Digital Influence Mapping Project

Visit NextNow Digital…Now

In 2020, I launched a new digital consultancy, NextNow Digital. All of my new ideas and insights can be found at the new site. The Digital Influence Mapping Project has been a labor of love since I started it in 2005.  This blog may continue to live on in some form or another.

For now, visit NextNow Digital Insights & Ideas. You will find fresh POVs on digital marketing and transformation to help startups, small and mid-size businesses, as well as continued thoughts for enterprise marketers.

Start with this post: Why Launch the Next Digital Consultancy…Now?

 

Why I Published a Blog for 15 Years

My first blog post in 2005 was a short few paragraphs on the Power of Fans. While hardly deep, it did ask a question that remains relevant today – “Why don't more brands leverage fans?” The rest is, literally, history. 

I started The Digital Influence Mapping Project to figure out how digital and social media was changing us and would alter business. I am intellectually and insatiably curious but hardly brilliant. By writing posts, I was sketching ideas and points of view that simply helped me form cogent thoughts (mostly). For me, this is a part of lifelong learning. This led me to connect with other bloggers and marketers wrestling with similar issues.

I blogged to make connections with people. The blog became a great device for an introvert to meet like-minded people (equally curious) as digital behaviors and social media swept the world.  Lucky to have a global position at Ogilvy, I met fellow bloggers in Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia, Portugal, Brazil, the UK, Turkey and many, many other fantastic places. We held ‘blogger meet-ups’ where I got to shake hands (remember that simple act?) with someone I had only known virtually.

I felt (naively, perhaps) that blogging and social media would connect a community of people, open channels of sharing, and weaken nationalisms.  I fancied myself an aspiring ‘citizen of the world’ vs. an American. I still feel that way today although I do recognize my indelible “American-ness.” I cannot shed that programming any more than I can pretend to not be a white male in a culture that affords privileges based upon superficialities and chance. No flag-waving for me, I’m afraid. I long to simply be another person on an Earth that values and is curious about all people.

The answer to “why did I publish The Digital Influence Mapping Project for fifteen years?” is really just those two things: to learn how digital technologies and behaviors would change us and to meet interesting, smart people from all over.

Curiosity and connection.

Luckily, many of the people I have met I remain connected to today. I wish I could name them all here in gratitude, but I would inevitably screw that up.  Check my connections on LinkedIn (and Twitter). I am guessing most of these smart, fantastic folks are there.   

So, something new is next and it won’t happen on The Digital Influence Mapping Project. Still, fifteen years of blog posts. That’s something.

Make the Content Marketing Commitment Already: Lessons from the ANA Study

The ANA delivered its study of how 126 brand marketers see the “GROWTH AND OPPORTUNITIES IN CONTENT MARKETING.” Hats off to my good friends at Manifest Agency for their timely summary of the report which you can find here.

As a brand-side and agency-side content marketer, three headlines peaked out above the rest. I am very bullish on the benefits of true content marketing for many brands. Great content is how we grab and keep people’s attention amidst the clutter, noise and diminishing effectiveness of so much advertising. Most brands want to deliver increased value to their customers. Valuable content is a great way to do that.

ANA Study Highlights:

Highlight #1: 52% of respondents said they have a strong commitment to content marketing while only 35% of respondents have a clear content strategy.

My POV: More strategy will lead to a greater commitment. Clearly more brands are creating content to engage customers. But many remain unconvinced that content marketing is more than how they tackle “thought leadership” (i.e. PR) or sales collateral. It is more, and a strategy will help align an organization to focus on content that matters to customers and can be measured in terms of awareness and discoverability (i.e search shelf-space), consideration and, ultimately, selection of your brand.

Some brands hesitate to embrace ‘always-on’ content marketing. They remain committed to the “marketing campaign” concept – a time-bound, near-term, goal-based approach to marketing. Campaigns are important, but not as much as they once were. Still, campaigns are what marketing organizations and the C-suite are used to. This creates inertia towards fully embracing content marketing. And it’s totally unnecessary. Modern marketers are quite capable of folding campaign concepts into their enduring content marketing programs.

 

Highlight #2: 63% of content marketing services are handled internally and a stable 37% is handled externally. 

My POV: Over the past 7 years, I have seen dramatic shifts in the agency world. I love agencies and have had the opportunity to work with some terrific ones while at Travelers. When it comes to content marketing, few traditional agencies are capable or have the business model to really contribute. I spent more time crossing agencies off the list as partners in content as adding them. Bigger agencies may feel they have the talent but too often that is creative talent, not strategy or operations. That means they can create some great content – usually in a particular medium like video or graphic design.

The rise of content production operations (again, mostly video) from Mediamonks to Epipheo is promising. They are tackling the big challenge of producing the trifecta that old-timers used to say couldn’t be had: good, cheap and fast. When video is so important to a content strategy, getting a flow of the right content through production and up online is key.

Strategy, execution, production and operations is largely an inside job. According to the ANA – 78% of ANA members had an in-house agency in 2018, versus 58% in 2013 and 42% in 2008. At Travelers, we built a content marketing operation to find and fashion stories from colleagues across the company. The subject matter expertise was complex, and the trust we built up internally would have been difficult to hand off to a partner.

As a brand marketer, if I needed help strategically, I would look for the individual who’s done it before. Sometimes that’s within an agency, often it’s a consultant who has worked on the brand side. The era of shopping to find everything you need within a Publicis or WPP roster are waning. Every once in a while, a new agency who seems to get it pops up. Manifest Agency is a great example. Lead by a great team including my friend David Brown, they really seem to understand content marketing.  They may not be unique, but they are certainly rare. And beware the traditional agency who claims they can do what groups like this can do.

 

Highlight #3: 59% of survey respondents reported a lack of actionable insights derived from current tracking methods to understand the effectiveness of content marketing.

My POV: You can measure content’s impact on sales. If you are using your traditional ad metrics – reach, engagement and conversion – to understand how hard your content is working, you will likely be disappointed. Content does sell just not always in that simple, direct marketing way.

