Digital Influence Mapping Project

Visit NextNow Digital…Now

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

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

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

 

Why I Published a Blog for 15 Years

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

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

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

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

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

Curiosity and connection.

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

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

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

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

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

ANA Study Highlights:

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

Great voices in content marketing:

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

 

From NextNow Digital:

Simple Customer Journeys Drive Marketing Strategy

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

How Generative AI Will Change Visuals in Marketing

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

The Next-Gen Digital AdvertisingToolbox

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

5 Learnings for Small Business Marketing in the Next Normal

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

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

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

McKinsey sees a greater challenge for small business:

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

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

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

 

Romance and serve your current customers

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

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

A recent Salesforce consumer survey revealed:

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

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

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

A how-to guide for digital ordering at Starbucks

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

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

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

 

Create regular, meaningful and increasingly personalized communications with them

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

Collect regular feedback and insights from your prospects and customers

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

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

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

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

 

Upgrade your digital customer experience

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

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

Here are some simple suggestions:

If your goal is ecommerce (sales):

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

If you are driving leads:

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

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

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

 

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

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

Coronavirus Small Business Guide – US Chamber

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

How Businesses Have Successfully Pivoted During the Pandemic – HBR

The Reopen, Reinvent, Grow Business Guide – Travelers Insurance

 

From NextNow Digital:

5 Questions to Define Your Business Brand

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

 

The Next-Gen Digital Marketing Strategy Toolbox

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

 

The Next-Gen Digital Marketing Strategy Framework

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

Idea Bar #17: Virtual School Hackathon Challenge

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

Virtual School Hackathon Challenge

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

Students would explore:

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

Useful resources:

20+ eLearning Platforms for COVID-19 Affected School Students

Physical or online? How to make your hackathons a success

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

Creating an Online Classroom

 

4 Ways Voice Interaction Makes Us Better Marketers

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

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

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

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

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

 

Homeowners Ask for Help

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

 

Designing for Voice Makes Us Better Marketers

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Useful Resources:

How Amazon Alexa Works: Your Guide to Natural Language Processing

Exploring VUI Design: The Basics and Getting Started

The future of voice search: 2020 and beyond

How Voice Technology will Influence Marketing in the Future?

The Top 20 Brand Innovators in Voice 

 

How Enterprise-level Content Marketing Drives Digital Transformation and Customer-Centricity

First came the drive for digital transformation. Companies embraced digital initiatives to become more efficient and, in some cases, to transform their business processes in one way or another. The Chief Digital Officer was born to drive a stimulus plan for change. That job was always meant to be temporary until everyone became “digital.” But something was missing. Digital for digital’s sake didn’t make much sense. So, business leaders discovered customer-centricity or their inherent lack of it. Understanding and meeting the needs of people became the next true north and nicely provided a direction for all that hoped for digital change.

Digital transformation was put in service of customer obsession.

Marketing as a discipline has always been customer-centered. Marketers ceaselessly seek insights about customers, dig deep into the emotional drivers of decisions not just the rational and embrace empathy. As David Ogilvy said (albeit with a 1955 lens), "The customer is not a moron. She's your wife."

 

Content Marketing is Different

In the push to transform large companies to become more customer-centered throughout their practices and to lean into digital change and disruption, marketing will play a significant role. And it’s a new form of advertising and marketing that will help lead the change: content marketing.

Content marketing focuses on delivering useful or inspiring content that helps customers do and achieve what is important to them at different moments in their lives. You cannot succeed with content marketing if you don’t have empathy and understanding of your customer. It’s all about delivering value – value as perceived by that customer. Oh, and as David Ogilvy also said in relation to marketing, “We sell or else.” Marketing must serve customers and it must improve the bottom line.

Three content marketing practices are essential for digital transformation.

 

A Journey-Based Customer Approach

Content marketing requires the marketer to think in terms of a customer journey. The goal is to deliver the content that helps customers move towards their goal whether that is purchasing a new home, teaching their teen to drive safely or successfully buy the right home insurance. The name of the game in marketing today is earning the attention and engagement of customers. That means understanding what they are trying to do and the emotional and rational drivers and barriers in that experience and then delivering the content and resources that can help them.

Content marketers design for discovery, consideration and evaluation phases. They map discrete “journeys” which describe a key episode like researching and selecting a financial advisor or requesting a bid from a home contractor. They seek to understand the emotional highs and lows of a particular journey. These become key opportunities.

As companies embrace digital transformation led by customer centricity, they will inevitably embrace a journey-based customer approach or as my colleague Claudiu Coltea calls it ”journey transformation.”

 

Measure Against Final Outcomes

Marketers often get caught in a swirl of measuring diagnostic metrics for marketing that speak to its efficiency at higher levels of the funnel. We pay a lot of attention to “engagement” metrics. That’s not wrong. In that engagement is predictive of some type of conversion, it is important to measure.

Conversion matters more. Sure, I mean sales or renewal or some other cash register metric. But conversion can be any high value action from filling out a form, using an agent finder utility, or even consuming a “high value” piece of content which has demonstrated itself as a great stepping stone to that sales outcome. If you know what these high value actions are, you can design and optimize your marketing to drive people to them. This is much more intentional marketing that will prove itself as a revenue driver and not some murky cost center.

Marketers in digital transforming brands are embracing this ‘back to outcomes’ approach. In a blog post about ContentTECH Summit 2019, Jodi Harris from Content Marketing Institute said,

“While Shiva (Aetna’s vice president of marketing technology and digital experience, Shiva Mirhosseini) acknowledges that the team still looks closely at things like net promoter scores, content engagement metrics, and behavioral patterns across their sites, a conversion is the most definitive indicator of a customer’s satisfaction with the communication experience.”

Defining and aiming towards conversions are part and parcel with a journey-based approach. We focus on actions and outcomes.

 

A Governance Process to Guide Change

Digital transformation, customer-centricity, content marketing – it’s all new for most brands. Without some controls on how you engage the customer (e.g. the voice and qualities of content, Web experience design, service interactions), chaos ensues.

Big marketing brands like Nestle developed operating systems like “Brand Building the Nestle Way.” These gave marketers across the businesses the rules of the road and steered them into proven and effective marketing practices. It helped a distributed network of marketers at different points in their career deliver great work faster. It also kept a lot of crap from leaking out the door.

Content marketing requires the same type of guardrails and governance. Cathy McKnight from Digital Clarity Group summarized:

“The content – images, text, audio, video – that fill our digital channels does not appear out of nowhere. Success in digital and content marketing comes from the quality of the content being managed. This success requires supporting content strategy. A large part of that strategy has little to do with the content itself, and everything to do with people; the people involved in creating, managing, and regulating the content. In other words, the people involve with content governance.”

Governance is about enabling people via clear guidelines, checks and systems and also training and tools. Like many new practices within a large organization, content marketing needs to start out more centralized and with an eye towards democratizing the capability once the governance guardrails and enablers are in place.

As large and mid-size brands aim towards digital transformation and customer-centricity, a marketing organization that has shifted to content marketing will bring complimentary change. It’s all about embracing a genuine empathy towards customers, boundless curiosity and a commitment to starting with the question, “what will customers feel is valuable?”  

 

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. 

How Tourism Embraces Content Marketing: #NewMexicoTrue

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.

 

A Strategic Approach to Marketing

In 2017, the program focused on some nearby cities and, at least one mid-country hub city:

“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 3^rd 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.

 

Success In The Future

Tourism is up in the state as are jobs associated with the travel industry. Here's a summary of impact: 

“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.

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.