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
I am just back from CES 2018 and found myself trying to sort through that experience of hobnobbing with 184K of my closest friends. What did I see or experience that really mattered to me? There are plenty of great recaps of what was shown and what happened at CES 2018. One of my favorites is the CNET CES 2018 hub. When we attend, I always appreciate the briefing that CNET’s Brian Cooley does for our team. He’s a great analyst and guide.
So while I could talk about the neat bits and bobs in the Smart Home category like Kohler’s Alexa-powered mirror or Vivint’s increasingly big booth; or Samsung’s 146” snap tech TV; or the autonomous Lyft ride; I am going to think ahead towards some simple wishes.
The event is exhilarating and tiring, and I prefer to surrender to optimism and look ahead to what might be.
Here are my 4 wishes coming out of CES 2018:
Big Vision Like Ford’s Living Street Gets Rewarded by Wall Street
“If you can change the street you can change the world” said Jim Hackett, CEO of Ford during the main keynote at CES 2018 (watch it here).
The vision is about restoring cities and a shared sense of belonging sacrificed by tech starting with the advent of the highway ‘operating system’ if not the automobile, itself. We need to harness tech to improve lives and restore a sense of community.
The Living Street vision combines car and infrastructure IoT. It includes the Transportation Mobility Cloud (TMC) – an open and collaborative platform; Cellular Vehicle to Everything (CV to X) – a partnership with Qualcomm to leverage the direct communications of 700K vehicles on the road; and self-driving business model(s) – establishing an API-led approach being tested with the Postmates delivery service, Dominoes and Lyft.
Jim delivered an inspiring and aspirational message at a show dominated by gadget geeks. A tech-rendered view of a new urban utopia seemed to spin off the architect’s CAD system onto a ribbon of video screens behind him that were reminiscent of the very roadways that need a re-think. (all thanks to Alex McDowell, production designer extraordinaire.)
Mr. Hackett cited physicists and ethicists as his close friends and influences. He made it clear that he thinks about some heady stuff.
I was inspired. I appreciated that he had ‘purpose’ at the heart of the thinking – craft or restore our vital cities towards vibrant and healthy communities. Ford partners with other great brands who are deeply expert in what they do. That type of brand collaboration provides a competitive edge and also telegraphs a healthy humility that Ford cannot figure this out on their own.
If Jim Hackett, CEO of Ford does not show off some commercially appetizing vehicles at the follow-on event, the North American International Auto Show, he may not have a long enough tenure at Ford to see The Living Street actually come to life.
He must sell cars and trucks today to hold onto investor confidence. I hope that the Ford stock retains value and grows. I am a customer. I hope Wall Street rewards the vision and that Mr. Hackett continues with strong vehicle sales now to fund this future vision.
The Smart Home and AI Lead to an Anticipatory Environment
Smart Home tech was everywhere. There were more sensors of every variety, cameras combined with light bulbs and robots, and applications against more and more use cases from showers to kitchens to litter boxes.
Often demos of these products began with the opening of an app on smart phone. Increasingly it began with a voice-command to either Alexa or Hey Google. The possibilities and modality in the apps was impressive. Still, after the third swipe or button-click to turn something on in the home or the awkward voice command, “Alexa, open the blah, blah, blah skill...,” I just get a little tired.
The tech hobbyists have the patience to establish “scenes” which bundle several actions together. Blurt out, “Alexa, night time,” and you could dim lights, lock the front door, turn the room temperature down and more.
But I want that to all happen automatically when I walk in the door - because I have done it before, it’s Tuesday night, and it’s what I like. We need the tech to anticipate us and drop the cognitive load to zero – or as close to zero as possible. I want control and simplicity and not necessarily in that order.
By combining artificial intelligence and the machine learning within it, smart tech can teach itself what experience to manifest based upon my behavior, not twelve button clicks in an app.
Brain Cooley (@briancooley) mentioned ViaRoom, an AI-powered hub-of-hubs meant to learn your habits. I expect Google, Apple and Amazon, at least, to offer their own versions of this intelligence going forward.
Technology that accurately anticipates needs will be a leap forward.
Marketing Becomes True Customer Experience
CES is not a marketing show. The marketing “hub” at Tech South was particularly scattered and anemic this year. Still, the event is great for brand marketers. We want to get glimpses of innovation in consumer’s lives, talk with smart people who are working to bring those innovations to market, learn from others what may be next, discover new potential channels or how consumers are or will be spending their time, and more.
