Digital Influence Mapping Project

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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?

 

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

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

Digital transformation was put in service of customer obsession.

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

 

Content Marketing is Different

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

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

Three content marketing practices are essential for digital transformation.

 

A Journey-Based Customer Approach

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

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

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

 

Measure Against Final Outcomes

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

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

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

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

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

 

A Governance Process to Guide Change

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

From NextNow Digital:

5 Questions to Define Your Business Brand

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

The Next-Gen Digital Marketing Strategy Toolbox

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

The Next-Gen Digital Marketing Strategy Framework

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

 

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

CDP vs. DMP vs. XYZ: What is Your Brand’s Approach to Marketing Data Management?

Data management sounds so boring. The field is rife with acronyms for solutions that remain a bit vague like Customer Data Platform (CDP), Data Management Platform (DMP) and, in our case, Master Data Management (MDM). This is not exactly what I imagined I would be obsessing about as a marketer at this point in my career.

But think about this:

By 2020, 51% of consumers expect that companies will anticipate their needs and make relevant suggestions before they make contact. (Source) 

78% of U.S. Internet users said personally relevant content from brands increases their purchase intent. (Source) 

Personalization reduces acquisition costs as much as 50%, lifts revenues by 5-15%, and increases the efficiency of marketing spend by 10-30%. (Source) 

 

Delivering increasingly personalized and valuable content, tools, and offers to customers and sales agents (e.g. independent insurance agents, financial advisers, physicians) helps marketing become the measurable growth and revenue engine it is intended to be.

And it all starts with data and a data operating model that ensures the value of the data and how you can use it grows over time. That’s managing data for marketing and customer experience and that’s not so boring after all

 

Prospect to Customer Data for Marketing and Experience

From the time a lead is identified (i.e. marketing qualified lead, MQL) through a renewal on a multi-year, loyal customer, we have the opportunity to use data to manage how we attract and engage via:

• Segmentation and targeting of ideal customer types or accounts (e.g. account based marketing or ABM)
• Identifying new leads that look like your best customers (e.g. look-a-likes)
• Behavioral tracking and insight (e.g. paying attention to what people do and where their interests lie)
• Preference management (i.e. what are people’s stated interests and preferred channels
• Predictive marketing and service offerings (e.g. combine new data sources to reveal predictable behaviors; a person who buys and installs smart home technology for security and safety benefits is likely a better insurance risk as they are more inclined to maintain their home and anticipate problems before they ever become claims.)
• Individualized marketing by delivering personalized content, tools and offers to individuals that increases the value they feel from the brand and drives them to valuable actions (e.g. delivering content relevant to where and how they live)

While there is a natural break-point between pre- and post-acquisition, strategically it makes sense to think about the entire customer journey from unknown lead to loyal customer. If your business model includes a sales agent of some sort like a financial advisor in wealth management, then that agent has their own journey. They deserve the same increasingly personalized engagement now made a bit more complex as you now need to associate them with an individual prospect and customer.  

 

DMPs vs. CDPs vs CRMs

Acquiring, using, updating “cleaning” and growing customer data for marketing requires a creative mind and an intensely detailed obsessive mind. The creative part is about imagining what is possible. Very few brands are delivering on seamless and intuitive personalized marketing. Even Amazon, the archetype for all things good and data-focused still promotes gift product ideas to me based upon a one-time gift purchase for cousin Bob. Imagining what could be possible – delivering personalized recommendation based upon the house and property you own and the trending weather in your neighborhood and the search intent of your neighbors, for example – takes creative vision.

Detailing all of the data fields necessary to make that possible and then map out how to source and maintain that data takes the marketing equivalent of an obsessive compulsive (dis)order.

 

Data Management Platforms or DMPs were defined by advertisers, publishers and the tech companies who support them – like Adobe. Here’s how Kiki Burton defines DMP on the Adobe Blog:

“A DMP, or data management platform is a tool used to consolidate the disperse data sets of a company across first, second, third-party channels. It manages the segmentation and identity definition of user to then provide cohesive audience targeting across all of the various channels where you might be engaging with a consumer.

Forrester Research defined a DMP as “a unified technology platform that intakes disparate first-, second-, and third-party datasets, provides normalization and segmentation on that data, and allows a user to push the resulting segmentation into live interactive channel environments.”

In other words, it pulls data from a bunch of different, potentially unrelated sources and allows organizations to define specific audience segments to which they can provide distinct marketing experiences.”

Many consultants sum up DMPs as useful for acquisition marketing – finding and attracting your next customers.

 

Customer Data Platforms or CDPs are newer. They stress the first party data part of the first, second, third-party data layer cake. Some definitions focus on known customers while many extend from prospect to customer. Tealium (channeling the CDP Institute) describe it this way:

“The CDP Institute defines a Customer Data Platform as “a marketer-managed system that creates a persistent, unified customer database that is accessible to other systems.” Basically it’s a system that centralizes customer data from all sources, unifies this data into customer profiles and then makes this data available to other systems for marketing campaigns, customer service and all customer experience initiatives.”

