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?

 

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. 

 

Three Ways to Scale Humanity in Marketing Technology and Automation

For those of us trying to scale marketing’s impact via new technology and data solutions, one of the big tricks is holding onto some humanity in these approaches. Marketing automation quickly gets, well, automated and devoid of personality. What can you do to retain and apply humanity at scale? How do you avoid the pitfalls of marketing that tries to be more human and personal but ends up reeking of stock phrases and machine-made personal touches.

The problem may not lie in the new technology so much as the habits of big companies. Just think about all of the stars of Fast Company extolling the wisdom of personal customer service and human touches. They are almost all small companies. And the big guys who get held up as poster-children of the personal touch - Zappos, Neiman Marcus and the Ritz Carlton - are the same service-side players that always get featured. It’s hard for big companies to embrace their humanity and address their customers in colloquial, conversational language that reveals a bit of the humanity of the people behind the scenes.

That being said, marketing technology can aggravate this tendency. Here are three examples where marketers are trying to use technology to strengthen that human connection.

 

Show me my field rep

We recently launched a new approach to email marketing with our independent agents. Two of our marketers could see what a truly great email approach could be, one that strengthens our relationships with these agents while at the same time drives actions that mattered to them and to us.

They designed each email to start with something quite simple: a photograph of the field rep from our company that represented that independent agent. The emails were personalized to the agent and the sender was their field rep. This type of personalization is foundational to good email marketing. The photograph was that extra touch that made the difference. It wasn’t easy to pull off and my hat’s off to our internal team who connected the images associated with employee profiles on our intranet to serve up via the email system.

The gymnastics needed to make this work might cause many to question, is it worth it? The answer is a resounding ‘yes!’ anything we can do to share our humanity with our agents and customers helps us make the connection we value most – being trusted partners who genuinely care about our customers and our communities.

 

Handwritten notes at scale

I had a boss who would send me handwritten notes 3-4 times a year to acknowledge some accomplishment. Ultimately, I really appreciated these notes. Rarely do I receive a handwritten note from the CEO of a partner company (I refer to the companies we use for various functions and technology in marketing as ‘partners.’ I don’t like the word ‘vendor’ or its implications). Actually, I cannot remember ever getting a handwritten note. Emails, sure. Handwritten notes deliver a different impact.  But how would you scale that?

Bond has figured it out. They have created a web-based service for sending out handwritten notes at scale. You can see the rows of handwriting machines on their web site, each capable of a variety of writing styles. Now, I doubt the recipient is fooled into thinking the CEO of a company wrote them this perfectly printed note. Combine four things and I don’t care: the note card format, a sender who is a real executive, the script lettering and, most of all, a human, conversational message.

It’s funny that it’s this last piece, the actual copy, itself that companies likely struggle with the most. If we all just wrote a bit more conversationally and friendlier, we might achieve more humanity in our Web sites, our direct mail, even our advertisements.

 

Chatbots: friendly but not chatty

Too much has been written on chatbots. If you want to catch up on the whole concept, here’s a decent summary from Deloitte Digital.

We have been developing AI-fueled chatbots over the past year or two and one of the biggest learnings has little to do with the whiz-bang artificial intelligence and machine learning that promises to make these chatbots sharper with their answers. A tricky piece has been weaving in a friendly, conversational tone that doesn’t become too chatty and get in the way of the communication. Everyone interacting with a bot should know it’s a bot. Trying to trick people into thinking they are interacting with call center rep is not cool (and not likely to work.) Making the interactions pleasant, more than ‘just the facts, m’am,” and even with a bit of a smile can go a long way to reveal our own humanity in a simple interaction.

Mya is a chat bot developed for the talent acquisition field that conveys that human touch well. The folks behind it began running a recruiting service for college grads called First Job and then pivoted to develop Mya as their core gig. The dialogue style is conversational and meant to help nurture talent and update talent databases. The humanity is subtle and doesn’t get in the way of the communication. Think about it – the best way to add humanity is with humor or story, both of which would make interactions too long. Short and sweet and human.