Still, some marketers are just trying to understand where to put their ads on a smart fridge or a dual screen smart phone.
Interruptive advertising may really be in its last legs. Joe Marchese (@joemarchese) from Fox developed a POV that we ought to be planning marketing around a fixed asset – people’s available attention. His Attention Rate Card is a way to scale, buy and sell access to customers. He takes an old idea – the attention economy – and breathes new life through the practical lens of how we purchase media. In this model, we can buy access but we must earn the attention by delivering real value to the customer/prospect. We earn that attention by being genuinely relevant and useful to people, not finding new ways to wedge in ad messages.
I love marketing. But it’s time for it to become “customer experience” where everything we do to sell the right product or service at the right time to the right customer becomes an authentic value to that customer. Either we reminded them of a product when they were truly shopping, or the brand provides a service and becomes relevant or we help them accomplish something important.
If we accept a broad view of ‘customer experience’ as our relationship starting before we even know that customer through acquisition and loyalty and ahead to losing that customer and winning them back, then marketing needs to become that big view of customer experience.
It’s a semantic change. I get it. But the line between marketing and customer experience needs to go away. And we are more apt to see customer experience as being in service to the customer and, therefore, all about delivering value. That’s what marketing needs to be going forward.
AI-powered Virtual Agents Become the New Interface
Judging by posters and billboards around Vegas, it was easy to see that the battle is on between Hey Google and Amazon’s Alexa to become the dominant voice interface or agent inside of everything. Alexa seems to have a bit of a momentary advantage, yet most of the bets I heard were on Google to win.
But voice is only part of the story. CNET’s Brian Cooley (@briancooley) showed a slide on virtual agent dominance beyond voice and Google owned the lion’s share of that pie chart. Next up is virtual agent plus artificial intelligence.
Whether it’s the spoken question or the typed phrase or the submitted image, the new ability to have machines learn your intent and give you the most useful answer could change how many interfaces are designed going forward.
Think about Web sites. Most are designed with three basic interfaces: navigation, browse and search. Users can try to click through a navigation hierarchy to get to something they need. They can browse pages to discover something relevant. Finally, they can use the site search to find something they need.
Site search is the closest interface to AI agents in a chat format. Most brand sites are organized around products and search results reflect that. If you are not familiar with what a product is called, your search will be frustrating. Never mind that most brands under invest in the quality of their site search.
Imagine a robust AI chat interface where you can type in the question you are trying to answer (or speak it into the microphone) and immediately get an answer and relevant link to the best content. Web sites become an AI chat window plus a beautiful way to browse. Find something specific quickly or simply browse for ideas and inspiration. That’s it.
No more big, spidery Web sites. No more product manuals. No more keyword search. Perhaps.
Most of the talk about current use of artificial intelligence (AI) in marketing cites what the 4 Horsemen are doing or likely doing. Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon have digital, data and automation at the heart of their businesses. They have the skills and the culture to make the application of machine learning and artificial intelligence a core competency.
Meanwhile, many marketers still struggle just to get their customer data source in order never mind speculating on how AI might improve the customer experience and/or the profitability of these customers. The hype curve of AI creates this nervous energy for marketers. To not do anything in AI seems wrong. On the other hand, to leap in expecting it to solve big, hairy 2018 problems also seems naïve.
I would recommend creating a simple ‘road map of exploration.’ Andy Betts (@andybetts1) has a useful post and diagram (above) counselling CMO’s to start planning in 2018. For once, it’s okay to start learning and exploring vs. jumping into action. I have a ‘bias-for-action’ like most marketers. We want to learn by doing. In this case, I want to pick and choose the pilots and proof-of-concepts (PoCs) while not derailing my marketing and customer service operations who already have a pretty full agenda next year. I will start by defining use cases where AI may have a positive effect on marketing.
Five Use Cases for AI in Marketing
Show the right, next call-to-action – Are people looking for a home-plus-valuables insurance quote? Trying to get answers about coverages in the weeks leading to an insurance need? Winterizing their home before jetting off to Florida for the season? These are pretty simple states but often hard to detect amongst the unknown visitors to your digital properties. Knowing the next right action to suggest and guide them is hard.
