SOW 159 – Scott Petinga: Big Data Marketing

Scott Petinga is the Founder of Akquracy, which specializes in data driven marketing to better optimize leads and existing contacts. Petinga joins the show to explain how to better segment lists and use marketing correlations to boost revenue.

Petinga discusses why most “marketers” completely miss the mark, so he lists some things that great marketers get that failing ones don’t. He also shares modern strategies for building market share. Petinga caps the discussion by telling the story of how he launched Akquracy in his basement after surviving cancer.

Visit Akquracy at www.akquracy.com.

Narrator: Speakers, publishers, consultants, coaches, and info marketers unite. The Speaking of Wealth show is your road map to success and significance. Learn the latest tools, technologies and tactics to get more bookings, sell more products and attract more clients. If you’re looking to increase your direct response sales, create a big time personal brand, and become the go to guru, the speaking of wealth show is for you. Here is your host, Jason Hartman.

Jason Hartman: Welcome to the Speaking of Wealth show. This is your host Jason Hartman, where we discuss profit strategies for speakers, publishers, authors, consultants, coaches, info marketers, and just go over a whole bunch of exciting things that you can use to increase your business, to make your business more successful and more and more passive and more and more automated and more and more scalable. So we will be back with a great interview. Be sure to visit us at SpeakingofWealth.com. You can take advantage of our blog, subscribe to the RSS feed, and many other resources for free and SpeakingofWealth.com and we will be back with a great interview for you in less than 60 seconds.

Start of Interview with Scott Petinga

Jason Hartman: It’s my pleasure to welcome Scott Petinga to the show. He is a very interesting guy. He’s the founder of a company called Akquracy, with an unusual spelling. Today we’re going to talk about some things that will absolutely amaze you. And it’s something you’ve heard about. It’s the world of big data and how marketers can use big data to increase revenue and do all kinds of other amazing things. Scott, welcome. How are you?

Scott Petinga: I’m great Jason. Thanks for having me.

Jason Hartman: Give our listeners a sense of geography and ten thousand data points on yourself: where are you located?

Scott Petinga: I’m located in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Jason Hartman: Okay, fantastic. What does Akquracy do?

Scott Petinga: It’s a communications agency with a focus on big data and analytics.

Jason Hartman: This is literally amazing. Every person in America from what you say has about 10 thousand data points stored somewhere in the cyberspace of big data that determine their behaviors, and what websites they like, what they buy…where do I start on this? It’s mind boggling.

Scott Petinga: I talk about it all the time. And from a transparency standpoint, the biggest thing you can think about is when we were kids and we read The Brothers Grimm novel Hansel and Gretel. Hansel and Gretel essentially left little trails of bread crumbs throughout the forest and we do the exact same thing as consumers. As we consume things and just go about our lives, we essentially leave these trails.

And markers actually follow us and they pick those trails up and they decipher that information, and they understand who we are geographically, essentially where we live, and demographically and that’s the makeup of who we are. Household makeup: are we single? Do we have kids? And behaviorally, what do we consume? What types of products do we like, do we lend to? And even now with the power of the social media. Things that we like on the sites like Instagram and Pinterest, and what our sentiments are to brands and to certain types of objects.

Jason Hartman: The listeners are mostly solo entrepreneurs, small business owners, of course from a consumer stand point we’re all concerned about big data and what it’s doing to us. Tell us how we can use this. We’re not giant corporations here. is there anything that the smaller business can do with this?

Scott Petinga: I think a lot of small businesses, if they do have a point of sale system, is to make sure they’re starting to capture consumer transactional data at the consumer level. What that means is when Jason Hartman actually walks into a location and makes a purchase, make sure that when Jason comes up to the cash register it’s just not [0:03:04.2], that the POS system actually has the ability to put Jason Hartman’s information in it such as name, address, city, state and zip. And then we’re able to do some pretty hardcore analytics once we have all of that information in one place.

Jason Hartman: So you’re talking about a brick and mortar business. What about an online business?