We have been able to effectively measure how engagement with our content leads to significant lifts in consideration. This is true with our personal lines ("only brand or first brand I would consider:" +46pt lift for those exposed) and commercial lines (+14pt lift) customers. New, nimbler research companies like GroupRFZ make this type of research quicker and less expensive.

We have also been able to see how those exposed to our content eventually purchase. Combined, we have a reliable way to understand how content marketing can impact brand and sales. In many ways, this measurement is more reliable than how marketers measure many of their efforts.

 

Building an effective content marketing team that combines internal and external resources is well within reach now. Defining and executing against a content marketing strategy and then measuring results is available today. 

At a time when people are ever more reliant on digital content that helps them get through their day, make decisions, run their business and generally cope, many brands should not hesitate to embrace content marketing and then bring it to scale. Make the commitment, already.

 

Great voices in content marketing:

• Manifest Blog (“Itch”)
• Content Marketing Institute
• Contently Blog

 

From NextNow Digital:

Simple Customer Journeys Drive Marketing Strategy

One of the real gems of planning methods, Drivers and Barriers, examines a particular customer persona at a stage in their journey, e.g., discovery, education/engagement, etc., and using any available research, identifies the drivers and barriers. Click the link to learn more. 

How Generative AI Will Change Visuals in Marketing

AI-generated text is one thing, but visuals are a different story. MidJourney, DALL-E2 and Stable Diffusion are super-interesting visual playgrounds creating extraordinary fantasy images or increasingly realistic people or creatures. Click the link to learn about the innovators like KittyKat. 

The Next-Gen Digital AdvertisingToolbox

A lot of businesses may be wasting their money on digital advertising. They struggle to use it well and gain enough efficiency for a positive return on their media investment. Here's a toolbox that works in the face of higher ad costs and lower effectiveness. Click on the link. 

5 Learnings for Small Business Marketing in the Next Normal

New normal, next normal, not-so-normal – however you see the changes to our lives and businesses, the affects will be lasting, even transformative. For small businesses, reopening is its own challenge only to be followed by an urgent need to reinvent that business to grow and thrive in new circumstances.

Small business can use a simple framework to guide an anything-but-simple adjustment. By this time, many have wrestled with what it may take to reopen their business aligned with public health needs. How should that business change to do better? Different ordering and delivery – digital, wherever possible; streamlined and automated operations, even different products and services that are suddenly more relevant. At Travelers, we developed the Reopen, Reinvent and Grow Business Guide to help small business owners with key steps along the way.

But what are the lessons for marketing in the next normal to help that reinvented business grow, not just endure? What is realistic for a resource-strapped small business to effectively market?

McKinsey sees a greater challenge for small business:

“Around the world, economies are cautiously reopening. Businesses are keeping one eye firmly on the here and now but also tentatively looking ahead to what’s shaping up as a great reset…

…Small businesses will confront some of these problems. But much as Ginger Rogers danced the same steps as Fred Astaire—only backward and wearing high heels—small businesses must make the necessary changes at a greater relative cost and with less working capital.”

While it’s tough to generalize between the great variety of B2C, B2B and B2whatever businesses in terms of new practices to focus on, here are four lessons that may serve as a guide.

 

Romance and serve your current customers

Whether you are a local restaurant, a massage therapist, or a hardware wholesaler serving the trades, now is the time to accelerate how you connect with existing customers.  This goes beyond the adage that retaining your existing customers can be more profitable than acquiring new ones (although that does tend to be true).

In our recent consumer pulse surveys, after COVID-19 and the economic impact, people are worried about the unknown. They need businesses they can trust and rely on. Many customers want to see the businesses they regularly buy from endure. 

A recent Salesforce consumer survey revealed:

“55% of respondents noted the top priority they want small businesses to focus on is to make them feel safe. While most state mandates have issued safety guidance for small businesses to follow (keep those masks on!), customers appreciate seeing small businesses go above and beyond to ensure proper sanitation and responsible social distancing.”

People want to know what a retail business, restaurant or, even, hardware store, is doing to keep the place clean and reduce customers’ risks. With so much confusion from federal, state and local government and a lack of consensus about something as clear as wearing masks, people want reassurance that a local business is taking reasonable steps to try to keep them safer.

While no small business, Starbucks knows what it takes to build trust in their communities. Their blog is full of ways to help their customer cope with what’s going on and more confidently buy from Starbucks:

A how-to guide for digital ordering at Starbucks

At home? You can still work from Starbucks with virtual backgrounds

From shattered glass, Starbucks murals become first ‘blossom’ in a neighborhood rebuilding

Now is the time to show you care about your customers based upon their concerns.

 

Create regular, meaningful and increasingly personalized communications with them

Customers and agents want to know what you are doing to serve them and about relevant offers and services. Email marketing and organic social media marketing help you keep in touch. While these channels serve known customers (or agents) best, certainly organic social media (non-paid) also reaches prospects and communities. (According to a Salesforce survey, social media usage spiked — 54% of consumers noted spending more time on social media services, some with an increase as high as 25% as compared to pre-COVID times.)

Hartford Prints is a small design and printing retailer based in Hartford, CT. They are a quintessentially local business and retail storefront. With the lockdown, they had to figure out how to remain relevant. They serve up weekly emails to customers with timely offers, news about their community commitments and new offers like virtual classes.  They stuck to their knitting – going beyond selling letterpress cards to actual customer printing and mailing for customers.

At Travelers, we deliver personalized emails to our agents featuring useful content for their small and medium-sized business customers. Articles like: “Employee Training to Consider During COVID-19” and “Should You Pivot Your Business Model?” aim to help businesses with valuable content that’s a bit different than a lot of the same content being delivered out there.

 

Quality over quantity. Everyone is overloaded with email and other digital communications. Building a steady cadence of genuinely valuable, highly relevant, personalized content is more important than delivering a high volume of content.

