It seems obvious that before you develop a marketing communications program or message, you take time to think through your options. But too often, deadlines and compressed schedules dictate what’s possible. These days, the cadence of life is driven by technology. It accelerates everything, placing urgency on business and marketing decisions. The variety of ways we engage and communicate with our target audiences has exploded, which only serves to accelerate things even more.

Many marketing decisions are now programmatic based with real-time bidding for impression opportunities made in the two-tenths of a second it takes a web page to load.  But developing the ideas, strategies and key messages behind these efforts still requires the attribute of thinking to make rapid-fire marketing productive.  Without “big picture” thinking you risk missing meaningful trends that surround your business. You might just miss your optimum potential to align on an emotional and rational level with your audience. Thinking is still the fuel that stimulates creativity.

So instead of barreling through a to-do-list in our short-on-time environment, or grabbing an off-the-shelf solution, we rely on thinking to help reframe how we approach the execution of a goal. We’re in a business of custom solutions. To do this, we need to customize our thinking on a client-by-client basis.

In a world where 2% click-through rates on emails are considered success and message retention rates are south of 25%, the most important step for any communication campaign is taking time to think. It’s the true lynchpin in SMZ’s Listen. Think. Do. process for what we do to make any message, any idea effectively connect with an audience.

Rich Williams, SVP, Strategic Business Development