 

Humanity Builds Trust

If we want to strengthen trust between brands and customers, one way we will do that is by revealing our humanity. Think about the classic equation for trust which I first learned from David Maister:

Credibility + Reliability + Intimacy / Self-Orientation

The intimacy in the equation comes from our willingness to reveal our humanity. Think about how you are doing that in your marketing. And think about how that can scale via martech.  

 

From NextNow Digital:

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. 

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 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. 

The Agile Marketing Strategy for Small Business

The importance of strategy in marketing can’t be overstated. Today, though, we need simpler strategies that can be tested and optimized. Click the link. 

Three Examples of Content Marketing to Enable Your Sales Channel

If you sell through a sales channel and especially if you sell through an independent sales channel, a portion of your marketing effort goes towards enabling their sales effort. That’s old news. Most B2B marketing started by creating sales collateral to put in the hands of the sales staff. Then came the “consumerization” of B2B marketing where marketers connected directly with prospects and customers via digital channels and began building trust and laying the groundwork for preference.

How marketing supports sales channels is changing. This is largely because buyer habits are changing. Three-page sell sheets may still have a role but it’s a smaller one.  Buyers are doing their own research online. They (we) look for quick ways to get smart on a subject like retirement, insurance or home buying, that may be complex or jargon-filled and inaccessible. Then we talk to a sales agent.

Think about how investment firms like Blackrock create awareness and demand from investors while helping the financial advisor with content that helps them be smarter or actual content they can pass along to their clients.

Content that respects our time – short explainer videos, “Three Tips…” articles, 1-minute diagnostic quizzes – help us get smarter without having to take a sabbatical from work. Content needs to be designed to be of-use and responsive to whatever decision is likely in front of a buyer. That’s the new interpretation of ‘customer-centered.’

We want it on our phone and on our laptop. We discover it via our social feeds as well as search. We favor content passed along by a connection. Anything like a twelve-page whitepaper feels old-school or, at the very least, requires a time investment we keep putting off into the future. (How many 10-page pdfs sit on my hard drive waiting for that perfect moment when I can actually read or scan them?)

To help the sales staff today, we need to do three things:

• Educate sales about their buyer – how habits are changing, what is different about them today and will likely be different tomorrow. The notion that the sales person has the sacrosanct knowledge of their customer and how to sell to them is just, well, over.
• Give sales digital content that helps them connect with today’s and tomorrow’s buyer – more of that bite-sized, utility content designed around what the buyer needs to get done and native to the many screens they use.
• Train sales to become social sellers – tune-ups on how to connect via LinkedIn and Facebook and even interact digitally (e.g. text & email) with the next generation of buyers who just expect that.

Here are three examples of how brands or technologies are working to enable their sales channel to adapt and succeed.

 

Freddie Mac and the Borrower of the Future

Freddie Mac wants their lenders to be more familiar with today’s home-maybe-buyer. The core premise of the research and insights-heavy site - The Borrowers of the Future - is summed up, “What's on the mind of future borrowers? It may not be what you think.”

Articles sum up the ‘so what’ for lenders and convert societal trends into very practical terms:

• How Are Home Sharing Platforms Affecting Home Buying?
• Want to Help Millennials Become Homeowners? Try Townhouses
• High Housing Costs Are Root Cause of Low Homeownership Rates Among Young Adults

Experts from academia and Freddie Mac capture ideas in short videos. That places Freddie Mac at the heart of the solution. The whole site demonstrates their expertise vs. claiming it. It positions Freddie Mac as the “guide” not the hero of the story. In this B2B site, the lender is clearly the hero. As Donald Miller outlines in Building a Story Brand, being the guide is a powerful role for any brand to play.

 

State Street Listens

The investment firm, State Street, wants to help advisors and investors stay abreast of trends that will affect their investment strategies today and tomorrow. As a big firm, they have research budgets and capabilities not everyone would invest in. Their new “Listen” site publishes topical summaries of trends in five categories: Culture, Innovation, Markets, Perspective, Clarity. While these themes may be broad or high-minded, the actual articles get a little more down-to-earth (although not as practically titled as Freddie Mac):

• Building a New Workplace for Generation Z
• Memorize This: Three Tips for Remembering Clients' names, Faces and More
• Overruling the Heart: How Science, Data and Experience Can Curb Lovesick Investing

The articles are by-lined by State Street Advisors thus establishing their expertise. ‘Listen’ articles feature in their LinkedIn channel making them easy for advisors to pass along in their own feeds. State Street is working to give their advisors more that they can use to engage their clients and prospects more often. This goes beyond the robust research reports they are known for into more scannable content with a quick POV. 