Build your 1^st party data to personalize and market to your customers and sales agents

This is foundational. That means it won’t feel that good doing it until you start applying it to marketing and achieving results. 1^st party data is just the data you own about your customers or agents – who they are, how to contact them, what they have bought, what they care about and more. It’s what makes personalized marketing even possible, and it’s the future of marketing.  If there is one thing that vexes non-digitally native companies big and small, it’s catching up on managing the data they have on their customers. Small business can leapfrog ahead and start collecting your customer information in a methodical way. You can do this via a simple CRM system or an email marketing platform.

• Always get your customer’s email address(es)
• Collect phone and text information as well as their contact preferences
• Connect their contact information with purchase history
• Allow for these customer data profiles to grow over time to include preferences, interests and other future information

 

Collect regular feedback and insights from your prospects and customers

Our consumer pulse surveys help us understand how people’s outlook changes over time. One of the top three concerns for the past few months has been that fear of the unknown. When uncertainty rules the day, it’s difficult to know when folks are ready to shop and buy or move ahead with that project. It’s hard to know just what they’re worried about, and it can change from day to day.

Andrew Reid, CEO Rival Technologies, summed this up in an article in Entrepreneur,

“Now is not the time to rely on assumptions. Any data you have from 6 weeks ago—let alone 6 months ago—is already out of date.”

Whether you have the capacity for regular surveys, analysis of call center logs or simply ask 1-2 questions following a transaction, getting real time feedback from customers will help guide your activity today and tomorrow. No business wants to appear tone-deaf to community or customer concerns. Regular feedback can help tell you how you can best communicate not just what you communicate.

 

Upgrade your digital customer experience

While obvious, it may be hard for smaller businesses to spend more to get a better Web site or experience. All I can say is try. People are adopting new digital habits for the long haul. That dodgy online ordering service can undermine your revenue.  

Aim towards a ‘friction-free’ way to get answers to prospects and customers, order and deliver products and services. Nothing alienates new, digitally native customers more than a crappy Web experience. The world just got suddenly more digital. Given choice and limited dollars to spend, many customers won’t do business with a company that hasn’t made their digital experience a seamless one.

Here are some simple suggestions:

If your goal is ecommerce (sales):

• Create a more seamless purchase flow
• Allow customers to get fulfillment alerts via any channel (e.g. SMS, Email)
• Drive customers to enrollment in CRM for future marketing

If you are driving leads:

• Work with custom landing pages so you can personalize the experience from ads and emails
• Integrate interactions into campaign management (email+) & CRM system to re-market

If you want to improve consideration for your brand/company:

• Do ongoing SEO research to better understand what people are looking for now
• Publish better and more useful content to help them with current challenges
• Always include clear calls-to-action (CTAs) to drive them to a next action

 

Here are some other great resources for marketing during the long haul of COVID-19

How to Adapt Your Marketing During the Coronavirus (COVID-19) - Neil Patel

Coronavirus Small Business Guide – US Chamber

5 creative ways small businesses are succeeding during the COVID-19 quarantine – Fast Company

How Businesses Have Successfully Pivoted During the Pandemic – HBR

The Reopen, Reinvent, Grow Business Guide – Travelers Insurance

 

From NextNow Digital:

5 Questions to Define Your Business Brand

For small and mid-size businesses who want to build their brand (and, therefore, their business) thoughtfully and with intention, click on the link for 5 questions that will help you sort out what your distinctive brand is all about.

 

The Next-Gen Digital Marketing Strategy Toolbox

is the distilled and essential toolbox to allow any business and/or marketing leader to develop strong marketing with measurable impact. This is built on the simple “Next-Gen Digital Marketing Strategy Framework” where a test-and-learn culture and capability serve as the keystone. Click on the link to get the toolbox.

 

The Next-Gen Digital Marketing Strategy Framework

For small and midsize businesses who want to create an effective digital marketing strategy for their business that responds to these changes, we’ve put together a new strategic framework and toolbox. Click the link or the framework. 

Five Priorities for Marketing During the Next Phase of COVID-19

How do we market and manage our businesses as the country experiments with “opening up?” How do marketers balance their original growth strategies for 2020 with the new, much different reality? Is this about post-crisis or merely managing intervals in a crisis? It's a lot to untangle. 

There used to be an adage business folks bandied about in the early aughts, “the only constant is change.” Well, that could now be rewritten as “the only thing certain is uncertainty.” We just don’t know what will happen between the behavior of a virus, the impact on the complex system of global economies and the changes in political leadership to come.

Still, we have to make progress. Humans are, by nature a planful bunch. Clearly the key today is to adjust strategies and remain nimble to shift given circumstances. Based on the last fifteen years of experience associated with social media adoption, brands have become nimbler. In March, brands put marketing programs on hold, made huge operational shifts and adopted crisis communications to respond to employees, customers and financial stakeholders.

Here are five priorities for marketers as we emerge from the first phase of this crisis and segue into the next, marathon phase:

Re-align Marketing Strategy to Business Goals

Don’t throw out your strategy. Adjust and re-align it to business goals that respond to new realities. Some businesses will suffer greater or longer-lasting disruption. The airline business and travel, in general, will suffer for a prolonged period. Movie theaters may not recover as the businesses they were before the crisis. People will still buy homes, fewer perhaps, but that business doesn’t just stop. That being said, shopping for homes may shift as people rely on virtual tours as they seek ex-urban places to live now that virtual work (and the threat of compressed populations) is more possible.

Chances are before COVID-19 (BCVD), you had a growth strategy in some part of your business. Now, you may need to shift to improving retention. That’s a reasonable shift in goals. Now, re-align your marketing strategy to that priority.

Kathy Bachmann, GM of Americas with the consultancy Analytic Partners Inc. told Paul Talbot in Forbes about the type of strategic shifts some brands are taking in their business:

“Here are some examples of the types of shifts we’re seeing and expect to see in marketing approaches and investments:

• Directing investments toward marketing tactics that drive online sales.

