The words “digital,” “mobile,” and “social” each describe changing behaviors and technology that affect how we make decisions, buy things and live our lives. Marketers must put extra energy behind each to learn and master how to use these technologies, channels and customer insights and behaviors to win, service and retain customers.
Digital Leads a Path to the Customer Journey
Enlightened marketers hire specialists in these new areas to strengthen their use of new platforms to deliver messages and “engage” with customers and stakeholders. They provide training and invest in new technologies to improve skills and outcomes.
Then you end up with some sort of digital marketing department(s) that sit alongside more traditional functional marketing groups: media, creative, analytics. The tension is good for a while. Both groups – digital and traditional – learn from each other.
Ultimately, marketing leaders conclude that people’s lives have changed so much in many countries around the world that distinguishing between digital and non-digital is not as helpful as trying to understand the holistic, complex, ever-changing customer journey that describes what people do across their lives and over time to get to a purchase decision.
You end up wanting a “post-digital marketing organization.”
There are a series of beliefs, principles and a view on an operating model that both gauge whether a marketing organization is ready to start down this path and indicate what it takes to succeed.
Beliefs
Customer journey moments: Today’s digital, mobile, social, online, offline customer journey has many touchpoints and influences over time and micro-moments full of opportunity.
Old marketing would tell you that reach and frequency matters, old digital marketing would tell you that optimizing for last click matters. Neither focus reflects the true, messy world of customer decision-making that can stretch out across all sorts of online and offline touchpoints over weeks or months or longer.
Look at GFK’s summary of the auto insurance journey – one of the simpler insurance journeys out there. Now think about a large manufacturing company purchasing/renewing their commercial property and casualty insurance. What are the moments that drive them to or away from renewal? How does that play out over the course of 1-3 year renewal cycles? Understanding that journey in its entirety with all of its variables and the weighting of influence is hard, potentially too hard. Mapping that journey to understand segments and moments where brands can have an impact is critical.
We used to just think in terms of “moments of truth” which was often interpreted to be those important events between a brand and customer that makes all of the difference in the world. For insurance that would be the claim experience.
But there are other moments that matter and set the tone of the relationship or present opportunities for brands to be of greater service to people.
David Edelman at McKinsey and Lisa Gevelber at Google outline the importance of “micro-moments:”
“Brands can identify micro-moments by recognizing times when someone has a particular type of need. Someone may need to learn something, somebody may need to get something done, or someone may need to buy something. It's about creating the content or tools to enable people to accomplish whatever they want in that particular moment.”
Deliver more value: Brands need to provide increasing value to customers over time to meet their needs and earn their business.
It’s not enough to make a static product and deliver it to your distribution channel. Business customers and consumers expect more and more. These expectations are established by our interactions with other brands across all parts of our life. Amazon, Uber, OpenTable and Trunk Club can set the expectations for the customers of a B2B electronics firm. Call it the “unified customer experience expectation.”
Shar VonBoskirk and her colleagues at Forrester have coined the phrase, “be human, be helpful, be handy.” Brands need to shift their marketing focus from advertising and message delivery to being customer obsessed and delivering more value. Ideally, that value would increase over time. The longer I am a customer, the more value I reap from the relationship.
Customer insights and needs: Marketers must constantly work to stay close to the customer and understand their emotional and rational needs and influences.
Forrester stresses the phrase “customer obsessed” over the weaker “customer-centered.” They are right to do so. Companies who say they are merely customer-centered may fall into the trap of doing lip service and approaching this quality as a static achievement. Customer obsession is a way of being and is never done.
Having a powerful mandate and organization to mine customer insights and drive their application across the enterprise is critical to walking the walk of customer obsession. Going beyond traditional methods of quantitative and qualitative research to include ethnographies, site visits and other close-contact research is critical.
Collaborative, agile process and teams: It’s more important to work across disciplines, iterate, learn and optimize than craft a “big bang” marketing campaign. Operate accordingly.
Skills, process and tools matter more than organizational structure. Too many big companies agonize over reporting and organization structures. The new marketing organization must have clear roles – that can be played by many people; a variety of new specialisms that can be assembled into teams; and a few commonly understood tools that make it easy to work in quickly assembled or transient teams. Agile means work quickly and adapt. Focus energy on what helps that happen.
Principles
Always learning; always curious – we will never know enough about our customers and how to be of-use to them so we are always seeking. We condition ourselves to an ongoing effort to learn and gain insight.
Data-driven; data-facile – we focus on using data to gain insight, instrument our work and tell true stories about the impact of what we are doing as marketers.
Empathetic to a fault – we care about the challenges our customers and our salesforce faces. That empathy ensures we stay ‘customer-obsessed.’
Operating Model
Shar VanBoskirk and Sheryl Pattek at Forrester both have insightful views of the post digital organization. Think of post digital marketing as an operating system. We focus on how we work together quickly and effectively.
We do that by having shared:
- Beliefs
- Principles
- Goals
- Tools
- Framework for working
“Framework for working” is a better approach to improving how we work together than proposing another organization model. Organization models are tough to upend. By outlining the roles and skills needed and then outlining how teams form and work quickly together it’s possible to align contributors in a post digital marketing organization.
Sheryl Pattek makes a good case for the need to move away from a channel-centered organization model to one that is customer-centered (see her preso here). She has a sketch of what that organization might look like. Rather than an org model, however, I read this as a ‘framework for working.’ I can also see the wisdom on adjusting it to your own company’s reality.
Here’s a ‘framework for working:'
- Customer segment marketing strategy leads: these folks run a team serving particular customers – small business, consumers, etc… They take responsibility for holding deep customer knowledge and for being the steward of the strategy – how to play & win.
- Marketing CoEs: from content marketing to social media marketing to insights & analytics to advertising media, each of the CoE’s represents a highly technical specialism. Trained to integrate with each other, this collection of CoE’s builds defensible strength in their particular area and attracts talent to the organization.
- Channel Managers: Our Web sites, email marketing, social media channels are all precious customer touchpoints and must be managed with the customer, the businesses and the brand in mind.
- Marketing Operations: The new ‘ops center’ can have responsibility in four areas: performance measurement, process and workflows, marketing technology management, marketing data management. This group serves the entire marketing organization and has its eye on making the function ever more effective and efficient.
Are you working towards a post digital marketing organization? If so, how are you making it work?
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