Scott Petinga: And the same thing holds true for online. Again, a lot of times when you do check out they have that information where you do check out, you have to give a postal address. The great thing about shopping online is there’s always the ability of who’s the payee and where’s the stuff get shipped? So you can understand if it’s a gift or if it’s being bought from a consumer standpoint, but he’s buying it and having it shipped to work or vice versa where he’s buying it under work credentials and having it shipped to his personal residence. I think it’s all about knowing who your customers are; there’s a lot of knowledge that floats around companies. Sometimes they think they believe who their customers are, but nine times out of ten when we actually collect the data and analyze it, the customer isn’t who people think it is.

Jason Hartman: So what do we do? We really want to collect zip code, and I’ve noticed that by the way with some retailers, just brick and mortar retailers. Of course online you’re always putting in your zip code because they’ve got to ship you the product, unless it’s a digital product. So a lot of our solopreneurs listening that are selling digital products, mostly educational products, you may or may not be asking for a zip code to process a credit card, especially a PayPal. I would think you’re Emailing it back to them. Mostly, I guess you’re putting all of your billing information but not always, I don’t think. So that zip code is very meaningful, right?

Scott Petinga: Birds of a feather flock together, so if you think of your home and your residents, a lot of people in your neighborhood share the same structure. Houses relatively cost the same in neighborhoods, people essentially fit into a cookie cutter pattern whether they have the same education level, the same family makeup, the same traits when it comes to lifestyle. So right across the street from my house is a lake. Of course, if you’re living on the lake you’re probably into boating and fishing, and some of those other outdoor activities. And again, that holds true with some of your neighbors on other things as well. If you look around, some of the newer developments, a lot of the people are new families, parents are the same age, kids are the same age and so forth.

Jason Hartman: Tell us some more things about this. Looking at your website, there are all kinds of services and solutions here. You talk about data services, systems integration, campaign management, business intelligence tools, profiling, segmentation, analytics, predictive modeling, forecasting… wow there’s a lot to this.

Scott Petinga: There definitely is. We’re firm believers, from a marketing perspective is trying to understand what works and what doesn’t. And by doing so, it allows you to be brutally efficient and allows you to maximize your impact. For every dollar spent, what’s the return on investment? We tell our clients this all the time: there used to be a saying, 50% of the marketing budget you don’t necessarily know how it’s being accounted for.

Jason Hartman: I think it was David Ogilvy. He said, “I am firmly convinced I know that half of my advertising and marketing is a waste of money. I just don’t know which half.”

Scott Petinga: Absolutely.

Jason Hartman: And that’s not true anymore though, but in the olden days that really was the case.

Scott Petinga: You can pretty much track everything. We set up a lot of campaigns like chemical trials. What we’ll do is we’ll stimulate some parts of the country, we don’t stimulate other parts of the country and for all intents and purposes, they essentially look the same. They’ve got the same types of people, the cities are the same size, weather patterns are the same. And what we do is we look at those areas that we stimulate and those we don’t to see if we’ve actually increased purchase rates in those areas that were stimulated compared to those areas that don’t.

Jason Hartman: Some of the things I want to ask you about, and just take whatever you want. I think our listeners want to know, how do they better segment their list, what can they do with marketing correlations to increase revenue, what are many marketers completely missing out on? We have all these assets, we have this list, we have this database that we’ve spent a lot of money and time developing. What opportunities just the low hanging fruit right in front of us. What are the modern strategies for building market share? Of course you’ve alluded to some of these. I just want to drill down more.

Scott Petinga: The easiest ways to segment is based off of RFM and that’s recency, frequency and monetary. That’s looking at how often your consumers come into this location, when was the last time the consumer came in, how often within a 12-18 month period of time…

Jason Hartman: Or bought something online. Doesn’t need to be coming. . .same thing.

Scott Petinga: Yeah, same rational. And the last one is how much they spent during that period of time. So that’s one of the easiest ways that you can segment.

Jason Hartman: RFM.

Scott Petinga: RFM.

Jason Hartman: Okay, that means Recency, Frequency, and Monetary.

Scott Petinga: Some clients are truly segmented by gender. So if you’re a clothing store that is geared toward women or men, again, you most likely have one type of gender. And then within there you can get down to the sort of generation or age brackets: under 18, 18-25, 25-35, etc. sometimes we have clients that have been based off of ethnicity. And the reason being it’s all about relevancy. So what’s the reason why you want to segment? And a lot of it just comes down to being able to have a more intimate conversation.