• Reducing marketing investments on campaigns to drive short-term sales or business outcomes, while keeping brand-building campaigns live – essentially saving dry powder.

• Shifting budgets to promoting at-home and delivery-based options (i.e., at-home fitness solutions/equipment/apps, grocery delivery, restaurant delivery, etc.)

• Shifting focus from promoting premium products to entry-point or everyday items….”

 

Our businesses will change in big and small ways. Consumer habits will change temporarily and permanently. We need to adjust, and we need strategy to align our organizations to do more than react to crisis. Don’t settle for just reacting to the crisis.

 

Join with Research for a 3-Legged Marathon

Think you know what your customers want or are worried about? Wait a day and it might change. Now is the time to adopt new practices to get constant input and insight about customers and sales channels. That certainly means strengthening any voice of the customer programs you have (grabbing feedback from customers during dozens of interactions). We are running a series of consumer and distribution channel surveys every two weeks to keep a pulse on how people’s attitudes and behaviors are changing (e.g. a rise in ‘fear of the unknown’). This is on top of our real-time feedback from social media, regular insights from search behavior (e.g. “what DIY projects are people planning/doing based upon Pinterest and Google searches”), and our VOC programs.

For anything new, we are engaging customers in qualitative co-creation sessions virtually. We need their current views to help us bring something to market that makes sense. One way or another, join with research at the hip and keep them embedded in your efforts for the foreseeable future. Embrace the 3-legged marathon.

 

Demonstrate What Your Brand Believes in and Distinctly Delivers

Many brands stream stories through their social channels and even via paid media of their support for the healthcare front line, the service workers delivering packages and their own employees who do their job in the face of adversity and uncertainty. Unfortunately, there is a sameness to all of these montages. They are largely being done to benefit employee morale and assure the rank and file that their work has meaning. Nothing wrong with that.

Still, as we emerge from this first phase of the crisis, brands will benefit from demonstrating what they believe in and what distinct role they can play in people’s lives. This may sound like the usual call for brands to invest in “brand” or embrace a purpose. Sort of. Post Covid-19 (PCVD), brands will need to demonstrate how they are helping people live their lives under the oppressive uncertainty we all face. The question is what does your brand mean now.

McKinsey takes a look at what marketers need to do during this immediate crisis and afterwards:

“Our analysis of consumer decision-journey behaviors showed that 87 percent of consumers shopped around: they were willing to consider other brands. We believe that behavior could be even more drastic given the scale and nature of this disruption…Marketers should begin revisiting what their brand means to customers. Agile marketing practices—typically focused on performance marketing—will need to be adopted at the brand-building level, with communications managed rapidly in test, learn, and refine cycles of continuous improvement.”

That notion that we apply rapid test-and-learn practices on brand-building is new. Having a static notion of your brand position won’t cut it anymore.

 

Put Some Jet Fuel into Digital Transformation

Clearly this jagged-edge “zig” we are all living through has demonstrated the urgent need for more digital ways to deliver products and services, customer experience and manage ourselves. We need to make digital change happen faster. But it is not as simple as green-lighting all those digital transformation projects that your business couldn’t find a way to fund BCVD. Funding will be scarce.

This is the time for leadership to step forward, roll up their sleeves and work with their most innovative business leaders to place some bets. You cannot delegate the selection of digital transformation projects/initiatives to the next tier. Digital transformation most often requires participation across the org chart. It’s up to the C-suite to declare big priorities to stimulate true collaboration and commitment.

Where to start? Accelerate that part of the customer journey that current circumstances reveal is more urgent. Double-down on that CRM implementation or expansion that will quickly make a fully remote field force more productive. Choose those projects that are so foundational, they can no longer be ignored (e.g. fix customer data) and those initiatives that will help the most people interact with your business digitally.  

 

Be Generous with Your Customers

What do your customers need most right now? If you ask them (see the 3-legged marathon above), you will find out that what you ultimately sell or deliver to them is actually helpful. If you are a bank, you can offer them guidance on managing their finances in a recession. If you are a restaurant, you can go beyond take away to allow them to subscribe to a meal-a-week delivered to their door. Yes, touchless or whatever makes folks feel more comfortable. If youy are an insurance company, you can recognize that people are driving lsss and give them a break on the car insurance bill.

When business locations open again, what do we all want to know? That you care enough about your customers to have special cleaning protocols in place to reduce the chances of your doorknobs and surfaces carrying the virus. “Generous” means “liberal in giving or sharing; unselfish.” Call it doing the right thing; demonstrating empathy; simply caring enough about your customers to listen closely and aim to serve them in a generous way.

Like a lot of folks, we tried to order from local restaurants regularly to keep their businesses going.  When I would pick up, I noticed a range of safety behaviors from the pizza place that hadn’t changed a bit and forced nervous dads into a small takeout pickup room where no one wore masks or gloves to the other Italian restaurant who arranged curbside pickup from masked and gloved staff. This second experience demonstrated a business who was empathetic to the concerns of many of their customers.

Think about what would really help your customers now. Do that. Then optimize for efficiency. People need brands who care about them.

 

Here are 4 useful POVs on how brands are leaning into PCVD marketing:

• How The Coronavirus Pandemic Impacts Marketing Strategy – Forbes
• How Marketing Leaders Can Both Manage the Coronavirus Crisis and Plan For The Future - McKinsey
• Preparing your marketing plans for the Coronavirus downturn – The Drum
• Brand Marketing Through the Coronavirus Crisis – HBR

 

Idea Bar #17: Virtual School Hackathon Challenge

Schools went virtual overnight. Sure, online classes have been growing from the full blown online universities like the University of Phoenix to LinkedIn Learning to new startups like Lessonly for business. But a lot of secondary school teachers and even university educators got thrown in the deep end when students were sent home abruptly. On top of that, it's not clear if schools will be able to start terrestrial classes in the Fall. 

