Digital Influence Mapping Project

Visit NextNow Digital…Now

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

ANA Study Highlights:

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

Great voices in content marketing:

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

 

From NextNow Digital:

Simple Customer Journeys Drive Marketing Strategy

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

How Generative AI Will Change Visuals in Marketing

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

The Next-Gen Digital AdvertisingToolbox

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

5 Learnings for Small Business Marketing in the Next Normal

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

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

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

McKinsey sees a greater challenge for small business:

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

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

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

 

Romance and serve your current customers

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

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

A recent Salesforce consumer survey revealed:

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

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

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

A how-to guide for digital ordering at Starbucks

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

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

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

 

Create regular, meaningful and increasingly personalized communications with them

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

Collect regular feedback and insights from your prospects and customers

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

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

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

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

 

Upgrade your digital customer experience

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

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

Here are some simple suggestions:

If your goal is ecommerce (sales):

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

If you are driving leads:

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

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

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

 

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

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

Coronavirus Small Business Guide – US Chamber

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

How Businesses Have Successfully Pivoted During the Pandemic – HBR

The Reopen, Reinvent, Grow Business Guide – Travelers Insurance

 

From NextNow Digital:

5 Questions to Define Your Business Brand

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

 

The Next-Gen Digital Marketing Strategy Toolbox

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

 

The Next-Gen Digital Marketing Strategy Framework

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

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

 

The Tenured CMO’s Survival Guide

Some CMO’s only expect to be in their position between 36-43 months. For those that are in for the long haul – at least 6-8 years – there are key initiatives beyond short term sales that must be tackled. You can’t wait these out. The “tenured” CMO is the one who has made it past the first 12 months that for one reason or another kicks out a lot of ‘bad fits.’ If you have made it that far presumably you can assimilate to the culture of the place. You have also figured out how to sustain or improve short term business results.

Next up are those bigger, foundational jobs that will suck energy and resources before having a payoff. If you avoid them, you may not only put your job in jeopardy but the competitiveness of your company in the future.

Here are four marketing must-do’s for the tenured CMO:

 

First-Party Data Strategy to Build Lasting Value & Competitive Advantage

Whether you sell direct or through a channel, your marketing organization’s ability to have solid first-party data on your customers and any channel partners (e.g. third-party sellers like independent agents or brokers) is key to competing tomorrow. That first-party data should expand with every transaction and includes demographic, psychographic, transaction and other behavioral data. Some good sense needs to be applied to not collect everything under the sun (and protect privacy). But, in general, more is better.

The strategy needs to include the ability to access and apply the data to marketing and customer experience use-cases. Your data needs to be on the cloud (if possible) to allow you to more easily combine with third-party data sources like Acxiom, Experian, Bombora, and more.

Command of your own customer and channel data serves as a defense against the walled-garden marketing channels like Facebook, LinkedIn, Google and Amazon. They have made their intentions clear. For now, they will not let user data out to partners in any significant way. Your first-party data strategy is also a hedge against the “cookie-less” future. 

While I am sure the number of marketers working towards self-sufficiency is far greater than those who have achieved it, Mark Grether @mark_grether highlighted the shift in Martech Today:

“Recent surveys show more than 80 percent of marketers are data self-sufficient, or working towards the goal of self-sufficiency. Even before GDPR, marketers were shifting priorities and investments toward a heavier reliance on data. Because of this, there is a trend towards bringing these efforts “in-house” closer to the CMO and not under the purview of an agency. In fact, Unilever cited that its recent $1 billion acquisition of Dollar Shave Club was in part to gain access to the brand’s “unique consumer and data insights.””

Integrating Human-Centered Design to Get Closer to the Customer

Of all the ways to get closer to the customer to design better products and services, the practices of human-centered design watch the video above) feels like the most powerful. Inviting customers in to co-create a product, to inform its design and how it is marketed, will do more to ensure our marketing teams (or senior executives) don’t get too swept away with their hunches.

