Digital Influence Mapping Project

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

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

Five Priorities for Marketing During the Next Phase of COVID-19

How do we market and manage our businesses as the country experiments with “opening up?” How do marketers balance their original growth strategies for 2020 with the new, much different reality? Is this about post-crisis or merely managing intervals in a crisis? It's a lot to untangle. 

There used to be an adage business folks bandied about in the early aughts, “the only constant is change.” Well, that could now be rewritten as “the only thing certain is uncertainty.” We just don’t know what will happen between the behavior of a virus, the impact on the complex system of global economies and the changes in political leadership to come.

Still, we have to make progress. Humans are, by nature a planful bunch. Clearly the key today is to adjust strategies and remain nimble to shift given circumstances. Based on the last fifteen years of experience associated with social media adoption, brands have become nimbler. In March, brands put marketing programs on hold, made huge operational shifts and adopted crisis communications to respond to employees, customers and financial stakeholders.

Here are five priorities for marketers as we emerge from the first phase of this crisis and segue into the next, marathon phase:

Re-align Marketing Strategy to Business Goals

Don’t throw out your strategy. Adjust and re-align it to business goals that respond to new realities. Some businesses will suffer greater or longer-lasting disruption. The airline business and travel, in general, will suffer for a prolonged period. Movie theaters may not recover as the businesses they were before the crisis. People will still buy homes, fewer perhaps, but that business doesn’t just stop. That being said, shopping for homes may shift as people rely on virtual tours as they seek ex-urban places to live now that virtual work (and the threat of compressed populations) is more possible.

Chances are before COVID-19 (BCVD), you had a growth strategy in some part of your business. Now, you may need to shift to improving retention. That’s a reasonable shift in goals. Now, re-align your marketing strategy to that priority.

Kathy Bachmann, GM of Americas with the consultancy Analytic Partners Inc. told Paul Talbot in Forbes about the type of strategic shifts some brands are taking in their business:

“Here are some examples of the types of shifts we’re seeing and expect to see in marketing approaches and investments:

• Directing investments toward marketing tactics that drive online sales.

• Reducing marketing investments on campaigns to drive short-term sales or business outcomes, while keeping brand-building campaigns live – essentially saving dry powder.

• Shifting budgets to promoting at-home and delivery-based options (i.e., at-home fitness solutions/equipment/apps, grocery delivery, restaurant delivery, etc.)

• Shifting focus from promoting premium products to entry-point or everyday items….”

 

Our businesses will change in big and small ways. Consumer habits will change temporarily and permanently. We need to adjust, and we need strategy to align our organizations to do more than react to crisis. Don’t settle for just reacting to the crisis.

 

Join with Research for a 3-Legged Marathon

Think you know what your customers want or are worried about? Wait a day and it might change. Now is the time to adopt new practices to get constant input and insight about customers and sales channels. That certainly means strengthening any voice of the customer programs you have (grabbing feedback from customers during dozens of interactions). We are running a series of consumer and distribution channel surveys every two weeks to keep a pulse on how people’s attitudes and behaviors are changing (e.g. a rise in ‘fear of the unknown’). This is on top of our real-time feedback from social media, regular insights from search behavior (e.g. “what DIY projects are people planning/doing based upon Pinterest and Google searches”), and our VOC programs.

For anything new, we are engaging customers in qualitative co-creation sessions virtually. We need their current views to help us bring something to market that makes sense. One way or another, join with research at the hip and keep them embedded in your efforts for the foreseeable future. Embrace the 3-legged marathon.

 

Demonstrate What Your Brand Believes in and Distinctly Delivers

Many brands stream stories through their social channels and even via paid media of their support for the healthcare front line, the service workers delivering packages and their own employees who do their job in the face of adversity and uncertainty. Unfortunately, there is a sameness to all of these montages. They are largely being done to benefit employee morale and assure the rank and file that their work has meaning. Nothing wrong with that.

Still, as we emerge from this first phase of the crisis, brands will benefit from demonstrating what they believe in and what distinct role they can play in people’s lives. This may sound like the usual call for brands to invest in “brand” or embrace a purpose. Sort of. Post Covid-19 (PCVD), brands will need to demonstrate how they are helping people live their lives under the oppressive uncertainty we all face. The question is what does your brand mean now.

McKinsey takes a look at what marketers need to do during this immediate crisis and afterwards:

“Our analysis of consumer decision-journey behaviors showed that 87 percent of consumers shopped around: they were willing to consider other brands. We believe that behavior could be even more drastic given the scale and nature of this disruption…Marketers should begin revisiting what their brand means to customers. Agile marketing practices—typically focused on performance marketing—will need to be adopted at the brand-building level, with communications managed rapidly in test, learn, and refine cycles of continuous improvement.”