Propensity modeling used to be the answer. Defined as “a statistical scorecard that is used to predict the behaviour of your customer or prospect base,” propensity modeling works best when you know a bunch about the person. Think rich customer databases vs. a few Web clicks from strangers on your Web site.
Would you rather have a “scorecard” or a really smart robot (i.e. AI)? Imagine paying attention to the patterns of visitors to your site and all of the content they consume. Imagine if you could reliably predict/understand what they are trying to accomplish and you were able to deliver just the right calls-to-action on their screen. No more junking up their view with every possible choice they may consider. No more agonizing over Web site navigation models. With AI, you could understand what they are after and just give it to them.
Identify more accurate and actionable “look-a-likes” – Finding more prospects that look like your most valued customers and then selling them your product is generally a good thing. Most of the social networks have offered look-a-like audiences for a few years now. And given their facility with data and AI, these models will get better and better (and be worth more and more to advertisers).
As brands build their own audience pools for advertising, we need to find ways to use machine-learning and AI to identify more precise matches for our most valued customer. Just finding people in the same demographic or even the same interests as your current customer base isn’t enough. What if you could find more or less perfect matches for your top 20% most valued customers? And what if you could overcome the problem of “diminishing audiences” (when your target is so narrow you cannot cost effectively market to them) and engage them with just the right offers? AI could make that possible.
Automate market research and performance insights – We need a steady flow of timely insights about our customers (and prospects) and the performance of our marketing efforts. Currently, this process is so manual my bones ache thinking about it. If I think about all of the effort we are spending just automating a dashboard –a visualization of performance data, I have to laugh.
I want my performance AI to find patterns I would never recognize and draw insightful connections that help me market today and tomorrow.
When will my little machine-learning robot sift through all of the online panel data on a particular group of customer-types and reveal something I didn’t know to ask it for?
AI-generated content - I am less interested in teaching a robot to create a compelling article or video, than using AI to generate relevant content at a scale that is prohibitively expensive otherwise.
Let’s say you serve the small business market with a solution that lots of different business types could use. But small businesses want to buy a solution made for their business-type. If they are a dry cleaner they want a solution provider for dry cleaners. If they are a dog groomer or an art supply store, same thing. How can a solution provider create content for hundreds of small business types?
Discovering how AI can “learn” your existing content and then assemble industry-specific content to create something of value and relevance to the dog groomers and art supply store owners is the trick.
Solve customer problems conversationally – AI-driven chatbots are the most popular customer experience application judging by the number of companies offering chatbot solutions. Still, they remain in their infancy.
Get a computer to consume a “corpus” or body of data, teach it some lessons and “walla!” you have a way to quickly get personalized answers for customers and cut down on the overhead to deliver said answers. This is the type of solution that can serve both customers and prospects and will take sustained iteration and use to make very valuable.
These are just a few of the use cases on my road map of exploration in AI and machine learning. What’s on yours?
A lot has been written about the basics of good content marketing - from gathering customer insights to defining what the brand can talk about to understanding the impact on business. At a big, enterprise brand, the challenge that many consultants overlook is how you get the existing organization to efficiently adopt content marketing practices. Every company is different. Every culture is different. As I head off to Content Marketing World this week, I want to focus on the lessons learned from marketers actually applying content marketing in their enterprise-level companies. Often it’s not the fundamentals of content marketing that remain allusive, it’s how to make it work at Travelers, Xerox, GE and more.
In the interest of sharing my own experience – remember, results may vary - here are 3 key steps to enable content marketing across multiple business units in an enterprise brand. Far from perfect, these are, nonetheless, steps that seem to help rally people around common tools and processes.
Define Your Narrative Territories
Combine customer-centricity, brand-building and storytelling to effectively focus what you brand or business unit can talk about. Simple, right? In practice, it takes a framework and collaborative work to help a business unit focus their message in an impactful way. A narrative platform does just that.
“A Narrative Platform is a message platform and a brand position rolled into one simple model. By focusing what a brand cares about and saying it consistently again and again, we can earn a position in customers’ minds. The Narrative Platform is built upon customer insight and reflects what customers would find compelling not just what our brand-building wizards think it should be. It's brand positioning just from the customers POV.”