Dave Thomsen from Wanderful Media calls out the strength of more feedback, more often:

“When you’re working at breakneck speeds with tight deadlines, taking time out to gather feedback from users can feel like a luxury that’s easy to put off. But there’s no substitute for the nuance and depth of insight that can come from an in-person conversation. And with a couple of well-crafted Craigslist ads, a couple hundred dollars to pay your participants and an afternoon, you can quickly check key assumptions, uncover opportunities for improvement and gather inspiration for new ideas.”

Working side-by-side with customers (vs. behind one-way mirrors) breeds compassion and empathy. Those are two keys to truly customer-obsessed organizations. Human-centered design is a great way to bake it into culture.   

Here's a great summary from Greater Good Studio - What is Human-Centered Design 

 

Better Revenue Attribution and Belief

The need for better revenue attribution is not new. Still, it’s shocking how hard it is for many marketing organizations. Big consumer product goods companies and ecommerce companies seem to have this licked. For most others it remains a work-in-progress. Many CMOs are stymied by the difficulty in proving that a dollar spent in marketing (across 12 channels over an extended period of time) results in a causal uptick in sales. Building all the hard data pipes to prove it and report it daily (unless you are ecommerce) may be prohibitive.

Demonstrating the correlation between strong marketing programs and business results via highly instrumented pilots may be the better strategy. Then comes the second part of the CMO’s job – building belief in the senior executive ranks. These are the colleagues vying for limited annual budget dollars. They may be IT leaders, product leaders, finance folks. They are not marketers. Communicating the evidence of these pilots and getting them to acknowledge and buy-in to those results takes some adept maneuvering. Never assume the results speak for themselves. You can have produced the most definitive results, but if you haven’t gotten the “management committee” shark tank to acknowledge it, all may be for naught.

Do you want to be a marketing services leader or do you want to be the CMO in line to become the Chief Revenue Officer?

 

Build an Operating System That Delivers Against Key Goals

I have spent a lot of time planning out the next marketing organization structure. Is it aligned to products, customers, channels, marketing operations like ‘demand gen?’ While it matters which you choose or which hybrid you build, in this age of “agile marketing” how you work together may matter more. 

Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as just adopting agile marketing as a method. First of all, it doesn’t exist. Many of us have been working to apply the principles and ceremonies of ‘agile’ to marketing. Listen to the Agile Marketing podcast and it corroborates my experience applying it to an enterprise marketing organization – some things work and others don’t. (See The Boston Agile Group's approach here). CMG built a variant on an emerging view of agile marketing as an OS. It’s pretty strong and yet relies on significant change management to actually put it into practice.

 

Some marketers see promise in the “flywheel” model (see video above). This has been made popular by Hubspot. The flywheel is really portrayed as an alternative to the sales funnel yet it has strong implications for how your marketing organization can operate.

Creating a Marketing OS that works for you is highly personalized to your organization. My best suggestion is to rally your teams around common processes which may have shared artifacts like a common brief, channel plan or content Kanban board. Regardless of who the marketing team members report to or what discipline they come from – email vs. social vs. performance – if they share a common approach and tools to planning and execution that will become increasingly effective.

 

A Portfolio Approach

CMOs with an ambition to endure need to deliver value in the short run and they need to place bets on foundational capabilities that will help the organization compete next year or the year after. Tenured CMOs build a portfolio approach to their jobs and bravely place bets on tomorrow.

 

From NextNow Digital:

Simple Customer Journeys Drive Marketing Strategy

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

How Generative AI Will Change Visuals in Marketing

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

The Next-Gen Digital AdvertisingToolbox

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

Three Marketing Predictions for 2020 from a Brand-side Marketer

What are your big bets for digital marketing in the next 1-2 years? As a marketing strategist and practitioner inside a major brand, I need to focus on what will accelerate and improve business in the near term in addition to building a foundation for tomorrow. 

So, timing is everything. As I look back on the past few years and where momentum is growing, here are the few trends that I really do expect significant activity and gains over the next 12-24 months.