Virtual School Hackathon Challenge

If you are a high school, boarding school, community college or traditional university, set up a 6-week hackathon-meets-startup-bootcamp experience. Students enroll to work in teams to explore and improve the online learning experience for your school.  They accept challenges from different disciplines - science, English, political science, art studio. These all represent very different use-cases some  of which have resisted becoming virtual or digital. The goal is to elevate the virtual learning experience and bring as many teachers and students up to speed with these practices. At the same time, you would engage students to help invent these new best practices. 

Students would explore:

• Evaluate and test different technology platforms from Zoom to Webex to the legacy platforms some schools already own
• Define a toolbox of best practices for facilitating different teaching/learning modes from creative work like brainstorming (e.g. Marketing) to deep study and discourse (e.g. Philosophy)
• Develop new utilities or apps to further enhance the learning experience. This includes the "new student" training program that 
• Market the best ideas, tools, resources across the school ecosystem to raise the bar for the virtual learning experience across the institution. 

Useful resources:

20+ eLearning Platforms for COVID-19 Affected School Students

Physical or online? How to make your hackathons a success

Design sprints: what they are and how to successfully run one

Creating an Online Classroom

 

The Tenured CMO’s Survival Guide

Some CMO’s only expect to be in their position between 36-43 months. For those that are in for the long haul – at least 6-8 years – there are key initiatives beyond short term sales that must be tackled. You can’t wait these out. The “tenured” CMO is the one who has made it past the first 12 months that for one reason or another kicks out a lot of ‘bad fits.’ If you have made it that far presumably you can assimilate to the culture of the place. You have also figured out how to sustain or improve short term business results.

Next up are those bigger, foundational jobs that will suck energy and resources before having a payoff. If you avoid them, you may not only put your job in jeopardy but the competitiveness of your company in the future.

Here are four marketing must-do’s for the tenured CMO:

 

First-Party Data Strategy to Build Lasting Value & Competitive Advantage

Whether you sell direct or through a channel, your marketing organization’s ability to have solid first-party data on your customers and any channel partners (e.g. third-party sellers like independent agents or brokers) is key to competing tomorrow. That first-party data should expand with every transaction and includes demographic, psychographic, transaction and other behavioral data. Some good sense needs to be applied to not collect everything under the sun (and protect privacy). But, in general, more is better.

The strategy needs to include the ability to access and apply the data to marketing and customer experience use-cases. Your data needs to be on the cloud (if possible) to allow you to more easily combine with third-party data sources like Acxiom, Experian, Bombora, and more.

Command of your own customer and channel data serves as a defense against the walled-garden marketing channels like Facebook, LinkedIn, Google and Amazon. They have made their intentions clear. For now, they will not let user data out to partners in any significant way. Your first-party data strategy is also a hedge against the “cookie-less” future. 

While I am sure the number of marketers working towards self-sufficiency is far greater than those who have achieved it, Mark Grether @mark_grether highlighted the shift in Martech Today:

“Recent surveys show more than 80 percent of marketers are data self-sufficient, or working towards the goal of self-sufficiency. Even before GDPR, marketers were shifting priorities and investments toward a heavier reliance on data. Because of this, there is a trend towards bringing these efforts “in-house” closer to the CMO and not under the purview of an agency. In fact, Unilever cited that its recent $1 billion acquisition of Dollar Shave Club was in part to gain access to the brand’s “unique consumer and data insights.””

Integrating Human-Centered Design to Get Closer to the Customer

Of all the ways to get closer to the customer to design better products and services, the practices of human-centered design watch the video above) feels like the most powerful. Inviting customers in to co-create a product, to inform its design and how it is marketed, will do more to ensure our marketing teams (or senior executives) don’t get too swept away with their hunches.

Dave Thomsen from Wanderful Media calls out the strength of more feedback, more often:

“When you’re working at breakneck speeds with tight deadlines, taking time out to gather feedback from users can feel like a luxury that’s easy to put off. But there’s no substitute for the nuance and depth of insight that can come from an in-person conversation. And with a couple of well-crafted Craigslist ads, a couple hundred dollars to pay your participants and an afternoon, you can quickly check key assumptions, uncover opportunities for improvement and gather inspiration for new ideas.”

Working side-by-side with customers (vs. behind one-way mirrors) breeds compassion and empathy. Those are two keys to truly customer-obsessed organizations. Human-centered design is a great way to bake it into culture.   

Here's a great summary from Greater Good Studio - What is Human-Centered Design 

 

Better Revenue Attribution and Belief

The need for better revenue attribution is not new. Still, it’s shocking how hard it is for many marketing organizations. Big consumer product goods companies and ecommerce companies seem to have this licked. For most others it remains a work-in-progress. Many CMOs are stymied by the difficulty in proving that a dollar spent in marketing (across 12 channels over an extended period of time) results in a causal uptick in sales. Building all the hard data pipes to prove it and report it daily (unless you are ecommerce) may be prohibitive.

Demonstrating the correlation between strong marketing programs and business results via highly instrumented pilots may be the better strategy. Then comes the second part of the CMO’s job – building belief in the senior executive ranks. These are the colleagues vying for limited annual budget dollars. They may be IT leaders, product leaders, finance folks. They are not marketers. Communicating the evidence of these pilots and getting them to acknowledge and buy-in to those results takes some adept maneuvering. Never assume the results speak for themselves. You can have produced the most definitive results, but if you haven’t gotten the “management committee” shark tank to acknowledge it, all may be for naught.

Do you want to be a marketing services leader or do you want to be the CMO in line to become the Chief Revenue Officer?

 

Build an Operating System That Delivers Against Key Goals

I have spent a lot of time planning out the next marketing organization structure. Is it aligned to products, customers, channels, marketing operations like ‘demand gen?’ While it matters which you choose or which hybrid you build, in this age of “agile marketing” how you work together may matter more. 

Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as just adopting agile marketing as a method. First of all, it doesn’t exist. Many of us have been working to apply the principles and ceremonies of ‘agile’ to marketing. Listen to the Agile Marketing podcast and it corroborates my experience applying it to an enterprise marketing organization – some things work and others don’t. (See The Boston Agile Group's approach here). CMG built a variant on an emerging view of agile marketing as an OS. It’s pretty strong and yet relies on significant change management to actually put it into practice.

 

Some marketers see promise in the “flywheel” model (see video above). This has been made popular by Hubspot. The flywheel is really portrayed as an alternative to the sales funnel yet it has strong implications for how your marketing organization can operate.

Creating a Marketing OS that works for you is highly personalized to your organization. My best suggestion is to rally your teams around common processes which may have shared artifacts like a common brief, channel plan or content Kanban board. Regardless of who the marketing team members report to or what discipline they come from – email vs. social vs. performance – if they share a common approach and tools to planning and execution that will become increasingly effective.

 

A Portfolio Approach

CMOs with an ambition to endure need to deliver value in the short run and they need to place bets on foundational capabilities that will help the organization compete next year or the year after. Tenured CMOs build a portfolio approach to their jobs and bravely place bets on tomorrow.

 

From NextNow Digital:

Simple Customer Journeys Drive Marketing Strategy

One of the real gems of planning methods, Drivers and Barriers, examines a particular customer persona at a stage in their journey, e.g., discovery, education/engagement, etc., and using any available research, identifies the drivers and barriers. Click the link to learn more. 

How Generative AI Will Change Visuals in Marketing

AI-generated text is one thing, but visuals are a different story. MidJourney, DALL-E2 and Stable Diffusion are super-interesting visual playgrounds creating extraordinary fantasy images or increasingly realistic people or creatures. Click the link to learn about the innovators like KittyKat. 

The Next-Gen Digital AdvertisingToolbox

A lot of businesses may be wasting their money on digital advertising. They struggle to use it well and gain enough efficiency for a positive return on their media investment. Here's a toolbox that works in the face of higher ad costs and lower effectiveness. Click on the link. 

Three Marketing Predictions for 2020 from a Brand-side Marketer

What are your big bets for digital marketing in the next 1-2 years? As a marketing strategist and practitioner inside a major brand, I need to focus on what will accelerate and improve business in the near term in addition to building a foundation for tomorrow. 

So, timing is everything. As I look back on the past few years and where momentum is growing, here are the few trends that I really do expect significant activity and gains over the next 12-24 months.

Practical Applications of AI

The subtitle of Ajay Agrawal (co-authors Joshua Gans and Avi Goldfarb) Prediction Machines is “The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence.” Hearing Ajay speak recently, I have come to appreciate the simple idea that AI enables more efficient predictions which are key to decision-making. Think about operations in marketing where we could use some cheaper predictions – like which audiences will respond to specific marketing efforts, which customers are more likely to buy a next product or which customers are most likely to become your most valuable.

Targeting, segmentation, creative and messaging are all ripe territories for machine learning improvements. Clearly the “digital gatekeepers” – Google, Amazon, Facebook – are all over AI. Google appears to be investing about $3.9 billion; Amazon about $871 million (from TechRepublic). Their interests go far beyond marketing yet you can bet they are using AI to enhance their leadership in that space.

AI could easily become the new every-year prediction like mobile did for many years – “this is the year of mobile.” Still, we will see more brands practically using AI in their marketing efforts.

Marketers will find it easier to rent AI solutions even as they negotiate with internal IT teams to establish a competitive edge capability in-house.

Persado integrates AI to control advertising messaging and essentially predict which messages will drive the most action. Gone are the clumsy days when we craft multiple exections and optimize to the high performer. Persado can improvise at scale (I know, it’s hardly improvisation – just good old machine learning)

A lot of brands will gain experience with AI via a big platform like Salesforce Einstein. From big ambitions around workflow automation to narrow use cases like email send time optimization, marketers will gain experience via these partners. As eMarsys puts it, AI will “identify the optimal time for emails to be sent for each contact – not segments, not groups, but individuals.”

 

More ‘Full Stack’ B2B Sales and Marketing

We have been doing some terrific work with Account Based Marketing (ABM) over the past couple of years and will continue to lean into it in 2020. One of the by products of trying to make the full potential of ABM work is establishing a more complete martech integration between your marketing automation and sales automation capabilities. While some companies may already have that level of sales and marketing sophistication, many more are like us – in the process.

This year, we will see more brands putting that “full stack” into service to run fully instrumented marketing and sales programs. That may be why there is softening in martech investments (from Martech Today).  

Brands have the tech, they just don’t have all the talent they need or haven’t connected it all. As Martech Today puts it,

“Martech allocations may be down in 2019, but according to Gartner, marketing leaders continue to see martech as a tool for driving customer engagement and growth.  According to last year’s survey, marketers indicated they only use 61% of the functionality available in their martech portfolio. A reported lack of resources was identified as a common organizational challenge.”

More brands will do the hard work of connecting sales and transaction data to track the impact of integrated sales and marketing activities. I would peg 2021 or later for serious weighted attribution analytics to understand better how various channels and tactics contributed to that sale.

A Strategic Commitment to Conversational Marketing

There is a profound shift for marketers embedded in the term ‘conversational marketing’ - a shift towards designing marketing to solve customer problems; a shift to catching up to what Google already knows about people (they are seeking answers not your Web site); a shift towards brands embracing their authority.

The folks at Drift point out the frustrations people have getting answers on the Web:

When brands deploy digital agents or ‘chatbots’ designed to get people to helpful answers quickly or navigate a process as simply as possible, that’s conversational marketing. When brands design voice skills on Alexa that simply must be of-use to people to even get enabled, that’s conversational marketing. When brands deploy live chat across platforms to become pervasively available, that’s conversation marketing.