That notion that we apply rapid test-and-learn practices on brand-building is new. Having a static notion of your brand position won’t cut it anymore.

 

Put Some Jet Fuel into Digital Transformation

Clearly this jagged-edge “zig” we are all living through has demonstrated the urgent need for more digital ways to deliver products and services, customer experience and manage ourselves. We need to make digital change happen faster. But it is not as simple as green-lighting all those digital transformation projects that your business couldn’t find a way to fund BCVD. Funding will be scarce.

This is the time for leadership to step forward, roll up their sleeves and work with their most innovative business leaders to place some bets. You cannot delegate the selection of digital transformation projects/initiatives to the next tier. Digital transformation most often requires participation across the org chart. It’s up to the C-suite to declare big priorities to stimulate true collaboration and commitment.

Where to start? Accelerate that part of the customer journey that current circumstances reveal is more urgent. Double-down on that CRM implementation or expansion that will quickly make a fully remote field force more productive. Choose those projects that are so foundational, they can no longer be ignored (e.g. fix customer data) and those initiatives that will help the most people interact with your business digitally.  

 

Be Generous with Your Customers

What do your customers need most right now? If you ask them (see the 3-legged marathon above), you will find out that what you ultimately sell or deliver to them is actually helpful. If you are a bank, you can offer them guidance on managing their finances in a recession. If you are a restaurant, you can go beyond take away to allow them to subscribe to a meal-a-week delivered to their door. Yes, touchless or whatever makes folks feel more comfortable. If youy are an insurance company, you can recognize that people are driving lsss and give them a break on the car insurance bill.

When business locations open again, what do we all want to know? That you care enough about your customers to have special cleaning protocols in place to reduce the chances of your doorknobs and surfaces carrying the virus. “Generous” means “liberal in giving or sharing; unselfish.” Call it doing the right thing; demonstrating empathy; simply caring enough about your customers to listen closely and aim to serve them in a generous way.

Like a lot of folks, we tried to order from local restaurants regularly to keep their businesses going.  When I would pick up, I noticed a range of safety behaviors from the pizza place that hadn’t changed a bit and forced nervous dads into a small takeout pickup room where no one wore masks or gloves to the other Italian restaurant who arranged curbside pickup from masked and gloved staff. This second experience demonstrated a business who was empathetic to the concerns of many of their customers.

Think about what would really help your customers now. Do that. Then optimize for efficiency. People need brands who care about them.

 

Here are 4 useful POVs on how brands are leaning into PCVD marketing:

• How The Coronavirus Pandemic Impacts Marketing Strategy – Forbes
• How Marketing Leaders Can Both Manage the Coronavirus Crisis and Plan For The Future - McKinsey
• Preparing your marketing plans for the Coronavirus downturn – The Drum
• Brand Marketing Through the Coronavirus Crisis – HBR

 

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 

 

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.  

 

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.

Marketing Data Fluency for CMOs

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

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

It’s Not Easy

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

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

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

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

 

What Do Marketers Want from Data

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

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

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

No pressure. 

 

A Simple Frameworks to Think and Talk about Marketing Data

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

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

The CMO’s Planning Framework for Data

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

Here’s a way to look at it:

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Related links:

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

CES 2018: Four Wishes for the Future

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.

Here's another interesting POV on the interface topic: Why Google A.I. is the last user interface (Computerworld – Mike Elgan, @MikeElgan )

 

Related articles

The Marketing Technology Stack Dilemma

Is the 'Buyer Journey' a Bunch of Hooey?

Remarkable and refreshing content design from media and brands

An early look at the Detroit auto show floor

Everything you need to know about attending the 2018 Detroit auto show

How AI and Machine Learning May Apply to Marketing

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?

 

Good resources:

3 Ways AI Will Affect Marketing - Smart Insights

The CMO’s guide to AI’s marketing impact for 2018 - MarTech Today

How Will Artificial Intelligence Impact Digital Marketing in 2018? – NextWeb

8 Ways Intelligent Marketers Use Artificial Intelligence – Content Marketing Institute

10 Ways to Use Chatbots for Marketing and Sales – Entrepreneur

 

 

Related articles

Artificial Intelligence and the Rise of Google RankBrain in Search

The Marketing Technology Stack Dilemma

Is the 'Buyer Journey' a Bunch of Hooey?