Practical Applications of AI

The subtitle of Ajay Agrawal (co-authors Joshua Gans and Avi Goldfarb) Prediction Machines is “The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence.” Hearing Ajay speak recently, I have come to appreciate the simple idea that AI enables more efficient predictions which are key to decision-making. Think about operations in marketing where we could use some cheaper predictions – like which audiences will respond to specific marketing efforts, which customers are more likely to buy a next product or which customers are most likely to become your most valuable.

Targeting, segmentation, creative and messaging are all ripe territories for machine learning improvements. Clearly the “digital gatekeepers” – Google, Amazon, Facebook – are all over AI. Google appears to be investing about $3.9 billion; Amazon about $871 million (from TechRepublic). Their interests go far beyond marketing yet you can bet they are using AI to enhance their leadership in that space.

AI could easily become the new every-year prediction like mobile did for many years – “this is the year of mobile.” Still, we will see more brands practically using AI in their marketing efforts.

Marketers will find it easier to rent AI solutions even as they negotiate with internal IT teams to establish a competitive edge capability in-house.

Persado integrates AI to control advertising messaging and essentially predict which messages will drive the most action. Gone are the clumsy days when we craft multiple exections and optimize to the high performer. Persado can improvise at scale (I know, it’s hardly improvisation – just good old machine learning)

A lot of brands will gain experience with AI via a big platform like Salesforce Einstein. From big ambitions around workflow automation to narrow use cases like email send time optimization, marketers will gain experience via these partners. As eMarsys puts it, AI will “identify the optimal time for emails to be sent for each contact – not segments, not groups, but individuals.”

 

More ‘Full Stack’ B2B Sales and Marketing

We have been doing some terrific work with Account Based Marketing (ABM) over the past couple of years and will continue to lean into it in 2020. One of the by products of trying to make the full potential of ABM work is establishing a more complete martech integration between your marketing automation and sales automation capabilities. While some companies may already have that level of sales and marketing sophistication, many more are like us – in the process.

This year, we will see more brands putting that “full stack” into service to run fully instrumented marketing and sales programs. That may be why there is softening in martech investments (from Martech Today).  

Brands have the tech, they just don’t have all the talent they need or haven’t connected it all. As Martech Today puts it,

“Martech allocations may be down in 2019, but according to Gartner, marketing leaders continue to see martech as a tool for driving customer engagement and growth.  According to last year’s survey, marketers indicated they only use 61% of the functionality available in their martech portfolio. A reported lack of resources was identified as a common organizational challenge.”

More brands will do the hard work of connecting sales and transaction data to track the impact of integrated sales and marketing activities. I would peg 2021 or later for serious weighted attribution analytics to understand better how various channels and tactics contributed to that sale.

A Strategic Commitment to Conversational Marketing

There is a profound shift for marketers embedded in the term ‘conversational marketing’ - a shift towards designing marketing to solve customer problems; a shift to catching up to what Google already knows about people (they are seeking answers not your Web site); a shift towards brands embracing their authority.

The folks at Drift point out the frustrations people have getting answers on the Web:

When brands deploy digital agents or ‘chatbots’ designed to get people to helpful answers quickly or navigate a process as simply as possible, that’s conversational marketing. When brands design voice skills on Alexa that simply must be of-use to people to even get enabled, that’s conversational marketing. When brands deploy live chat across platforms to become pervasively available, that’s conversation marketing.

A prediction that we will see more AI-powered chatbots this year isn’t much of a prediction (we will). If anything, chatbots as the primary manifestation of conversational marketing will give way to more complete strategies around interacting with people in new, streamlined ways to get them the answers they need.  This customer-focused approach pays off for the brand by building greater consideration through every useful interaction.

As marketers, we need to solve peoples’ pain points, make their lives better and save them time and anxiety while doing it. Conversational marketing does that.