Digiday tries to sum up the difference between CDPs and DMPs:

“CDPs mainly analyze first-party data based on real consumer identities, while DMPs largely examine consolidated third-party data based on cookies. A good way to think about the difference is CDPs can be used to nurture the relationship with existing consumers, while DMPs are mainly used to acquire lookalike audiences.”

Some people describe CDPs as the CRM for the B2C set. It’s not clear whether the rise of CDP is due more to what attracts venture capital (money in search of a problem and solution) or a true unmet need at the enterprise level.

 

Customer Relationship Management systems or CRMs have been around since the eighties and nineties (the acronym, CRM, is traced to 1995.) They are most often described either as the sales team’s answer for customer and prospect sales management or the company’s for delivering service and value to existing customers.

The Salesforce definition of CRM goes like this:

“Customer relationship management (CRM) is a technology for managing all your company’s relationships and interactions with customers and potential customers. The goal is simple: Improve business relationships. A CRM system helps companies stay connected to customers, streamline processes, and improve profitability.

When people talk about CRM, they are usually referring to a CRM system, a tool that helps with contact management, sales management, productivity, and more.

A CRM solution helps you focus on your organization’s relationships with individual people — including customers, service users, colleagues, or suppliers — throughout your lifecycle with them, including finding new customers, winning their business, and providing support and additional services throughout the relationship.”

 

What is Your Data Solution?

There is a lot of overlap in the definitions of these systems. Each industry and each brand is different enough that there is no one right answer. Unfortunately, it leaves the brand marketer with the chore of defining their own need and then labeling it – whatever the hell you want.  

• Companies with strong sales practices, teams and culture may want to build on a CRM-based model with some additional system for acquisition marketing
• B2C companies who rely on attracting a steady flow of customers and need to scale via look-a-like marketing via ad networks and publishers may want to lean into DMPs
• Companies who may sell via a few channels including bridging B2C and B2B marketing or who might be behind in marketing automation may want to define a CDP-like solution that serves both acquisition and customer marketing.

Here are some suggestions to help the non-data geek marketer consider the right options (you can also check out CDP-provider NGData and their comparison of CDPs vs. DMPs and Digiday's comparison of all three):

Create a vision for how you want to attract and engage new customers and how you want to serve those you already have. How “individualized” will you go? How important will Account Based Marketing (ABM) be to acquiring new customers?

Understand how you can create a continuous path for unknowns to paying customers. Can you practically hope to build a single data resource or do you need to separate acquisition efforts from customer experience?

Define your commitment to finding new ways to combine 1^st, 2^nd, and 3^rd party data to improve the efficiency of potentially both acquisition and customer marketing. If you want to aggressively experiment and “own” the lessons learned and outcomes then it may point you to a Cloud-based, owned solution.

Clarify the vision and commitment for integrating sales and marketing. If your future depends on it, then start putting the data infrastructure in place now. It may take years to get it right.

Welcome to the next age of data-drive marketing. Let’s learn from each other.

 

(The images in this post are from PETER CRNOKRAK. They are some of the most interesting "data-art" (my term) and I am a big fan. You can also acquire poster versions of many of them at The Luxury of Protest) 

 

6+ Promising Sessions at Content Marketing World 2017

Content marketing remains a critical strategy for brands eager to earn the attention and interest of customers – ones they already have and those they seek to attract. It’s different than advertising messages but is just as high-tech and data-driven.

Since content sits at the heart of a lot of the marketing that I plan, I am heading off to Content Marketing World on September 5^th – 8^th in Cleveland  (home of Bonin Bough's Cleveland Hustles) to learn from many of the smart people attending and speaking. I will have my own session on how we use data-driven, integrated content marketing to drive business impact. I plan to share what we have learned putting content marketing to work in a large enterprise.

If you go, connect with me via Twitter – @jbell99 . I would love to compare notes on enterprise-level content marketing. Here are some of the sessions I am looking forward to (I hope I can get to most!):

 

The Messaging Science behind Customer Acquisition and Customer Renewal Messaging

Sounds like I will get a good dose of sales ‘behavioral economics.’ And Tim Riesterer (@TRiesterer ) appears to be a very smart guy in this space.

 

Content ROI – How Marketers Demonstrate Value to the Brand and the Boss (a panel)

Connecting the business value for content marketing is not as simple as ‘how much did it sell.’ While that is important, I am looking forward to hearing what this panel including Jenifer Walsh/GE (@jlansky) and Laura Cameron/Key Bank (@lcameron80) have to say in terms of communicating value within an organization.

 

Driving Content Marketing Success in Your Organization: Sales, Product and Global-Regional Collaboration

This session is marked for the “Beginner” yet, even still, I am guessing that Jillian Hillard/Electrolux (@jillianhillard) will offer some good tips on how she engages others like product people in content marketing.

 

Machine-Assisted Narrative: How to Transform and Scale Your B2B Content with Artificial Intelligence

Okay, I know it’s early days yet for applying machine learning and AI to content but we are doing it now on the customer service side and I am keen to see how Paul Roetzer (@paulroetzer) sees the immediate future.

 

Time to Leave the Lead-Gated PDF Behind: How More Engaging Content Can Transform Your Lead Gen and Accelerate Growth

This may sound a little tactical but I am hoping that Aaron Dun (@ajdun) can deliver some insights that get us beyond the “whitepaper.”