 

Sales Content Platforms: Seismic

Seismic is a platform for sharing content with a distributed sales force. There are a few solutions like it out there. Conceptually, I am more than intrigued by the promise of a platform like this. Practically-speaking it does seem like advanced science for most sales people and organizations.

The breakthrough of this type of platform is how it connects marketing with sales via a data-driven solution.  Marketing wants to create content that works hard for sales. The performance and sales analytics – what content is being used most, what content is associated with a sales event- remove the guesswork or biased anecdotes from well-intentioned sales leaders. Now we can know what content works hardest.

The platform puts more content in more formats at the fingertips of sales people. They can find it easily. They can sort it and think about how content aligns to wherever a prospect is within their buyer journey. With Seismic securing another $100M in Series E investment and with John W. Thompson, Chairman at Microsoft, joining the board, the VC community is demonstrating belief in their platform.

 

Marketing and Sales Alignment

Marketing has always supported sales. The change that’s coming is the full instrumentation of the sales and marketing functions and their technology-enabled integration. Business leaders will overcome the tribal conflicts between sales and marketing as each function aligns around common KPIs revealed in a completely transparent dashboard of performance. Marketers can scale the impact of sales and know when they are truly winning. By delivering content that helps people make decisions quickly and easily wherever they are in their day or in the journey of their lives, marketing and sales can be aligned in serving today's customer.

 

From NextNow Digital:

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. 

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 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. 

The Agile Marketing Strategy for Small Business

The importance of strategy in marketing can’t be overstated. Today, though, we need simpler strategies that can be tested and optimized. Click the link. 

Three Predictions for Brand Marketers in 2019 (It's All About the Data)

If I really knew what was coming down the pike, I would quietly invest in the market that benefits from my so-called predictions and be done with it. I am not much of a gambler. Still, that doesn’t mean I am wrong, but I certainly acknowledge that I might be.

With that bold statement of confidence, here are my quick predictions for marketers next year:

 

Brands will need to take a stand on marketing and customer data stewardship

Brands need to protect their customer’s data in two ways. The first is cyber security - protecting the customer data in their care from breaches. The second is protecting customer data and privacy from misuse. Think Facebook and Cambridge Analytica.

Both protections are a part of a brand’s customer data stewardship, but it’s the second risk – misuse – that brands will be held accountable later next year.

So far, brands have largely ducked the issue in regards to marketing data. Many are happy to let Facebook take the heat while growing their use of that ad platform (and other data targeting) to reach prospects and customers. No brand wants to be accused of misusing customer data. Better to let these monolithic media companies take the blame. And just what is “misuse” anyhow? Using new data sources and combinations to more effectively reach and engage people with content, offers and messages that are increasingly relevant to them is the positive promise of advanced customer data management. The dark side is the misuse of the new knowledge that brands may accrue on their customers. The examples often cited are health care insurers amassing behavioral data about customers that cause them to stop insuring them. I don’t know if that is happening but I can certainly imagine it.

The Cambridge Analytica example is similar. Gaining access to Facebook user data and unbeknownst to the end user, a company mined that data “to develop "psychographic" profiles of users, and target users with pro-Trump advertising, a claim that Cambridge Analytica denied."

Consumers are paralyzed by the complexity of data and privacy. According to the NYTimes,

“Research by Professor Turow and his colleagues has found that most Americans give up data for relevant ads not because of convenience, but resignation. Rather than participating in a rational exchange, he argues, consumers are giving up their personal information with “a feeling of futility.”

In 2019, the inertia caused by the complexity of the consumer problem will likely be broken by a confluence of events: the application of the GDPR-like California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018, the next brand-goes-too-far data-use scandal, the hubris of the VC community eager to back marketing data startups (especially AI) that promise an invasive set of capabilities and the 2020 election cycle which will show some of this ‘misuse’ in action.