The less obvious benefit or outcome for brands answering questions or simplifying a process for people is to firmly place the brand in a position of authority on topics. It builds trust. And in an online world full of dodgy, untrustworthy information, brands need to step up. One company that is building a business around creating brand authority is Yext (disclosure: we are doing some work with these folks right now). They ask a simple question,

“Every day customers ask questions about your brand. Shouldn’t the answers come from you?”

They are setting up services that aim to put brands in the driver’s seat of answers. It may start with listings and local search but the application and the intersection with conversational marketing is huge. For packaged goods companies, it might be consumer questions on ingredients or nutritional value. For an insurance company, it might extend beyond core product attributes to authority on risk prevention.

 

Three Trends in 2020 

Three trends in digital marketing for 2020 include the everyday application of artificial intelligence, the hardening of the full stack in marketing and sales automation, and the prioritization of conversational marketing. These are practical predictions from a marketer within a rather large enterprise brand. That means they are more about what I expect to happen within 12 months, not ‘maybe someday’ predictions.

What do you see coming around the next corner?

 

Other Good POVs:

Four Digital Marketing Trends Poised to Disrupt in 2020 - Prophet 

2020 Digital Marketing Trends - Adroll

How AI Will Transform Marketing in 2020 -Martech Advisor

Trends in 2020 to Look Out For in Digital Marketing - Entrepreneur 

Conversational Marketing Guide - Hubspot 

 

From NextNow Digital:

Simple Customer Journeys Drive Marketing Strategy

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

How Generative AI Will Change Visuals in Marketing

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

The Next-Gen Digital AdvertisingToolbox

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

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 

 

Agile Marketing in 2019: Can You Get There from Here

Having explored, experimented and applied agile practices within the marketing function for the past few years, I feel like I have as many questions today as when we first started. We have learned a lot. But I think there is a bigger dance afoot and that is the complete rethinking and restructuring of marketing such that we are able to live the dream of agile – creating customer value quicker, committing to a data-driven approach more completely and empowering teams to make decisions faster while being happier at their jobs.

So, this post is filled with more questions than answers.

We have been experimenting with agile marketing practices – adopting those that work well and dropping others that seem too much of a forced-fit. Meanwhile, we have built a marketing technology and data strategy which articulates the most important marketing capabilities to grow and establish to support our business. We have teams and specialisms in campaign management (think email plus), social media marketing and communications, and measurement, for example.

Therein lies the conflict: agile marketing teams focused on specific journeys vs. specialty disciplines applied to many, many campaigns and projects.

Here’s how that conflict plays out:

Team: Do You Have Enough People

You know that being great at ever-more-sophisticated campaign management or relationship management is key to your business. So, you assemble the best capability – people, process, technology and data – to design and execute. To get the most out of that capability, you apply it to as many parts of your business and their customers as you can. If your business is already organized around “journeys’ then you are challenged with deploying these marketing specialists into multiple journey teams. Staffing becomes a real challenge. How do you have enough marketing experts to assign to all the right journeys? Most journey-based models call for dedicated teams working in some sort of sprint cycle. With dozens of active journey teams, that calls for a lot of marketing expertise.

McKinsey’s guide to Agile Marketing highlights the core issue implicit in the agile model,

“While these elements are crucial for success, the most important item is the people—bringing together a small team of talented people who can work together at speed. They should possess skills across multiple functions (both internal and external), be released from their “BAU” (business as usual) day jobs to work together full time, and be collocated in a “war room”. The mission of the war-room team, as these groups are sometimes called (though companies also refer to them by other names, such as “pod” or “tribe”) is to execute a series of quick-turnaround experiments designed to create real bottom-line impact.”

How do you staff enough marketing specialists against many pods or tribes while still maintaining some “center of expertise?”

 

Team: Do You Have Enough “Specialist-Generalists”

A new tension arises: specialists vs. generalists. Is there a difference between what an 8-year email marketing director can do vs. a 2-year email specialist can do? Yup. So, we tend to adopt the agency or consulting paradigm of having senior folks supervise the work of many juniors. “Pyramids” spring up all over the place where the senior leader at the pinnacle quickly becomes a choke point or barrier to scale.