A prediction that we will see more AI-powered chatbots this year isn’t much of a prediction (we will). If anything, chatbots as the primary manifestation of conversational marketing will give way to more complete strategies around interacting with people in new, streamlined ways to get them the answers they need.  This customer-focused approach pays off for the brand by building greater consideration through every useful interaction.

As marketers, we need to solve peoples’ pain points, make their lives better and save them time and anxiety while doing it. Conversational marketing does that.

The less obvious benefit or outcome for brands answering questions or simplifying a process for people is to firmly place the brand in a position of authority on topics. It builds trust. And in an online world full of dodgy, untrustworthy information, brands need to step up. One company that is building a business around creating brand authority is Yext (disclosure: we are doing some work with these folks right now). They ask a simple question,

“Every day customers ask questions about your brand. Shouldn’t the answers come from you?”

They are setting up services that aim to put brands in the driver’s seat of answers. It may start with listings and local search but the application and the intersection with conversational marketing is huge. For packaged goods companies, it might be consumer questions on ingredients or nutritional value. For an insurance company, it might extend beyond core product attributes to authority on risk prevention.

 

Three Trends in 2020 

Three trends in digital marketing for 2020 include the everyday application of artificial intelligence, the hardening of the full stack in marketing and sales automation, and the prioritization of conversational marketing. These are practical predictions from a marketer within a rather large enterprise brand. That means they are more about what I expect to happen within 12 months, not ‘maybe someday’ predictions.

What do you see coming around the next corner?

 

Other Good POVs:

Four Digital Marketing Trends Poised to Disrupt in 2020 - Prophet 

2020 Digital Marketing Trends - Adroll

How AI Will Transform Marketing in 2020 -Martech Advisor

Trends in 2020 to Look Out For in Digital Marketing - Entrepreneur 

Conversational Marketing Guide - Hubspot 

 

From NextNow Digital:

Simple Customer Journeys Drive Marketing Strategy

One of the real gems of planning methods, Drivers and Barriers, examines a particular customer persona at a stage in their journey, e.g., discovery, education/engagement, etc., and using any available research, identifies the drivers and barriers. Click the link to learn more. 

How Generative AI Will Change Visuals in Marketing

AI-generated text is one thing, but visuals are a different story. MidJourney, DALL-E2 and Stable Diffusion are super-interesting visual playgrounds creating extraordinary fantasy images or increasingly realistic people or creatures. Click the link to learn about the innovators like KittyKat. 

The Next-Gen Digital AdvertisingToolbox

A lot of businesses may be wasting their money on digital advertising. They struggle to use it well and gain enough efficiency for a positive return on their media investment. Here's a toolbox that works in the face of higher ad costs and lower effectiveness. Click on the link. 

Practical Steps for Digital Transformation in Business

"Digital Transformation" is big business for the world's top consultancies. The pressure for business to adopt digital practices has never been greater, and still it may feel inaccessible to many. You don't need a 6-7 figure consulting engagement to get started. 

Here are some models for assessing and organizing how a business leader can manage digital change that can help.

Going Digital

What does “going more digital” in your business mean? In short, business leaders are faced with making sure their businesses can compete and achieve their ambition at a time when digital channels, technologies and behaviors are changing basic business processes from marketing, sales, operations, talent management and more. You ‘go digital’ because you have to in order to meet your goals today and tomorrow.

Larger businesses have been feeling the pressure to adopt more digitally-based capabilities like marketing via digital channels or streamlining operations by integrating data and supply chain management. They have been investing millions in digital transformation. See the digital change stories from Nestle, Walmart and Aetna. Small startups have made digital a competitive advantage as they build their business around these changes without the ball and chain of legacy systems or cultures. Often their whole business is made possible by new digital platforms and behaviors. See Venmo, AirBNB, CoverHound, HelloTech and many, many more.

For everyone else, there is that careful assessment of what changes can be made in the business to reap a financial benefit quickly while committing to building new capabilities that may payoff beyond the current fiscal year. Where does a business leader start?

There are two approaches that may make sense for your business: Portfolio Management and Journey-based Transformation.

Portfolio Management

Whether you are a regional construction company with $100M in revenue or a new retail store hoping to break $1M in annual revenue, you can create a practical plan to “go more digital’ around a portfolio management approach.

Woody Driggs, EY Americas Advisory Digital Transformation Wavespace Leader has a solid POV on managing three portfolios: Protect, Optimize and Growth. “Protect” asks you to identify that part of your business that is mission critical and where you may have significant risks. Think customer data and privacy or any areas of your business governed by regulation. “Optimize” has you find those parts of your business where an incremental improvement can deliver cost savings or some other benefit in the near term. “Growth” is a bit more speculative and requires you to plan for bigger changes that can help your business grow into the future. This may be in response to industry disruptions  - e.g. how hard it is for construction companies to find experienced workers. Woody suggests you manage this third portfolio as a private equity fund:

““For a successful growth portfolio, a company needs to try to understand future trends and changes that will impact customers,” he says – for example, the ways in which Gen Z consumes services differently, or the shift in the healthcare sector from a focus on paying for procedures to paying for outcomes. “They then need to make a plan by working backward to apply resources to these scenarios while determining their market feasibility at the present time.””

 

Journey-based Transformation

Whether you are a B2B business like a medical device company that sells to hospitals or medical practices, or a B2C business like a retail store that sells online and on main street, you can easily re-imagine your business through the lens of the customer. This starts with simple frameworks that break down your business into phases that span from marketing to customer engagement to loyalty and retention.

There are lots of ways to document a customer journey within a particular business. There is also a bit of an art to documenting the real journey versus the one that senior execs may think is happening.

Click here for a gallery of customer journey maps to give you a sense of that diversity.

Take a simple journey like this:

Now, examine how your business supports the customer in each phase and determine what Incremental improvements can be made via digital processes that make for a better experience and reduce cost. Next determine what bigger, Growth changes could be made that would help the business grow and compete in the near future. These are the big, transformational changes like selling directly online or developing new products based upon digital insights. Essentially, this is applying a portfolio approach to the journey phases. This ensures your innovations will deliver value to your customers and are not digital for digital's sake. You don’t have to be a Fortune 100 company to benefit from this type of analysis and management.