As brands get serious about strengthening customer trust, a few will step forward voluntarily with their own, “customer data stewardship promise.”

Marketing personalization will remain nascent until 2020

Marketing personalization is a hot topic. Customers want it as revealed in the Segment 2017 study summarized by eConsultancy (chart above). Marketers are investing in more advanced capabilities to deliver the right message to the right customer at the right time via the right channel. The martech stack for personalization expands. And so on.

Ecommerce companies are the leaders. They can immediately see the direct impact on sales for sites and email now governed by personalization engines (i.e. “Customers like you also bought…”). The investment has short term gains. But even becoming Amazon overnight is hard.

Then there are the other businesses who can imagine the benefits of personalized marketing. Pretty much every brand out there. 

Since this new capability hinges on solid customer data, it’s going to be slow going for a while. The VC and consultant community will push hard for personalization in 2019 eager to see their investments pay out. But brands who get serious about personalization need to get their house in order on data and that requires a cross-enterprise solution. New, significant case studies on marketing personalization won’t start to materialize until 2020. Think of 2019 as the year most marketers figure out just how hard it is and the foundation they need to have in place with data.

 

Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) will really become a thing

Customer Data Platform is a made-up term. But so are so many terms in marketing. Who would have guessed that ‘account-based marketing’ would have grabbed hold the way it has?

The marketing data world is awash in jargon: DMP, CDP, data lakes, CRM, data warehouse, datamart, and more. Browse a few marketing blogs to compare the definitions for just DMP and CDP and you will see it’s still a little wild west out here. (You can check out my post on the difference here) 

A workable definition for Customer Data Platform comes from the CDP Insititute:

"A Customer Data Platform is packaged software that creates a persistent, unified customer database that is accessible to other systems".

This definition has three critical elements:

- "packaged software": the CDP is a prebuilt system that is configured to meet the needs of each client.  Some technical resources will be required to set up and maintain the CDP, but it does not require the level of technical skill of a typical data warehouse project.  This reduces the time, cost, and risk and gives business users more control over the system, even though they may still need some technical assistance.

- "creates a persistent, unified customer database": the CDP creates a comprehensive view of each customer by capturing data from multiple systems, linking information related to the same customer, and storing the information to track behavior over time. The CDP contains personal identifiers used to target marketing messages and track individual-level marketing results.

- "accessible to other systems": data stored in the CDP can be used by other systems for analysis and to manage customer interactions.

eConsultancy has a great grid (from the CDP Institute) that quickly compares the features of different data assets like CDPs:

The reason CDPs will take hold as a concept is that companies already have master data management (MDM) initiatives underway to organize customer and stakeholder data for the benefit of the entire organization – but not necessarily designed around the needs of marketers.

The marketing and customer experience professionals need a marketing-specific resource, one  that is connected to the MDM system yet designed to power marketing content and delivery. CDP’s will become key to delivering personalized marketing. It is certainly possible to design the core functions of a CDP without buying a SaS, CDP-labeled solution. Building it via the IT function is risky and costly business. eConsultancy sums it up,

“A CDP is built with the marketing function in mind. Could you build a CDP yourself? In theory you could, and many custom IT projects try to achieve what a CDP does. Obviously, there are quite some big investments, time and risks involved in a custom project like that.”

CMO’s know that great customer data is foundational to tomorrow's successful marketing. In a recent Forrester study, CMO’s reported the following challenges (and more) to achieving marketing priorities next year:

• Poor quality, inconsistent, or inaccessible customer data                   43%
• Poor alignment or collaboration with IT                                             43%

CMO’s will latch onto CDPs as the marketing data solution that can more easily be communicated to IT while not wholly relying on an IT-build and implementation. CDPs will take hold because marketers need a manageable concept they can rally their people to implement. 

The immediate future of marketing hinges on the strength of 1st party data and 'data agility' - the ability to work quickly and easily to combine 1st party and 3rd party data for some benefit. 