If your marketing organization serves multiple business units (each, theoretically, with multiple journeys on their “must-do” list) then the model of senior and more junior marketing experts where the seniors supervise the work of the juniors quickly starts to ache at the seams.

David Edelman, Jason Heller, and Steven Spittaels from McKinsey recommends reducing the senior leader bottleneck:

“The marketing organization’s senior leaders will understandably need to oversee the activities of the war-room team. But they ought to interact with the team in a lightweight manner—once every three or four weeks, for example. Automated dashboards with key metrics can help provide leadership with transparency.”

Some organizational experts focus on the “T-shaped” team member. Here’s how Jason Yip puts it:

“As opposed to an expert in one thing (I-shaped) or a “jack of all trades, master of none” generalist, a “t-shaped person” is an expert in at least one thing but also somewhat capable in many other things. An alternate phrase for “t-shaped” is “generalizing specialist”.”

Hiring and training T-shaped team members takes intention, it doesn't just happen. The biggest commitment is training. To make specialists into great generalists, there is more they can learn and get experience with. To deepen their specialism in the fast-paced universe of data and technology-fueled marketing, they also need more learning opportunities.

Are you growing T-shapes vs, bulking up on specialisms? And what is the right balance?

 

Process: Go Full Agile or Go Home?

We have seen quick benefits to sprints, stand-ups, retrospectives and demos in some of our consistent teams like social media and content. These teams work together all the time. They have extended team members in legal and the business units who can be pulled into these group rituals. Still, it’s not full agile (Think SAFe Agile). We’ve been trained and tried it but struggle to make it all work in marketing.

Agile Sherpas in the 2^nd Annual State of Agile Marketing Report put it this way:

“Hybrid frameworks are becoming increasingly common on Agile marketing teams, with 54% of Agile respondents saying this is how they approach their process. This is a big jump from 2018, when only 44% reported the use of hybrid frameworks.”

We are cherry-picking the process that seems to work best in established marketing teams. We tell ourselves that marketing is unlike a software product team or a manufacturing team where more complete agile can work well.

Are we adopting the bits that work best or avoiding the pain of restructuring the complete marketing function to work in the continuous improvement cycle of full agile?

 

Tools: Are Kanban Boards an Improvement or a Fad?

We have evolved from taped-up Kanban boards on the walls to software like Rally. The Kanban board is one of the most-adopted tools within our team. We will continue to expand its use and look for ways to keep it transparent and available to everyone in the belief that it has really advanced our game.

Remember the days of Basecamp? I mean old Basecamp which was the remedy to Gantt chart project management. Or other tools meant to streamline marketing processes. While Basecamp is still used today, Slack and Microsoft Teams are the rage. What will last? 

Here’s why I see Kanban as a lasting improvement:

• The teams doing the work really like it’s transparency and clarity.
• Kanban boards are great for prioritizing work for teams with fixed capacity and, just as importantly, they help make the argument for more resources from business leaders.
• They support a greater level of transparency across the whole team and today’s workforce demands that.
• Kanban boards are simple. They almost defy complexity which makes them east to adopt and easier to manage.
• Because they’re simple, they are cheap to stand up and maintain.
• They provoke discussions when something is being held up by someone or something. There’s that transparency again as it’s harder to hide the bottlenecks.

 Will agile tools change how we do things for at least the next 5-10 years or will they flame out quickly?

 

Agile marketing remains new and emergent. A lot of marketing leaders are trying out various aspects. Fewer are embracing it as a full, revolutionary change to how they staff and apply marketing to their business. I am looking forward to meeting other marketers at the ANA Digital and Social event next week where I will host a round table on agile marketing - mostly so I can ask all of these questions and here how others are experiencing applying agile to marketing. 

Related Posts on Agile Marketing: This Blog

Why Agile Marketing is New and Important

Agile Marketing combines lessons from the quick, collaborative approach of agile software development with the reliance on insights from the planners and the use of response data in performance marketing to create a way to plan and execute marketing that is fast, responsive, and measured.