Jason Hartman: No question about it. The intimate conversation with that consumer is just critical. Because consumers, they expect that. Sometimes they think it’s a little creepy, for sure, but they also like it. Facebook has just done a masterful job at this. I remember when my assistant got engaged and suddenly all of her Facebook ads started changing for wedding planning. Then when she got married they changed again. And then when she had a baby, it changed again. The marketers can just walk through life events and life stages with people incredibly well nowadays. You probably have some thoughts on Facebook in particular. Until really the last year or so, I don’t think they did that great a job of it, but in about the last year, Facebook has just come on strong in terms of the relevancy advertising.

Scott Petinga: Absolutely. And a lot of it comes down to retargeting. Most people don’t realize, what retargeting actually is, is when you actually go to a brand’s website and then you log in your Facebook…

Jason Hartman: Having it follow you around, yeah.

Scott Petinga: Not only having it follow you around, but some marketers are even getting more sophisticated, and the ads that appear up in Facebook are the actual item you were looking for on that retail.

Jason Hartman: Let me just give you a little testimonial on that. Two retailers, and by the way I had one of them on the show and that was Patrick Byrne, the founder and CEO of Overstock.com. I had him on talking about being the first major retailer to accept bitcoin. Interesting conversation. But overstock is huge into retargeting. I remember I went on there and I had this challenge in my last house… I kind of challenge myself: can I furnish and decorate my entire house online? So it was just kind of a weird little challenge I gave myself. I’d never done it before, I always shopped for sofas and big items like that in a brick and mortar store. But I went online and I went to overstock and Amazon and different places, and I was looking for a sofa. And I couldn’t believe how accurate the retargeting was. It was masterful. And the same thing was true with Lamps Plus.

Scott Petinga: It’s amazing too about Facebook. They’re starting to get into facial recognitions. I don’t know if you’ve ever done this, but it’s pretty amazing. if you actually take a picture of some place outside and your spouse is in it, your friends and your kids, people you know who are on Facebook, when you upload and your spouse is in it, your friends and your kids, people you know who are on Facebook, when you upload it to Facebook it will put a little square around their head because it essentially recognizes them but because of what Facebook’s up to these days, if somebody else is in the picture, say it’s a complete stranger to you but that person is a Facebook member and Facebook… they’ve tagged themselves in Facebook before, it will allow you to tag them as well in your picture.

And this has happened to me. My kids were in karate and I was actually taking a picture into the mirror, and I’m sitting next to a complete stranger and Facebook brought up her Face and knew who she was and it asked me if I wanted to tag her. And I thought twice about it because I almost did it just to see what her reaction would be when she got home.

Jason Hartman: Right. Creepy, scary. And last night I just watched for the second time the movie Minority Report. So that’s where we’re going whether we like it or not, for better or worse. Very interesting. Scott, give out your website and tell people where they can find you.

Scott Petinga: It’s akquracy.com.

Jason Hartman: Any closing thoughts or comments?

Scott Petinga: I think the biggest thing is definitely understand who your customers are, but sometimes don’t forget that as an individual you’re a consumer as well. So put yourself in the consumer’s shoes. How would you behave if you were the consumer? How would you act? What would be impactful for you? What would be relevant? I think so many times once people own companies and they become marketers they forget essentially who they are and that sets in the day where just consumers are a product. Think of it that way and then this stuff comes really easy and a lot of it is just common sense.

Jason Hartman: Like the old saying, walk in the other Indian’s moccasins for a mile until you have their experience. Well, Scott Petinga, thanks so much for joining us today. This was a fascinating discussion.

Scott Petinga: Thanks so much.

Narrator: Copyright the Hartman Media Company. For publication rights and interviews please email media@JasonHartman.com. This show offers very general information. Opinions of guests are their own. Nothing contained herein should be considered personalized, personal, financial, investment, legal or tax advice. Every investor strategy and goals are unique. You should consult with a licensed real estate broker or agent or other licensed investment, tax and/or legal advisor before relying on any information contained herein. Information is not guaranteed. Please call 714-820-4200 and visit www.JasonHartman.com for additional disclaimers, disclosures and questions.

Transcribed by Ralph

The Speaking of Wealth Team
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