A lot goes into this including customer insights. What are customers’ needs and pain points in relation to your category? What are the purchase drivers that cause them to select your brand over another?
Also, what is your brand position and core value proposition?
The actual deliverable for a narrative platform is pretty straightforward. Picture 3-4 short descriptions of territories with one summary statement. For those with a public relations background, this will remind you of the message platform.
Tools: Narrative Platform
Process: workshop or collaborative iteration + marketing writer
Map Topics to the Buyer Journey and Narrative Territories
If the Narrative Platform helps you focus on what you will say or create content around, mapping topics to the buyer journey adds context. What is your customer trying to get done at any point in the journey? Their needs will be very different if they are trying to prep their teenager to drive then if they are comparing insurance providers for auto insurance.
A ton has been written around buyer journeys. They can take many forms some quite detailed. I would recommend a simplified view that represents core phases of what a typical buyer goes through from very early stages of a journey through moments of being a customer. Here’s a way to think about the buyer journey in a simplified way for business. A B2B buyer journey might include these phases:
Discovery – they may discover your brand when they are trying to solve business problems related to your category. This could be well before they are ready to shop or purchase a solution.
Consider – when they begin to define the solution and even start shopping, they may engage if you help towards making good decisions.
Evaluate – ready to buy, what does the customer need to know that will help them select your brand over others?
Purchase – immediately after purchase, what telegraphs that they have made the right choice.
Experience – as a customer, how will they interact with the brand from billing and customer service to actually getting additional value as a customer.
Renewal – for some product categories like insurance, customers have a choice to buy again or renew. What are their needs during this moment or phase?
One of the steps we have wrestled with is how much content is planned up front (yearly? quarterly?) vs. how much is developed organically and iteratively on a daily and weekly basis. As marketers, we want to ensure all of the content we create supports that sweet spot between customer and business goals. That takes planning and creating useful tools like the Narrative Platform and a Content Plan anchored in the Buyer Journey.
But tactical content – articles, videos, visuals on specific topics that will resonate with users – isn’t quite so neat and predictable. Story ideas don’t always pan out in the research phase. A good idea in a headline and abstract can sometimes fall apart in execution.
We are learning that our content plan is more like a “seed plan” that has topics and some actual content titles. It’s a place to start. It is also a good plan for those items like videos and interactives that require more lead time and investment.
Reserving time and resources to pursue related content stories that come out of evolving priorities or insights from performance data can be helpful. A marketer might get a new priority - to help promote insurance to the legal sector or to try and bundle a few insurance covers in a new way. We might see that content on ‘business continuity’ is outperforming other small business content. In each case, we need to respond to these needs and not be slavish to “the plan.”
To ensure our content plan is strategic and that it aims to drive valuable business actions, we do need a plan of what content to create. We simply need to leave room in the plan for content that wasn’t foreseen and responds to new needs from both customer and the business.
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.
Clearly, these three are all connected. They reflect a shift in financial services away from product-centric marketing towards customer-centered marketing. To be customer-centered we must know our prospects and customers and deliver relevant services and experience to them. That means personalized content and services.
But anyone who has wrestled with creating a more personalized Web experience for anonymous visitors (prospects) and creating a personalized omni-channel experience for known customers can speak to the complexity of the task. It challenges even the most mature marketing organization. Then there is financial services, if you know what I mean.
So, is marketing personalization hard? You betcha. How hard? Darn hard.
Personalizing to anonymous users
Someone follows an organic search result about planning for business continuity in small businesses. When they arrive at the site, they should not only get the content they are after but other small business content as they move through the site.
A user clicks and reads a series of home and boat safety content on the site. The next time they visit, they should receive more home and boat content and be spared the chore of clicking past enterprise business content that is not relevant.
We want to pick up on signals from people we don’t yet know visiting our Web sites and draw reasonable conclusions about who they are in order to give them the most relevant experience.
The biggest challenge towards personalizing the experience for someone we don’t yet know is deciding the segments that matter to personalize against and what we do to personalize to those segments. So, pretty much the whole thing is a big challenge.
“Other than showing return visitors product categories they already looked at instead of whatever is on sale that day, the strategy for what you do in response to any data point is highly unclear, as soon as you go beyond basics.