Eight Principles and Voices of Agile Marketing

We are borrowing from the evolution in the production management and software development worlds. The aim is to make marketing more responsive, iterative and more impactful. 

 

From NextNow Digital:

5 Questions to Define Your Business Brand

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

The Next-Gen Digital Marketing Strategy Toolbox

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

The Next-Gen Digital Marketing Strategy Framework

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

Three Ways to Scale Humanity in Marketing Technology and Automation

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

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

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

 

Show me my field rep

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

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

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

 

Handwritten notes at scale

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

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

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

 

Chatbots: friendly but not chatty

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

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

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

 

Humanity Builds Trust

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

Credibility + Reliability + Intimacy / Self-Orientation

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

 

From NextNow Digital:

The Next-Gen Digital Marketing Strategy Framework

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

The Next-Gen Digital Marketing Strategy Toolbox

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

The Next-Gen Digital AdvertisingToolbox

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

The Agile Marketing Strategy for Small Business

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

How Tourism Embraces Content Marketing: #NewMexicoTrue

State tourism used to be a series of TV spots to inspire and, if the tourism office was lucky, a memorable slogan. Remember the iconic “I(heart)NY” logo designed by Milton Glaser? The first TV spot urged people to explore upstate New York and break the perception that NY=NYC. It’s a little ironic that decades later, the logo lives on mostly as a symbol of those who visit Manhattan.

 

State Tourism has caught up to the content age. New Mexico tourism has built on a 6-year-old slogan/campaign - #NewMexicoTrue – extolling the authenticity of the experiences to be had across the state.  Their best accomplishment is not the consistent slogan but the rich collection of content and especially videos that are designed around the different needs of travelers to the state. Like their video profile of Route 66. Of course, I am completely biased as I love New Mexico and have been traveling there consistently for about 27 years. From White Sands to Taos Ski Valley, from Tent Rocks to Chaco Canyon from Pie Town to Southwest Print Fiesta and all of the interesting people, there’s a lot to love about New Mexico.

The next challenge for the tourism office will be to expand the impact of this strong content marketing via digital marketing.

 

A Strategic Approach to Marketing

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

“New Mexico True promotes the state on airport billboards, as well as in print and through social media, in Dallas, Houston, Phoenix, Denver, San Diego, Chicago and most recently Austin, Texas.”

They have put in for a larger budget in 2019 ($16.1M or up $3.5M). I hope they got as I know they wanted to expand the marketing effort to San Francisco which is a slam-dunk great idea (as are LA and Seattle). Two thirds of the driving trips in the state (23M of 35M) came from out of state. I would love to know how many travelers are repeat-visitors. I have been visiting the state every year or so for 27 years. I doubt I am the only diehard fan.  

To get people to fly into the Sunport (ABQ), they need big experiences and destinations like the historic Native American sites and pueblos or the Balloon Festival. For the road-trippers, they need lots of ideas and potential itineraries.

 

Content for All Parts of the Journey

The design of the New Mexico tourism site is simple and strong and hats off to Simpleview who focus on supporting travel destination marketers. The site organizes the content in the most practical ways and connects the many channels from YouTube to Twitter to Facebook and more.

The heart of the content is video followed closely by photographs, short articles and planning tools. The video embedded in the site is all published on their YouTube channel.

 

Discovery

How do any of us discover a new destination- a place we might visit someday? Beyond word of mouth, there is advertising, of course. We might browse through a travel magazine or notice a compelling billboard in an airport or by the road. Someone might travel on business to discover a destination worth checking out on vacation.  Ideas may come to us via our many other affinities – food blogs, biking communities, art organizations. I presume that beyond print advertising and airport billboards in their target markets, New Mexico Tourism is using highly targeted Facebook advertising to reach potential visitors via these affinities. Likewise, they would be experimenting with different 3^rd party data combinations to reach those with an intent to travel to experiences like #NewMexicoTrue.  

