First came the drive for digital transformation. Companies embraced digital initiatives to become more efficient and, in some cases, to transform their business processes in one way or another. The Chief Digital Officer was born to drive a stimulus plan for change. That job was always meant to be temporary until everyone became “digital.” But something was missing. Digital for digital’s sake didn’t make much sense. So, business leaders discovered customer-centricity or their inherent lack of it. Understanding and meeting the needs of people became the next true north and nicely provided a direction for all that hoped for digital change.
Digital transformation was put in service of customer obsession.
Marketing as a discipline has always been customer-centered. Marketers ceaselessly seek insights about customers, dig deep into the emotional drivers of decisions not just the rational and embrace empathy. As David Ogilvy said (albeit with a 1955 lens), "The customer is not a moron. She's your wife."
Content Marketing is Different
In the push to transform large companies to become more customer-centered throughout their practices and to lean into digital change and disruption, marketing will play a significant role. And it’s a new form of advertising and marketing that will help lead the change: content marketing.
Content marketing focuses on delivering useful or inspiring content that helps customers do and achieve what is important to them at different moments in their lives. You cannot succeed with content marketing if you don’t have empathy and understanding of your customer. It’s all about delivering value – value as perceived by that customer. Oh, and as David Ogilvy also said in relation to marketing, “We sell or else.” Marketing must serve customers and it must improve the bottom line.
Three content marketing practices are essential for digital transformation.
A Journey-Based Customer Approach
Content marketing requires the marketer to think in terms of a customer journey. The goal is to deliver the content that helps customers move towards their goal whether that is purchasing a new home, teaching their teen to drive safely or successfully buy the right home insurance. The name of the game in marketing today is earning the attention and engagement of customers. That means understanding what they are trying to do and the emotional and rational drivers and barriers in that experience and then delivering the content and resources that can help them.
Content marketers design for discovery, consideration and evaluation phases. They map discrete “journeys” which describe a key episode like researching and selecting a financial advisor or requesting a bid from a home contractor. They seek to understand the emotional highs and lows of a particular journey. These become key opportunities.
As companies embrace digital transformation led by customer centricity, they will inevitably embrace a journey-based customer approach or as my colleague Claudiu Coltea calls it ”journey transformation.”
Measure Against Final Outcomes
Marketers often get caught in a swirl of measuring diagnostic metrics for marketing that speak to its efficiency at higher levels of the funnel. We pay a lot of attention to “engagement” metrics. That’s not wrong. In that engagement is predictive of some type of conversion, it is important to measure.
Conversion matters more. Sure, I mean sales or renewal or some other cash register metric. But conversion can be any high value action from filling out a form, using an agent finder utility, or even consuming a “high value” piece of content which has demonstrated itself as a great stepping stone to that sales outcome. If you know what these high value actions are, you can design and optimize your marketing to drive people to them. This is much more intentional marketing that will prove itself as a revenue driver and not some murky cost center.
Marketers in digital transforming brands are embracing this ‘back to outcomes’ approach. In a blog post about ContentTECH Summit 2019, Jodi Harris from Content Marketing Institute said,
“While Shiva (Aetna’s vice president of marketing technology and digital experience, Shiva Mirhosseini) acknowledges that the team still looks closely at things like net promoter scores, content engagement metrics, and behavioral patterns across their sites, a conversion is the most definitive indicator of a customer’s satisfaction with the communication experience.”
Defining and aiming towards conversions are part and parcel with a journey-based approach. We focus on actions and outcomes.
A Governance Process to Guide Change
Digital transformation, customer-centricity, content marketing – it’s all new for most brands. Without some controls on how you engage the customer (e.g. the voice and qualities of content, Web experience design, service interactions), chaos ensues.
Big marketing brands like Nestle developed operating systems like “Brand Building the Nestle Way.” These gave marketers across the businesses the rules of the road and steered them into proven and effective marketing practices. It helped a distributed network of marketers at different points in their career deliver great work faster. It also kept a lot of crap from leaking out the door.
Content marketing requires the same type of guardrails and governance. Cathy McKnight from Digital Clarity Group summarized:
“The content – images, text, audio, video – that fill our digital channels does not appear out of nowhere. Success in digital and content marketing comes from the quality of the content being managed. This success requires supporting content strategy. A large part of that strategy has little to do with the content itself, and everything to do with people; the people involved in creating, managing, and regulating the content. In other words, the people involve with content governance.”
Governance is about enabling people via clear guidelines, checks and systems and also training and tools. Like many new practices within a large organization, content marketing needs to start out more centralized and with an eye towards democratizing the capability once the governance guardrails and enablers are in place.
As large and mid-size brands aim towards digital transformation and customer-centricity, a marketing organization that has shifted to content marketing will bring complimentary change. It’s all about embracing a genuine empathy towards customers, boundless curiosity and a commitment to starting with the question, “what will customers feel is valuable?”
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