 

Other Interesting Predictions

• 6 digital marketing predictions for 2019 - Smart Brief/Kent Lewis 
• Content Meets Technology: Marketing Predictions for 2019 - Martech Advisor/Casey Wuestefeld
• The 5 Biggest Marketing Trends For 2019 - CMO.com/Giselle Abramovich

 

From NextNow Digital:

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. 

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 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. 

The Agile Marketing Strategy for Small Business

The importance of strategy in marketing can’t be overstated. Today, though, we need simpler strategies that can be tested and optimized. Click the link. 

Marketing Data Fluency for CMOs

Insights, ideas, and creativity – marketers love to talk about these. The latest generation of CMOs can talk about revenue and business growth, sales and leads and so forth. But bring up “data” and you rarely get past the usual qualifiers like “customer data” or a descriptor like “demographic data.”

Today’s marketing leader needs to be fluent in data concepts and terms to steer their organization to building and maintaining the most differentiating resource beyond talent that they can develop: marketing data.

It’s Not Easy

The bad news about marketing data is that we all feel we are behind where we need to be. The good news is that we are all behind where we need to be. Okay, those both seem bad. Still, we are not alone and the important point is to just get going.

A 2018 Forrester study of B2B marketers found, “Eighty-two percent of respondents cited managing data across the business as a challenge.”

That same data pointed to the upside of data, “The study showed organizations with data activation maturity were more likely to report increases across marketing/sales and customer metrics, with 73 percent reporting more rapid sales cycles, 73 percent reporting a higher marketing ROI and 77 percent reporting increased customer retention.”

Data will grow to be the top competitive advantage in marketing. Let’s get fluent.

 

What Do Marketers Want from Data

For some of us, data is a bit like math. I am glad I was good in other subjects because I am just not fascinated by math. But like math, I am keenly interested in what I can do with data:

• Combine different data sources to more effectively and efficiently target and reach more specific audiences.
• Analyze data for insights that can change my strategy, content or creative and how I engage with prospects and customers.
• Use all types of data to better know prospects and customers, personalize their experience and drive greater action.
• Analyze demographic, firmagraphic, behavioral and account data to develop new products and servces that create more value for the customer and the business.
• Discover predictive data that makes marketing more efficient and measurable against impact

And I expect this deeper data capability to give me a competitive edge in the marketplace. In short, marketing data facility is key to business growth and competing and winning for the foreseeable future.

No pressure. 

 

A Simple Frameworks to Think and Talk about Marketing Data

I tried to find that magic framework that neatly summarizes what types of data, the sources, how to manage and grow the data resource and apply it marketing seven ways from Sunday. I am a sucker for a good framework. I tried to find it, I really did. I would encourage the consulting community to put a bit more elbow grease into marketing data frameworks and then generously share them online.

Until then, here’s a simple way to think about the problem:

The CMO’s Planning Framework for Data

The CMO’s office needs to drive requirements for the use of data in marketing and customer experience and all of the supporting disciplines (e.g. public relations, research, advertising, and brand). Inside the enterprise, data capabilities is a team sport. Marketing relies on IT, business intelligence, data management and more to develop and maintain marketing data solutions. These cross-disciplinarians all benefit from a simple but actionable framework or shorthand for understanding the data needs.

Here’s a way to look at it:

Application: How do you plan to use data and how will you know if it’s helping? Knowing the application of the actual data source is the most critical step in designing a marketing data system that delivers something concrete. You don't have to know everything it will do but it ought to be designed fit-for-purpose as my UK colleagues might say. 

Customer and market insights: This is the broadest and least defined use of any data resource. Essentially, we all want to accumulate over time and increasingly valuable data resource that will reveal unexpected insights to inform product and service strategy, customer engagement, efficacy, and market opportunities.

Personalization: Increasingly improving relevance for our customers is the key to more effective marketing and revenue generation (and customer satisfaction and loyalty). This is the most complex yet imaginable benefit of data mastery for marketers.

Addressability: Reaching the increasingly “right” people to drive value and valuable actions means better data and analytics to know who and where they are, as well as, when we can reach them.

Marketing effectiveness: We need data tied back to the individual to understand marketing effectiveness. Did we sell one more policy to her? Did our retention emails and messages retain her for additional years? 