 

Inspiration & Research

Drawn in by a discovery tactic or an intent to travel, now the rich content – especially the video – that New Mexico tourism creates really works hard to expose people to actionable itineraries.  

New Mexico True Television comes in several varieties. The “seasons” are organized in :20 episodes featuring a host exploring a theme or a region (e.g. Farm Trips, North of Santa Fe). Each episode is then carved up into topical 2:00 segments, as well. These can be quickly browsed.

New Mexico True Experiences caters to those of us looking for that distinctive and memorable experience like staying in the glamped-up trailers at Hotel Luna Mystica or the Enchanted Forest Yurts.

New Mexico True Stories let a New Mexican tell their own story of some remarkable place or experience like Kathy Knapp’s story about Pie Town.  

New Mexico in TRUE 360 engage viewers in a surround-view of experiences like the Ballon Festival or Meow Wolf, the quirky art destination in Santa Fe.

 

 

Planning

Some of the content in the site can be compiled into a personalized list of to-dos. With such a rich and dense site, this ‘favoriting’ feature is helpful as you browse through loads of options from Scenic Byways to Kasha-Katuwe Tent Rocks National Monument. Not everything has the handy suitcase icon next to it (the trip planning tool) but each page does have the ‘Share’ This function so there are other ways to remember a list.

 

Remember

I like to take my travel experiences and discoveries home. It only makes sense that they have a store where you can buy directly from some of the small businesses that sell something quite special. They even certify it as #NewMexicoTrue. That’s where I picked up a bunch of Love+Leche hand cream bars which we first discovered while in ABQ.

 

Success In The Future

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

“In 2017, 35.4 million trips were taken throughout the Land of Enchantment, 1 million more than the year before and 5.6 million more than 2010…The state's leisure and hospitality industry added 1,700 jobs in 2017 — an increase of 19 percent and more than 17,000 over the past seven years.”

With domestic leisure travel set to grow another 2.4% next year and business travel 3.4%, New Mexico will need to scale up its efforts via digital marketing that converts into travel reservations to gain more than its fair share of this organic growth. Can they infiltrate and attract people from promising markets like San Francisco, LA, and Seattle with targeted digital marketing and without the costly traditional advertising tactics?  Since state budgets are not going up significantly any time soon, how they shift their spend will be key.

Here are four approaches to expanding the terrific work and impact of #NewMexicoTrue

1. Establish a data-drive digital marketing team inside of the Tourism department or via an agency partner to build a foundation of traveler data and testable digital marketing strategies that can scale results. This comes with greater marketing attribution and, therefore, a more persuasive sales pitch come budget season.

2. Expand Albuquerque as a business travel destination and market to those visitors. With about 900 hotel rooms downtown, it’s not clear what events best fit the infrastructure. I trust that the folks at the  Visitors Bureau and Convention Center are aggressively marketing the city. I hope they use the #NewMexicoTrue content and promise of authenticity to draw business meetings.

3. Enable New Mexico travel business owners to become expert marketers. New Mexico businesses have skin in the game and amplify the impact of tourism marketing by becoming more effective marketers themselves. In 2016, tourism brought in about $6.1B in revenue statewide and spending supports 8.4% of all jobs. This is big business for the state and key business for those running a business within the state. #NewMexicoTrue is already providing great resources to New Mexico businesses including “20+ Free Ways New Mexico True Can Work for You” and a series of “How-to…” webinars. Not only can they expend this great work, but they can organize it and deliver it as the bite-sized content that over-worked business owners need to fit practical steps into their day.

4. Continue to grow visitor advocacy. #NewMexicoTrue is highly active on Instagram and Pinterest, two strong platforms for digital advocacy. Inspiring more travelers to post their positive stories is always a chore as it requires far more attention and cultivation than non-marketers realize. Still, to expand the reach of their marketing and leverage the benefits of word of mouth marketing, #NewMexicoTrue will need to tap more advocacy to reach beyond their budget.