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.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
“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?”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 importance of strategy in marketing can’t be overstated. Today, though, we need simpler strategies that can be tested and optimized. Click the link.
State tourism used to be a series of TV spots to inspire and, if the tourism office was lucky, a memorable slogan. Remember the iconic “I(heart)NY” logo designed by Milton Glaser? The first TV spot urged people to explore upstate New York and break the perception that NY=NYC. It’s a little ironic that decades later, the logo lives on mostly as a symbol of those who visit Manhattan.
State Tourism has caught up to the content age. New Mexico tourism has built on a 6-year-old slogan/campaign - #NewMexicoTrue – extolling the authenticity of the experiences to be had across the state. Their best accomplishment is not the consistent slogan but the rich collection of content and especially videos that are designed around the different needs of travelers to the state. Like their video profile of Route 66. Of course, I am completely biased as I love New Mexico and have been traveling there consistently for about 27 years. From White Sands to Taos Ski Valley, from Tent Rocks to Chaco Canyon from Pie Town to Southwest Print Fiesta and all of the interesting people, there’s a lot to love about New Mexico.
The next challenge for the tourism office will be to expand the impact of this strong content marketing via digital marketing.
“New Mexico True promotes the state on airport billboards, as well as in print and through social media, in Dallas, Houston, Phoenix, Denver, San Diego, Chicago and most recently Austin, Texas.”
They have put in for a larger budget in 2019 ($16.1M or up $3.5M). I hope they got as I know they wanted to expand the marketing effort to San Francisco which is a slam-dunk great idea (as are LA and Seattle). Two thirds of the driving trips in the state (23M of 35M) came from out of state. I would love to know how many travelers are repeat-visitors. I have been visiting the state every year or so for 27 years. I doubt I am the only diehard fan.
To get people to fly into the Sunport (ABQ), they need big experiences and destinations like the historic Native American sites and pueblos or the Balloon Festival. For the road-trippers, they need lots of ideas and potential itineraries.
Content for All Parts of the Journey
The design of the New Mexico tourism site is simple and strong and hats off to Simpleview who focus on supporting travel destination marketers. The site organizes the content in the most practical ways and connects the many channels from YouTube to Twitter to Facebook and more.
The heart of the content is video followed closely by photographs, short articles and planning tools. The video embedded in the site is all published on their YouTube channel.
Discovery
How do any of us discover a new destination- a place we might visit someday? Beyond word of mouth, there is advertising, of course. We might browse through a travel magazine or notice a compelling billboard in an airport or by the road. Someone might travel on business to discover a destination worth checking out on vacation. Ideas may come to us via our many other affinities – food blogs, biking communities, art organizations. I presume that beyond print advertising and airport billboards in their target markets, New Mexico Tourism is using highly targeted Facebook advertising to reach potential visitors via these affinities. Likewise, they would be experimenting with different 3rd party data combinations to reach those with an intent to travel to experiences like #NewMexicoTrue.
Inspiration & Research
Drawn in by a discovery tactic or an intent to travel, now the rich content – especially the video – that New Mexico tourism creates really works hard to expose people to actionable itineraries.
New Mexico True Television comes in several varieties. The “seasons” are organized in :20 episodes featuring a host exploring a theme or a region (e.g. Farm Trips, North of Santa Fe). Each episode is then carved up into topical 2:00 segments, as well. These can be quickly browsed.
New Mexico True Experiences caters to those of us looking for that distinctive and memorable experience like staying in the glamped-up trailers at Hotel Luna Mystica or the Enchanted Forest Yurts.
New Mexico True Stories let a New Mexican tell their own story of some remarkable place or experience like Kathy Knapp’s story about Pie Town.
New Mexico in TRUE 360 engage viewers in a surround-view of experiences like the Ballon Festival or Meow Wolf, the quirky art destination in Santa Fe.
Planning
Some of the content in the site can be compiled into a personalized list of to-dos. With such a rich and dense site, this ‘favoriting’ feature is helpful as you browse through loads of options from Scenic Byways to Kasha-Katuwe Tent Rocks National Monument. Not everything has the handy suitcase icon next to it (the trip planning tool) but each page does have the ‘Share’ This function so there are other ways to remember a list.
Remember
I like to take my travel experiences and discoveries home. It only makes sense that they have a store where you can buy directly from some of the small businesses that sell something quite special. They even certify it as #NewMexicoTrue. That’s where I picked up a bunch of Love+Leche hand cream bars which we first discovered while in ABQ.