So what if you know that I listen to podcasts, work in Manhattan and just got married? Will any of that help you figure out how to best sell me something? Because I am a man, does it mean I like to see other men wearing clothes? Perhaps I’m shopping for my wife. How can you know? Are you going to rely on my returning to the website after showing interest in something, therefore only personalizing for a fraction of visitors?”
Personalizing to customers
We should know a lot about our customers. Many businesses did not establish central data profiles for their customers and are trying to catch up. There is a terrific example where many companies could have set these up ten years ago. The cost of catching up continues to accrue.
The three big challenges of delivering a strong and increasingly personal experience to customers include:
Integrating multiple data sources to establish an always-contemporary view of the customer
“A Forrester report revealed that while 87 percent of CMOs anticipate the need to integrate customer data into their digital strategy over the next four years, only 16 percent currently do so.
So what makes personalization difficult? Data silos pose the biggest obstacle. The fact that customer activity takes place across so many different platforms — social, web, mobile, email, e-commerce and CRM — makes it extraordinarily challenging for marketers to get a single, coherent view of the customer and understand the context of the interaction with the company.”
Just think about the data that would be the most helpful to know to get marketing personalization right:
All the customer’s sales and service data – what do they own and how have we interacted with them
Their demographic, geographic and household circumstances – what is the context of their daily lives
Key life events like moving, college and more – what disruptive changes do they face
Their stated and behavioral preferences – content, settings, delivery, channels
Their digital and social channel behavior – what they actually do online
Their social media profiles – what they say and do online and how influential they may be
That shopping list of data comes from very different stores, so-to-speak. Getting it all together and relating it in a view of the customer that is always growing is, well, hard.
Connecting the experience across channels (e.g. what they receive via email relates to their Web experience)
We all want an “omni-channel” world where we can start a conversation or service transaction with a client via phone or email and have it continue via social or a customer portal. Conceptually, we get it. Let customers determine which channels we communicate with them on. It just isn’t that easy. Using marketing automation tools like Salesforce and Maximyser, we can sync up the email with the Web site. But connecting the call center and social channels are chores unto themselves.
Creating the rules to trigger content and services via all channels to the right customer
When does one prospect receive a specific Web experience? When does a customer receive a sequence of emails in response to some behavior (e.g. they showed an interest in smart home technology and would now benefit from some follow-up information)?
Remember, this is 'marketing automation' and we are trying to develop rules or triggers that cause different content or messages to fire based upon what we know about our visitors. Developing those triggers and monitoring how well they work such that we are not inadvertently annoying customers with irrelevant or poorly-timed content or messages is important and hard. And trigger-based marketing is a bit of a blunt instrument.
"In a trigger campaign, a user’s action (such as a click, email open, pageview, etc) triggers the marketing automation software to perform an action – such as send a specific email or show a specific piece of content. This type of marketing requires a marketing automation tool, like Marketo or Hubspot for instance, that uses this basic set of user information to personalize content....
...A reason that trigger-driven personalization can be ineffective is that the content triggered to the visitor is predefined based a persona they may fit, rather than the actual indications of their wants or needs."
There are plenty of other challenges but these seem to be some of the big ones. Its one thing to acknowledge the obvious - that more personalized experiences will serve customers better. It's another thing to break this down into a practical strategy and start to implement i. That part is hard.
Well-designed apps that actually meet an unmet need tend to stand out from the crowd. Countable rises above so many apps out there. If you are a citizen of the United States, I highly recommend downloading it. I have become very active as it has a great alert system, and it answered my big question very early in my use.
Initially, I doubted if my simple input of comments on a particular issue was really visible to anyone. I know that Countable is trying to stimulate a community within the app. I suspect that will be more vibrant over time. Users can follow users and so forth. But that wasnt what I was most interested in. My biggest questions was whether my comments were actually sent to my representatives. Once I voted within the app and entered a few comments, I quickly received an automated email reply from my senator thanking me for my input. The app does deliver the mail.
What it is:
Countable is a mobile app that alerts you to which votes are happening now in Congress and how your Senator or Representative votes on the issues. I gives you real-time access to your government and makes it easy for your POV to be heard. It aims to help make governing more transparent and our congress people more accountable.