Once you have a view of what you might start with, it’s time to prioritize. You will not have the resources to make improvements across the board. Start with a known priority – you may need to acquire new customers or improve retention with the ones you have. You may need to improve the performance of your salesforce or simply drive down the costs of servicing existing customers. Then look at what can be done more easily – low-hanging fruit – and those changes that may take more time with some foundational effort happening immediately.

 

Last Word

Digital Transformation is never easy (here are reasons why digital transformations fail). Still, these are methods that any business can use to begin to get a handle on what they can do to make their business more digital over time. 

 

From NextNow Digital:

5 Questions to Define Your Business Brand

For small and mid-size businesses who want to build their brand (and, therefore, their business) thoughtfully and with intention, click on the link for 5 questions that will help you sort out what your distinctive brand is all about.

The Next-Gen Digital Marketing Strategy Toolbox

is the distilled and essential toolbox to allow any business and/or marketing leader to develop strong marketing with measurable impact. This is built on the simple “Next-Gen Digital Marketing Strategy Framework” where a test-and-learn culture and capability serve as the keystone. Click on the link to get the toolbox.

The Next-Gen Digital Marketing Strategy Framework

For small and midsize businesses who want to create an effective digital marketing strategy for their business that responds to these changes, we’ve put together a new strategic framework and toolbox. Click the link or the framework. 

 

4 Ways Voice Interaction Makes Us Better Marketers

Fresh from designing and deploying a new Alexa Skill, I am struck by three things:

• Designing for voice interaction requires a new set of skills and tools. It’s not as simple as “audio content.”
• Voice interaction is a relatively new behavior for which there are few real experts or templates to follow.
• The pressure to develop skills that people will actually use will make us better marketers. 

To say that voice interaction will become big may be like saying the computer mouse would be big back in 1968. The popularization of Amazon Alexa and Google Home have done more in the last three years to make verbalizing commands almost normal than anything before (including Siri commercials from Apple).

“U.S. Smart Speaker Ownership Rises 40% in 2018 to 66.4 Million”

“A new study from Juniper Research has found that there will be 8 billion digital voice assistants in use by 2023, up from an estimated 2.5 billion at the end of 2018.”

 

Homeowners Ask for Help

Check out Travelers Home Central Skill. We designed it for homeowners who want a little extra guidance on what home maintenance tasks to tackle and when. We mined search data to understand the questions people have. We dug into the performance data of the hundreds of content stories we have on our Prepare & Prevent resource. We paid attention to the scarce data available on current voice skills. And we dug into the homeowner inside each of us to craft a utility that helped people like me who need to be told to tackle certain chores at certain times to protect the value of their home and the safety of those who live in it. We will learn how to grow its value to homeowners over time.

 

Designing for Voice Makes Us Better Marketers

Here are 4 ways designing for voice interaction actually makes us better marketers overall: 

1. Identify trigger moments of need. The biggest uses of Alexa Skills include playing music and getting your news (“Flash Briefing/News"). Voice search is on the rise as people translate their smart phone behavior to voice – “Alexa, what was the last Jim Jarmusch movie?” In general, we are all just learning what we can do via a voice assistant. For brands, that means a healthy appetite for experimentation. It also means thinking in terms of trigger moments – what would cause a user to ask Alexa a question?

For homeowners, it might be prepping your home for a big, forecasted storm or simply that amorphous moment, called “winterizing your home,” when we want to take care of overdue maintenance chores.

Finding or creating a true moment of need that would be remedied by a brief voice interaction is not as easy as it may sound. Since talking to your fill-in-the-blank device is a new thing, it's not as easy as asking people. With voice interaction, identifying a need that can best be met with a voice interaction is tricky. We need to constantly be trying things and seeing how people respond. 

 

2. Design to use-cases or journeys. Like trigger moments, we need to think in terms of what a person is trying to get done. Some skills – like “Flash Briefings”, now “News” – deliver information with no specific next action. People want a snippet of information to chew on. When someone asks for a home maintenance tip, they may be ready to tackle that job immediately. More likely they may want to schedule a reminder for the weekend when they are more prepared to pull out the ladder and tackle the gutters.

 

3. Align to what people say and intend. Many a good prayer includes the phrase, “seek rather to understand than be understood.” Figuring out all of the ways someone might ask a question and what type of answer they are after become the core skills for “voice interaction designers.” This builds on the skills of great search engine optimization specialists who seek out the myriad ways people may type a question into Google. Conversational English is different than the typed word. When people engage with voice assistants, they often seek to be as brief in their question as possible.  Thankfully, for now anyway, people understand that the tech is early days, and they will go out of their way to try and frame an answerable question.

 

4. Iterate, expand the “corpus” and figure out how to apply artificial intelligence to increase the value. More than any new channel or format, voice assistants need constant iteration and improvement. Not only is the format young and hard to get “right,” it begs for iteration as the system learns from the questions posed to it. Adding new answers or anticipating a variety of utterances takes ongoing work. Natural Language Processing (NLP), one of the tools in the AI and machine learning toolbox, makes learning while doing more possible.  

 

Designing for voice demands we think about the journey - what people are actually trying to get done - and the trigger moment for seeking a solution. Because its voice, we literally have to listen to our customer and lean into understanding what they need. We have to be great at data and technology from the start with voice in order for its value to the customer to grow. Automation via AI and machine learning cannot really be after thoughts. Designing for voice pushes us to be better marketers. 

 

Useful Resources:

How Amazon Alexa Works: Your Guide to Natural Language Processing

Exploring VUI Design: The Basics and Getting Started

The future of voice search: 2020 and beyond

How Voice Technology will Influence Marketing in the Future?

The Top 20 Brand Innovators in Voice