What if we told you we had a tried-and-tested formula that could help you unlock audience insights that will make your marketing more dynamic, engaging and most importantly, profitable? Enter, Jobs To Be Done.
If you want to achieve the gold standard for your campaigns, you need to spend time getting to know your audiences. But according to The Economist, only 14% of executives feel that their approach to segmentation creates value.
Jobs To Be Done can help you identify the key characteristics and needs of your audiences. It does so by encouraging you to take a step back and clarifying what jobs need to be done to help you reach your goals. By making the job, rather than the insights/analysis/reports, the measure of success, you can gather impactful insights faster.
In this blog, we’ve combined learnings from David Boyle - Director of Audience Strategies - with our own marketing know-how to create the ultimate guide to applying Jobs To Be Done to your audience intelligence and marketing strategies.
Understand the nuts and bolts of your insight strategy
Insights is a broad term. To use them effectively, you need to understand the nuts and bolts of what you’re trying to achieve. David explains this using a carbon skateboard analogy. Customers are buying the wheels, the bearings and the hardware, but what they actually want is to feel like a pro-skateboarder busting out some cool new tricks.
Likewise, your business needs the nuts and bolts of audience insight to deliver your best marketing campaign ever. That’s where Jobs To Be Done comes in. Developing your audience strategy is like planning a journey, you need to understand each step along the way.
Be clear about the challenges you want to address
If you want to unearth audience insights that will lead to real profits, you need to be clear about the questions or challenges your insight work will address. Plus, you need to make sure everybody, at every level, buys in to your vision.
For example, you know that you need to reach an audience of young women aged 25 to 45 to promote your new skincare line. But what you actually need to know are things like:
- Where do they live and what do they typically spend on beauty products
- What skincare brands are they currently using, if any?
- What skincare topics are they talking about with their friends and peers? I.e., will Vitamin C even my skin tone? Should I be using SPF daily?
- Who are they most likely to be influenced by when it comes to trying new products?
- What media are they consuming that could be used to reach them?
Be sure to address these challenges in the early stages of setting your strategy and tailor your insights research to unearth what you need to know to make an impact.
Prioritise your Jobs by impact
You’ve got your challenges. Now you need to have a clear understanding of the Jobs To Be Done that will get you to the end goal - excellent audience segmentation. Start by identifying each of the stakeholders involved in your audience and marketing strategies, and outline which of the Jobs each stakeholder is responsible for.
You could do this through one-to-one interviews that will allow you to explore strategic challenges and opportunities in-depth. With this in mind, you can start to prioritise Jobs that will have the biggest impact and importantly, where insights and audience intelligence can actually help.
Tackle your audience strategy, one Job at a time
With your Jobs To Be Done outlined and organised, the next step is simple. It’s time to tackle your audience strategy and feed insights into your marketing campaigns… one Job at a time. Plotting your Jobs into a wider roadmap will help you strategically plan the journey ahead, so you don’t get overwhelmed before you’ve even begun.
For example, David and the team at Audience Strategies were able to transform EMI Music by ensuring they were focused on one Job at a time. This roadmap shows how each job was linked together and the order in which they tackled them, from setting the initial strategy right through to acquiring the right kind of talent and producing content to support launch.
Principaux enseignements
So, what have we learned about implementing Jobs To Be Done into your audience intelligence and marketing strategies? Here are the key takeaways.
- Understand the nuts and bolts of your insights strategy
- Be clear about the challenges you want to address
- Prioritise your Jobs To Be Done by impact
- Tackle your audience strategy, one Job at a time
Find out more about Jobs To Be Done in our recent webinar, in partnership with ESOMAR, which you can watch here.