 

Structure: How is the marketing data lake structured such that it is actionable, reliable and credibly managed. What is the relationship of this data resource to master data management (MDM) and other enterprise data lakes.

Data enrichment: We need the ability to grow our 1^st party data based upon account and behavioral data from both declared information and inferred information. We also need the ability to combine 1^st party data with 3^rd party data in a “sandbox” environment that is conducive to quick experiments before we make any longer term bets.

Customer-organized: The marketing data is essentially organized around prospects and customers. That includes connecting accounts (business customers) with individual customers where applicable. If you have a sales force, or in our case, an independent agent channel serviced by a field force, the structure needs to connect all of these relationships (e.g. which field staff serve which agents who serve which customers)

 

Sources: Where does reliable data originate? Account information may come from business systems but it may also be augmented from sales data. Behavioral information can come from dozens of different interaction sources like your Web sites, social channels, social listening, email interactions, point-of-sale, stated preferences and more. Defining sources is anything but a once-and-done exercise and is more about creating a foundation that is constantly adjusted, added-to and managed as a living, breathing organism.

Cleaning:  Data is messy, incomplete and often redundant. This is a fact of life. Distilling sources into a data resource devoid of the most glaring problems like records so incomplete it inhibits addressability or data being updated via a faulty source is hard work.

Identity-resolution: With many data sources comes data confusion about what to attribute to what customer. Resolving multiple emails, devices and cross channel interactions to a single customer is one of those table stakes capabilities that is maddeningly difficult.

Outputs: How will the data be used by other systems and how will we export reports and meaning from the data, itself.

Marketing systems: What marketing systems will use the marketing data lake and how will they return data to that system. That’s one of the confounding realities of data lakes feeding systems. Those systems will inevitably also be sources of data – either new data or corrected data – that must be returned and resolved inside the data lake, itself. Just think about the data generated from a customer email program which tells us about the interests of a customer (i.e. what did they click on).  That inferred interest should be associated with the customer “golden record” to be used by other systems like the Web site personalization engine.

Reports and Insights: These rich customer data lakes contribute to marketing performance measurement and will become the crystal ball massaged by analytics brainiacs to reveal heretofore unknown insights.  

 

Related links:

• IAB's Marketing Data Lexicon 
• The CMOs Guide to data Driven Marketing 
• Creating a “Single Source of Truth” for Your Customer Data

CDP vs. DMP vs. XYZ: What is Your Brand’s Approach to Marketing Data Management?

Data management sounds so boring. The field is rife with acronyms for solutions that remain a bit vague like Customer Data Platform (CDP), Data Management Platform (DMP) and, in our case, Master Data Management (MDM). This is not exactly what I imagined I would be obsessing about as a marketer at this point in my career.

But think about this:

By 2020, 51% of consumers expect that companies will anticipate their needs and make relevant suggestions before they make contact. (Source) 

78% of U.S. Internet users said personally relevant content from brands increases their purchase intent. (Source) 

Personalization reduces acquisition costs as much as 50%, lifts revenues by 5-15%, and increases the efficiency of marketing spend by 10-30%. (Source) 

 

Delivering increasingly personalized and valuable content, tools, and offers to customers and sales agents (e.g. independent insurance agents, financial advisers, physicians) helps marketing become the measurable growth and revenue engine it is intended to be.

And it all starts with data and a data operating model that ensures the value of the data and how you can use it grows over time. That’s managing data for marketing and customer experience and that’s not so boring after all

 

Prospect to Customer Data for Marketing and Experience

From the time a lead is identified (i.e. marketing qualified lead, MQL) through a renewal on a multi-year, loyal customer, we have the opportunity to use data to manage how we attract and engage via:

• Segmentation and targeting of ideal customer types or accounts (e.g. account based marketing or ABM)
• Identifying new leads that look like your best customers (e.g. look-a-likes)
• Behavioral tracking and insight (e.g. paying attention to what people do and where their interests lie)
• Preference management (i.e. what are people’s stated interests and preferred channels
• Predictive marketing and service offerings (e.g. combine new data sources to reveal predictable behaviors; a person who buys and installs smart home technology for security and safety benefits is likely a better insurance risk as they are more inclined to maintain their home and anticipate problems before they ever become claims.)
• Individualized marketing by delivering personalized content, tools and offers to individuals that increases the value they feel from the brand and drives them to valuable actions (e.g. delivering content relevant to where and how they live)