“In 2017, 35.4 million trips were taken throughout the Land of Enchantment, 1 million more than the year before and 5.6 million more than 2010…The state's leisure and hospitality industry added 1,700 jobs in 2017 — an increase of 19 percent and more than 17,000 over the past seven years.”
With domestic leisure travel set to grow another 2.4% next year and business travel 3.4%, New Mexico will need to scale up its efforts via digital marketing that converts into travel reservations to gain more than its fair share of this organic growth. Can they infiltrate and attract people from promising markets like San Francisco, LA, and Seattle with targeted digital marketing and without the costly traditional advertising tactics? Since state budgets are not going up significantly any time soon, how they shift their spend will be key.
Here are four approaches to expanding the terrific work and impact of #NewMexicoTrue
1. Establish a data-drive digital marketing team inside of the Tourism department or via an agency partner to build a foundation of traveler data and testable digital marketing strategies that can scale results. This comes with greater marketing attribution and, therefore, a more persuasive sales pitch come budget season.
2. Expand Albuquerque as a business travel destination and market to those visitors.With about 900 hotel rooms downtown, it’s not clear what events best fit the infrastructure. I trust that the folks at the Visitors Bureau and Convention Center are aggressively marketing the city. I hope they use the #NewMexicoTrue content and promise of authenticity to draw business meetings.
3. Enable New Mexico travel business owners to become expert marketers. New Mexico businesses have skin in the game and amplify the impact of tourism marketing by becoming more effective marketers themselves. In 2016, tourism brought in about $6.1B in revenue statewide and spending supports 8.4% of all jobs. This is big business for the state and key business for those running a business within the state. #NewMexicoTrue is already providing great resources to New Mexico businesses including “20+ Free Ways New Mexico True Can Work for You” and a series of “How-to…” webinars. Not only can they expend this great work, but they can organize it and deliver it as the bite-sized content that over-worked business owners need to fit practical steps into their day.
4. Continue to grow visitor advocacy. #NewMexicoTrue is highly active on Instagram and Pinterest, two strong platforms for digital advocacy. Inspiring more travelers to post their positive stories is always a chore as it requires far more attention and cultivation than non-marketers realize. Still, to expand the reach of their marketing and leverage the benefits of word of mouth marketing, #NewMexicoTrue will need to tap more advocacy to reach beyond their budget.
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
Agile marketing is still being defined. The rules are being written and tested as we speak. As such, I am not sure I buy into a dogmatic application of the software version of “agile” with its Scrum masters and 6-member team size limits. We are borrowing from the evolution in the production management and software development worlds. The aim is to make marketing more responsive, iterative and more impactful. “Agile” is a way of working that produces work that can be released, tested, and optimized. This is different for marketing. Sure, marketing has been tested for decades but not usually out in digital channels with the benefit of immediate feedback.
Here are some principles from smart voices in the world of agile that will define this new operating model:
I have been obsessed with strategy. Following strategy comes a great plan. Part of the innovation of 'agile' is respecting that plans change. When your strategy and plan are so rigid, they cannot change nimbly as you learn via the execution of the plan, you will likely waste a lot of effort. While I still believe a great strategy does wonders to align a team, the plan that shakes out of that is just a start. setting processes that allow for continuous improvement are important in the age of the connected customer.
Testing has become the quintessential data-driven marketing process: running controlled experiments to determine what resonates best with prospects and customers. (from Scott Brinker at ChiefMartec)
Learning how to test discrete marketing elements quickly and cheaply in-market is more important than old-school testing (although that does have it's place). We can test the demand for a new product just by buying some cheap advertising on Facebook. We can A/B test different ad creative or landing pages to figure out which actually drives the most response. Agile marketing requires skills at testing, reading results and adjusting on-the-fly.
Agile marketing methodologies encourage cross-silo teams to come together on projects quickly and easily and to dynamically reconfigure as needed from cycle to cycle. (from Scott Brinker at ChiefMartec)
Assembling small-ish, unusual teams brings the diversity of brains needed to create interesting work fast. Creating easy ways to bring those teams together so they know what to do and how to work with each other is worth the effort. Training teams in agile methods helps as routines like daily stand-ups, demos and others are new to most marketing folks.
“Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of marketing that solves problems” (from the Agile Marketing Manifesto)
Greater customer-centricity is on everyone's minds these days. Since agile methods drive us to test our hypothesis via actual customer behaviors, it can improve our knowledge of the customers and what he/she wants. Thinking about marketing as something that aims to solve customer problems is a good thing, better than "messaging" or simply "selling" when someone is ready to buy.