What it does well:
Tells you how your congress people are voting on specific bills
Alerts you to pending votes, debates or current topics and solicits your comments to send to your congress people
Increases the value (reach + engagement) of your advocacy by requesting you to create a video of your POV and sharing your POV via social channels
Provides advocacy widgets that can be easily embedded in any Web site
If you are concerned about how your views are represented, the current state of our government, or what can we do to positively affect change and "show up" as citizens, Countable might be a wise download.
Marketers once created brand value propositions that claimed the benefits of a particular brand. Advertising was then created to telegraph that brand position in the hopes that repeated exposures would establish that brand position in people’s minds. But times have changed. People are skeptical of and numb to the often hyperbolic claims of brands to be just the thing we are looking for. I imagine how the company who designed my 1970 home, The Acorn Deck House Company, would adapt to the new marketing world. If they embraced content marketing as an effective way to connect with new customers and builders and retain those they already have, they would do things differently.
In a recent interview, Robert McKee, father of storytelling and script writing education, traces this back to a form of bragging back in Benjamin Franklin's day.
"The classic advertising technique, that literally goes back to Benjamin Franklin, has been bragging and promising. What [successful companies] have smartly realized is that the Millennial generation and Generation Z coming up behind them have an adverse reaction to bragging. They’re annoyed by [assertions like] ‘We’re the biggest, we’re the best, we’re the shiniest, we’re the newest, we’re better than the competition.’ They find those claims doubtful at best."
Today, contemporary brand building programs focus on demonstrating the promise of a brand or company versus simply ‘claiming’ benefits or superiority. We understand a brand promise by what a brand actually does. Content from brands can play a dual role. It can actually be helpful to customers and become a living demonstration of how the brand can improve people's lives. At the same time, it becomes post-advertising brand currency. If it's genuinely relevant to people, content can create more moments of interaction and more possibilities to build consideration or loyalty.
Each of these brands made a choice about the role they can play in people’s lives. They defined the topical territories that mattered to their customers and then created content and tools that fit those territories. The narrative platform is a useful tool for brands to define the type of content they ought to create.
What is a Narrative Platform
A Narrative Platform is a message platform and a brand position rolled into one simple model. By focusing what a brand cares about and saying it consistently again and again, we can earn a position in customers’ minds. The Narrative Platform is built upon customer insight and reflects what customers would find compelling not just what our brand-building wizards think it should be. It's brand positioning just from the customers POV.
A Narrative Platform is different from a simple brand position. It defines what we will talk about that delivers value to our customers and demonstrates the brand value proposition. The Narrative Platform defines the territories and topics the brand can create content around. If you are planning on making content marketing a big part of your marketing strategy, the Narrative Platform helps align that content to the role your brand can play in your customers’ lives.
It includes:
3-4 themes that articulate what is important to your brand. If prospects knew and believed these things about you, they would prefer your brand. These themes drive the development of all content in marketing and communications.
A Key Narrative statement which summarizes what the brand believes in; what our POV is. It includes many of the supporting themes.
Here is a completely unsolicited example of a possible Narrative Platform for the Acorn Deck House Company:
How Do You Create One
In my experience, there may be many ways to get this done. Most of the time it really helps to run a collaborative workshop with people inside the company from across disciplines. This is a room of 8-10 people (bantam weight for a good workshop) that come from product or service development, marketing, sales and business leadership.
Not only do you get great and divergent points of view, you start the process of internal buy-in by creating stakeholders in the process.
You can set up the work session with a simplified “problem statement” – e.g. “how can we make the Deck House(company) synonymous with the best made house – from materials to design to construction – and a house designed to be a home – one that fits our lives and always gives us room to live, breathe and enjoy daily life.” (I live in a Deck House and feel it is a fantastic home. I made up the challenge statement and have no idea if this aligns to where they want to be in the market.)
You then remind people who your customers are, what they care about and some key insights about them that might be helpful. Then you run a moderated brainstorm and collect ideas, vote on them and refine if you have the time.
A writer takes all of this great raw material from the work session and crafts some prototype narratives. Rinse, repeat, iterate.
How Do You Put It into Practice
The whole point of the Narrative Platform is to have it drive all marketing and communications to gain the benefit of consistency and repetition in the marketplace. It is not the actual copy you use in any one communication. Rather it serves a foundation for all content and communications. Delivering to each marketing and communications practice such that they use it as a foundation is really up to what works best for your organization. Most groups welcome the focus.