While there is a natural break-point between pre- and post-acquisition, strategically it makes sense to think about the entire customer journey from unknown lead to loyal customer. If your business model includes a sales agent of some sort like a financial advisor in wealth management, then that agent has their own journey. They deserve the same increasingly personalized engagement now made a bit more complex as you now need to associate them with an individual prospect and customer.  

 

DMPs vs. CDPs vs CRMs

Acquiring, using, updating “cleaning” and growing customer data for marketing requires a creative mind and an intensely detailed obsessive mind. The creative part is about imagining what is possible. Very few brands are delivering on seamless and intuitive personalized marketing. Even Amazon, the archetype for all things good and data-focused still promotes gift product ideas to me based upon a one-time gift purchase for cousin Bob. Imagining what could be possible – delivering personalized recommendation based upon the house and property you own and the trending weather in your neighborhood and the search intent of your neighbors, for example – takes creative vision.

Detailing all of the data fields necessary to make that possible and then map out how to source and maintain that data takes the marketing equivalent of an obsessive compulsive (dis)order.

 

Data Management Platforms or DMPs were defined by advertisers, publishers and the tech companies who support them – like Adobe. Here’s how Kiki Burton defines DMP on the Adobe Blog:

“A DMP, or data management platform is a tool used to consolidate the disperse data sets of a company across first, second, third-party channels. It manages the segmentation and identity definition of user to then provide cohesive audience targeting across all of the various channels where you might be engaging with a consumer.

Forrester Research defined a DMP as “a unified technology platform that intakes disparate first-, second-, and third-party datasets, provides normalization and segmentation on that data, and allows a user to push the resulting segmentation into live interactive channel environments.”

In other words, it pulls data from a bunch of different, potentially unrelated sources and allows organizations to define specific audience segments to which they can provide distinct marketing experiences.”

Many consultants sum up DMPs as useful for acquisition marketing – finding and attracting your next customers.

 

Customer Data Platforms or CDPs are newer. They stress the first party data part of the first, second, third-party data layer cake. Some definitions focus on known customers while many extend from prospect to customer. Tealium (channeling the CDP Institute) describe it this way:

“The CDP Institute defines a Customer Data Platform as “a marketer-managed system that creates a persistent, unified customer database that is accessible to other systems.” Basically it’s a system that centralizes customer data from all sources, unifies this data into customer profiles and then makes this data available to other systems for marketing campaigns, customer service and all customer experience initiatives.”

Digiday tries to sum up the difference between CDPs and DMPs:

“CDPs mainly analyze first-party data based on real consumer identities, while DMPs largely examine consolidated third-party data based on cookies. A good way to think about the difference is CDPs can be used to nurture the relationship with existing consumers, while DMPs are mainly used to acquire lookalike audiences.”

Some people describe CDPs as the CRM for the B2C set. It’s not clear whether the rise of CDP is due more to what attracts venture capital (money in search of a problem and solution) or a true unmet need at the enterprise level.

 

Customer Relationship Management systems or CRMs have been around since the eighties and nineties (the acronym, CRM, is traced to 1995.) They are most often described either as the sales team’s answer for customer and prospect sales management or the company’s for delivering service and value to existing customers.

The Salesforce definition of CRM goes like this:

“Customer relationship management (CRM) is a technology for managing all your company’s relationships and interactions with customers and potential customers. The goal is simple: Improve business relationships. A CRM system helps companies stay connected to customers, streamline processes, and improve profitability.

When people talk about CRM, they are usually referring to a CRM system, a tool that helps with contact management, sales management, productivity, and more.

A CRM solution helps you focus on your organization’s relationships with individual people — including customers, service users, colleagues, or suppliers — throughout your lifecycle with them, including finding new customers, winning their business, and providing support and additional services throughout the relationship.”

