategy as well as client relationship too. With so much performance data available, how do you decide what insights actually matter to clients versus what adds noise?

**Anna Phillips** (4:31)
Yeah, a lot of that is really customized to each client because, you know, some agencies, they might have these really long reports with tons of data points. But at the end of the day, I've literally had clients tell me, like, hey, Anna, I don't read your reports or, hey, Anna, I only look at the email summary that you send me, and that's the most important thing. And so I asked them, like I asked them, what are the important metrics? And then also kind of part of that is education of figuring out what are the important metrics if they don't know, or if they're really focusing on a top line metric, like, I don't know, clicks or impressions, then we want to be focusing on leads and lead quality. So it's really collaborative, it's really tailored to each client, no matter how large or how small. We don't want them wasting time looking at metrics or reports from us that aren't useful to them. So again, that's part of that, I would say really solid onboarding process, getting to know the client and their preferences and their needs. And if there might just be one or two metrics that are really important to them every month, out of the dozens or hundreds of metrics that we could possibly report on.