The ANA held its annual ANA Digital & Social Media Conference in Colorado Springs, Colorado this past week. I continue to be impressed with the quality of the content and programming from this organization. The staff is smart and energetic. And hats off to Michael Donnelly, Global Head of Digital Marketing at Mastercard. He has played host at these events and earnestly looks for opportunities to strengthen the experience for members.
There were some important lessons or reminders from this year's event. here are 4 of them:
The ANA initiative around media transparency is a powerful call-to-action for advertisers (us)
Bob Liodice and Bill Duggan, ANA leaders, held a session that profiled the June report ANA produced in partnership with research company K2 on Media Transparency. They then segued into the just-released set of recommendations for brands.
The net takeaway is that the rise of complex ad trading desks and technology has led to practices that are not transparent to the buying brands including, but not limited to, rebates being paid that do not make their way to the actual advertiser and a ‘layer cake’ of fees from 3 or more providers involved in serving ads. Interestingly, new ad tech startups are springing up that promise to deliver greater transparency and direct service to advertisers (minus the agency trading desk) and remedy some of the ‘black box’ practices that have developed.
Interests not aligned: allegiance to outdated contracts
Bill and Bob make a powerful case that the business priorities of the agencies (in service to their shareholders) and the marketers they serve are not aligned. Agencies hide behind ‘contract compliance’ but fall short of serving the best interests of their clients. Contracts are outdated and not well understood inside the client and they lack the necessary transparency and audit clauses.
Rebates are widespread and often don’t get delivered to the advertiser
The research and conversations with ex-media company leaders reveal that rebates from publishers often track back no further upstream than the agency. Without transparency, there is no way for the advertiser to know that their money is going ‘elsewhere.’
Advertisers must take a more active role in managing media
Many advertisers have not supervised the media practices of their agencies with enough care. Many do not have contemporary contracts in place. The ANA has packaged a set of recommendations as well as a ‘best-practice’ media contract that features the clauses we all need to be looking for.
Big brands like Gatorade are auditing their media to understand viewability, effective-targeting, and fraud
Kenny Mitchell, Head of Consumer Engagement for Gatorade, shared terrific creative work including a Snapchat filter that allowed people to superimpose their own head shot with a super-realistic video of the Gatorade “dunk”, the ritual wherein the winning team coach gets doused with a cooler of Gatorade.
But more importantly, he shared the media audit they performed on their 2015 digital media. This was very timely based upon Bob Liodice’s call-to-action around media transparency. Kent reported that 50% of their digital ads were viewable. 24% were delivered against their targets and they suffered about 3% of fraud. The audience was quiet and no doubt brand marketing leaders are torn about doing their own audit with the prospects of revealing poorer performance than one of the world’s largest advertisers (Pepsico). I believe we all want to know which part of our advertising is even being seen by the right people.
Brands w/purpose like American Greetings can “punch above their weight”
Alex Ho, Executive Director of Marketing at American Greetings (and formerly at Progressive Insurance), shared a powerful POV about having a purpose-driven brand and how leveraging cultural tensions allows him to achieve great marketing results with highly creative, 360 programs. Alex shared 3 programs, none of which had big media TV support but had great impact (e.g. mid-journey work driving sales lift). He works in a 360 fashion with Mullen making sure that PR and marketing are working in service of the Idea.
American Greetings is all about helping people make connections. Their core business – greeting cards – has not receded despite the media-driven death knell (“print is dead,” “greeting cards are dead,” etc…). He focuses on identifying the cultural tension via research that he can then address in marketing programs. The hunger millennials have for authentic experiences and a way to connect to their true friends beyond the throngs of Facebook friends led them to their “Analog” pop-up at SXSW. Alex is a great reminder that powerful communications still starts with the idea (born from a cultural tension, born from insight).
Established brands can learn a tremendous amount from the disruptors in the collaborative economy
Jeremiah Owyang, a seasoned analyst, formed Crowd Companies two years ago to track and report on the rise of disruptive businesses from AirBNB to TaskRabbit to Lemonade and so many more. He devised a framework to better understand who they were and what their actual disruption was. Then he formed the Innovation Council which pulled together the world’s biggest brands from Mastercard to Allianz to Nestle and many more. These brands wanted to be exposed to relevant startups and, more importantly, they wanted to share experiences and ideas for innovation with other brands.