 

What is Your Data Solution?

There is a lot of overlap in the definitions of these systems. Each industry and each brand is different enough that there is no one right answer. Unfortunately, it leaves the brand marketer with the chore of defining their own need and then labeling it – whatever the hell you want.  

• Companies with strong sales practices, teams and culture may want to build on a CRM-based model with some additional system for acquisition marketing
• B2C companies who rely on attracting a steady flow of customers and need to scale via look-a-like marketing via ad networks and publishers may want to lean into DMPs
• Companies who may sell via a few channels including bridging B2C and B2B marketing or who might be behind in marketing automation may want to define a CDP-like solution that serves both acquisition and customer marketing.

Here are some suggestions to help the non-data geek marketer consider the right options (you can also check out CDP-provider NGData and their comparison of CDPs vs. DMPs and Digiday's comparison of all three):

Create a vision for how you want to attract and engage new customers and how you want to serve those you already have. How “individualized” will you go? How important will Account Based Marketing (ABM) be to acquiring new customers?

Understand how you can create a continuous path for unknowns to paying customers. Can you practically hope to build a single data resource or do you need to separate acquisition efforts from customer experience?

Define your commitment to finding new ways to combine 1^st, 2^nd, and 3^rd party data to improve the efficiency of potentially both acquisition and customer marketing. If you want to aggressively experiment and “own” the lessons learned and outcomes then it may point you to a Cloud-based, owned solution.

Clarify the vision and commitment for integrating sales and marketing. If your future depends on it, then start putting the data infrastructure in place now. It may take years to get it right.

Welcome to the next age of data-drive marketing. Let’s learn from each other.

 

(The images in this post are from PETER CRNOKRAK. They are some of the most interesting "data-art" (my term) and I am a big fan. You can also acquire poster versions of many of them at The Luxury of Protest) 

 

The Importance of Authentic Brand Storytelling

To connect with customers and communities, brands need to put more energy into brand storytelling. This is as much advice I am giving myself as anyone else wrestling with marketing at a large, enterprise brand.

It’s not enough to pump out a lot of content engineered to return well in Google search results. Traditional “buy” messages – often called “bottom-of-the-funnel” advertising – are likely not enough for most companies whose products compete against others that are not well differentiated in terms of benefits. Anthem-like brand films are good when you have something to wave a flag about, but even then, this is a lot of “inside-out” messaging.

Brand stories that demonstrate how people within a company work to solve customer challenges are different. And they cannot be constructed from whole cloth no matter how cynical a marketer you are. They are “discovered” within the people and operations of a company and then shaped to be as relevant as possible for an audience.

Two Stories

I want to share two stories from Travelers. We discovered each within the company. They reflect the commitment of people who care about our customers and our communities.

 

 

These brand stories are about people digging into hard problems – the opioid crisis and the growth of cyber risks and crime. Each is told by a real person.

If there is any pride in these storytellers, it is in the knowledge that they are trying to apply their specialisms – safety and health, risk management, recovery and more – to real problems people and business face. Few people wake up each day within large companies solely motivated by improving the share price. Financial health is a means to an end. The impact a thriving business can have on its communities is substantial.

 

 

Brand stories like these help customers and communities know a company and even understand what they sell - beyond the advertised products and services. This is customer-centered marketing in that they aim to frame what we do in relation to the benefit for our customers and their stakeholders.

Lessons Learned for Strong Brand Stories

• Find real stories of people earnestly solving problems
• Tell these stories succinctly in a way that respects the audience’s time and interests
• Use a genuine voice or storyteller to reveal more and, gasp, allow for some intimacy
• Lead people to more content that digs even deeper and does connect to what you sell
• Share the content via the channels and moments that make sense to your customers and stakeholders
• Make brand stories a key ingredient in a content marketing program designed around the complete buyer journey

Relevant Resources:   

• Storytelling, Brands and Some Words Of Wisdom – Forbes
• Why Only 10 Percent of Content Marketers Have Embraced Brand Storytelling – Content Standard/Skyword
• 8 Helpful Brand Storytelling Tips for B2B Businesses – Startup Nation