I appreciate that there is a thing called the "Agile Marketing Manifesto." To some extent it's just us marketers being marketers and wrapping our idea in a "manifesto" package to associate these thoughts with it's software development predecessor. The Manifesto has some strong ideas. Following the build-measure-learn feedback loop makes great sense. And making it an end unto itself also makes sense except that I still believe my alma mater's truth, "we sell or else." Marketing sells, period. This new emphasis on learning is just how we do it in the age of the connected customer.
Empower teams with decision-making and accountability. Marketing is regularly hampered by internal approval processes (from Barre Hardy at CMO.com/Adobe)
How many marketers have worked at brands where the "work" must be seen by the CEO, never mind the CMO? Sometimes that is right-minded. In this day and age of quick, iterative work, we need to empower the small marketing team to fully execute and learn fast. With the right team leadership, the risks can be minimized.
Bring the agency in-house. Internal agencies can work much more closely with cross-functional marketing teams to enable the company to own the performance data associated with campaigns (from Barre Hardy at CMO.com/Adobe)
The agency world is being turned on its head. Working on the brand side, I love the smart agencies that I work with. That being said, we have pulled all of the strategy work and even much of the operational marketing work internally. And the data. No way could we outsource all that it takes to source our data feeds and feed it into a reliable reporting framework and dashboard. Some things you just need to keep close to make agility work.
Marketing has always needed to be aligned to business priorities except, perhaps, when marketing simply supports "brand." Business priorities always have a commercial goal - growth, profitability, increased customer value, innovation and more. The days of pure brand initiatives are waning. More and more marketing tries to drive a concrete commercial outcome while establishing brand via experience. Agile methods can help retain alignment with business as priorities shift quarter-to-quarter. The days of monolithic marketing campaigns extending out for a year or more are numbered.
Content marketing remains a critical strategy for brands eager to earn the attention and interest of customers – ones they already have and those they seek to attract. It’s different than advertising messages but is just as high-tech and data-driven.
Since content sits at the heart of a lot of the marketing that I plan, I am heading off to Content Marketing World on September 5th – 8th in Cleveland (home of Bonin Bough's Cleveland Hustles) to learn from many of the smart people attending and speaking. I will have my own session on how we use data-driven, integrated content marketing to drive business impact. I plan to share what we have learned putting content marketing to work in a large enterprise.
If you go, connect with me via Twitter – @jbell99 . I would love to compare notes on enterprise-level content marketing. Here are some of the sessions I am looking forward to (I hope I can get to most!):
The Messaging Science behind Customer Acquisition and Customer Renewal Messaging
Sounds like I will get a good dose of sales ‘behavioral economics.’ And Tim Riesterer (@TRiesterer ) appears to be a very smart guy in this space.
Content ROI – How Marketers Demonstrate Value to the Brand and the Boss (a panel)
Connecting the business value for content marketing is not as simple as ‘how much did it sell.’ While that is important, I am looking forward to hearing what this panel including Jenifer Walsh/GE (@jlansky) and Laura Cameron/Key Bank (@lcameron80) have to say in terms of communicating value within an organization.
Driving Content Marketing Success in Your Organization: Sales, Product and Global-Regional Collaboration
This session is marked for the “Beginner” yet, even still, I am guessing that Jillian Hillard/Electrolux (@jillianhillard) will offer some good tips on how she engages others like product people in content marketing.
Machine-Assisted Narrative: How to Transform and Scale Your B2B Content with Artificial Intelligence
Okay, I know it’s early days yet for applying machine learning and AI to content but we are doing it now on the customer service side and I am keen to see how Paul Roetzer (@paulroetzer) sees the immediate future.
Time to Leave the Lead-Gated PDF Behind: How More Engaging Content Can Transform Your Lead Gen and Accelerate Growth
This may sound a little tactical but I am hoping that Aaron Dun (@ajdun) can deliver some insights that get us beyond the “whitepaper.”
Also eager to hear:
Matthew Glick/Marriott (@matthewglick123) – these guys do some interesting things
Matt Heinz (@HeinzMarketing) – I hear this company is smart in this space
Scott Monty/Brain +Trust Partners (@scottmonty) – always good to connect with Scott
Lee Odden/Top Rank Marketing (@leeodden) – a very smart consultant
Travelers publishes hundreds of articles, videos and visuals to engage consumers and business leaders at different points along their buyer journey. This fuel for integrated marketing programs attracts customers before they are even ready to shop for insurance. This session will cover building belief in data-driven content, integrating an editorial team inside marketing, and how we pulled it all together inside the Travelers Engagement Center – a new approach to digital marketing.