Jeremiah suggests that brands don’t have to merely innovate by waiting to buy Dollar Shave Club for $1b. And he recognizes the challenges of brands establishing innovation centers or outposts in Silicon Valley (ironically, he was on his way to the opening of Henri@Nestlé in San Francisco, a digital platform that will allow startups and entrepreneurs to pitch projects to the company in response to "innovation challenges" that Nestlé is looking to solve).
Brands can innovate in three ways:
Transform their product brand into a service (as Dollar Shave Club did; as BMW did with their Drive Now, cars as service in Europe)
Create a marketplace (imagine an insurance carrier providing a network of home contractors to help make homes safer)
Establish a platform (as U-Haul did with the U-Haul Investors Club which allows individuals to invest in U-Haul vehicles thus expanding their fleet and, more importantly, establishing the most effective way to drive loyalty
Tons of advice tell brand marketers how to hijack the skills of great content publishers on behalf of their product or service. “Make it share-worthy” by studying how Buzzfeed does it; tell authentic stories; choose pictures worth clicking on; and so forth. It’s not that this advice is wrong although often enough it is simplistic and obvious.
Content marketing needs to serve a business goal, first and foremost. If a marketer’s only motivation were to create the most popular or engaging content, she might likely steer content into territories that do nothing to further business.
To actually impact business, three essentials emerge: strengthen the brand, improve business results, and serve the customer (or whomever your end users may be). Understanding how your content program is informed and driven by all three can ground your program in service to your business and, yes, in service to the customer.
The only distinction worth making about content marketing and brand-building is that content should demonstrate the brand position and values not claim it like advertising often does. If your brand is meant to help small business run their business then the content ought to help and not simply state that is your position. Look at Chase for Small Business. Their content aims to actually give small business owners information on how to do things and to inform decisions. They share lessons from other business owners like these newsletter marketing tips from TheSkimm
Know your brand position: the territories of content that brand that to life and demonstrate the brand in-action.
Improve business results
Are you trying to find new customers? Retain existing customers? Cross-sell? All three? Do you need to raise awareness of your brand and solutions and become known in a market you are just entering? Drive consideration and favorability? Are you a direct-seller with ecommerce sales goals? Whatever your marketing goals that actually drive positive business results, designing your content marketing program to be measurably in service of those goals is just good business.
Look at Blackrock. They are an investment company with clear points of view from their experts about how the business behaves globally. Their blog features POVs on “global market intelligence” from actual Blackrock investment staff.
Blackrock is well known in the investment community. Larry Fink is the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of BlackRock. He started the company and shares his POV routinely. Now, a broad collection of thought leaders at Blackrock share their insights via content. That builds trust, consideration and favorability. Take a look at a typical article, this one by Richard Turnill, Chief Strategy Officer on “How to prepare for the low return environment ahead.” No doubt these guys are experts and have a particular view based upon their position managing so much money.
Clearly this blog is in service of marketing goals to increase consideration and favorability for Blackrock. With the right tagging and ‘view through” measurement, they are likely following how the blog drives financial advisors and investors to investment solution content on Blackrock.com and other valuable actions.
Whether this content shortens the buy cycle, improves preference and trust amongst financial advisors and, therefore, their recommendations of Blackrock, or even drives actual demand from investors, it is in-service to the business.
Serve the customer
The biggest shift for marketers through content marketing is to actually become much more customer-centered. It sounds simple and obvious really. My experience tells me that it is a lot harder for some businesses to actually change their practices to be more customer-centered. Businesses have old ways of feeling connected to the customer; anecdotes from sales professionals, customer surveys or traditional research. These are all great sources but we need to go further.
For content marketers, that means mining search engine data to understand what people are really concerned about, listening via all of our means including social media conversations, and examining content performance data to see what truly engages people and what they deem ‘share-worthy.’
Coldwell Banker has developed a rich content marketing resource via their blog. No doubt it attracts and serves agents as much as homeowners. One look a the collection of “Seller’s Resources” and it seems clear that they are listening to key homeowner questions about staging, increasing value via energy efficiency, and radon concerns and then creating useful content.
Even as you tune up your team to adopt all of the best practices of great content marketing, make sure your content program is grounded in who your brand is, the business results you must achieve and the constantly evolving needs of your customers.