Also eager to hear:

• Matthew Glick/Marriott (@matthewglick123)  – these guys do some interesting things
• Matt Heinz (@HeinzMarketing) – I hear this company is smart in this space
• Scott Monty/Brain +Trust Partners (@scottmonty)  – always good to connect with Scott
• Lee Odden/Top Rank Marketing (@leeodden) – a very smart consultant

 

Here’s my session on September 6 at 11:20am:

Under the Hood: Deconstructing Content Marketing the Travelers Way

Travelers publishes hundreds of articles, videos and visuals to engage consumers and business leaders at different points along their buyer journey. This fuel for integrated marketing programs attracts customers before they are even ready to shop for insurance. This session will cover building belief in data-driven content, integrating an editorial team inside marketing, and how we pulled it all together inside the Travelers Engagement Center – a new approach to digital marketing.

 I hope to see you in Cleveland.

(Thanks to Cleveland Leadership Center for the image of The Sixth City) 

A Fresh Business Case for Content Marketing by Brands

Reading the marketing trades online, one would get the sense that every brand has gotten wise to the value of content marketing and is busy shifting budget dollars from ineffective display or interruptive advertising to juicy content.  But attend a few marketing events where brands are presenting their progress or even their commitment to this area and you quickly see things are moving more slowly.

Working inside brands is a process. There are few lightning strikes of wisdom that shift behavior overnight. Rather a steady effort of communicating the benefits – and addressing the risks – of new marketing approaches may take hold over time. That means the sales pitch for content marketing is never done. Here is a compilation of what I find the most compelling reason to shift dollars and expertise to content marketing from some other marketing practices (those we do automatically, less because they prove themselves more effective).

Customers (B2B, B2C) research their purchase decisions online before, during and after the purchase and/or interaction with the brand.

Buyers go to Google before they know your product or service solves a problem they are researching. That’s the opportunity to get in front of them and earn their attention. A new report from Blue Nile adds some color to these behaviors:

“The ease of access to information in the Internet economy means buyers are fully prepared to leverage all channels available to them and more than 70% (76% B2B) use three channels or more when researching a purchase. 45% of buyers (46% B2B) want data and stats to help them make a buying decision, more than any other content type”

 

Great search results will always favor highly relevant content

While Google alters its algorithm seemingly all of the time, causing most brands to invest in persistent efforts to understand these laws and strengthen their results, the theme of good results remains consistent. Content others authentically share and link-to rise to the top. Fresh content and even longer content seem to do well.  If all you provide is content that describes what you sell, you can dominate on brand searches. If you provide highly relevant content on broader topics that garner more interest – business problems and solutions, for example – then there is a greater opportunity for you to connect with buyers. Check out Neil Patel’s summary of some of the more recent history of organic search that affects brands.

 

 

 

Native advertising works and requires user-valued content & content marketing discipline

Banner advertising is a disappointment. Ad blockers are a threat. For brands who want to work with media properties or even ad networks to reach specific audiences, the remedy to this deterioration is partly found in native content. Partnering with a great content property like Businessweek or CNET, for example, means access to a great audience. But it requires brands to get behind creating strong user-valued content. That is a different skill set than designing a package of banners. Just take a look at these videos – including this one on creating a dog washing station - inside the Instructables Web site for Moen. My experience has been that great native content cannot be completely outsourced to a partner. It requires the brand to think and apply value like a content marketer. 

 

 

Brands can realize efficiencies creating user-valued content for both their sales and marketing efforts

Content that helps buyers make great business and even purchase decisions has a place both in the hands of a salesforce and via direct online channels. The explainer videos on tough subjects like Nonprofit Directors & Officers Liability (if you serve on a board, you should care about this) are valuable, relationship-builders than can move a customer towards a purchase. When a salesperson (independent agent) shares that content, she strengthens her trusted advisor role. When the brand shares via digital channels, it aims to help buyers make more informed choices and earn perefence. Using content for both channels can be more efficient. 

 

 

Buyers are increasingly demanding video and rich-media content (not ads) to help or delight them

People are consuming a lot more video online and via mobile. That’s an irrefutable trend. Interestingly, that same Blue Nile study revealed, “B2B buyers actually preferred video at a greater rate than B2C.” As soon as you acknowledge this trend and embrace the challenge of delivering valuable video, you require a new of content marketing skills. TV spots generally don’t do it. Even the wonderfully emotional John Lewis holiday spot is pure delight and entertainment. It’s more than a TV commercial. Brands who want to achieve a marketing result via video, need to think about how to make that content useful and/or desirable in some way.

 

What are your compelling reasons for investing in content marketing.

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Three Harsh Realities of Content Marketing

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Chipotle: Building Content Marketing on a Story Platform

Neil Patel On Day Zero Strategy For Selling A SaaS Product

How to Evaluate Native Content Programs

I love Native Advertising. When it’s done well, it is user-centered and delivering value to the reader/user. Valuable content allows a brand to demonstrate rather than claim its strengths. It’s one thing to say you are an expert in supply chain risks and disruptions, it’s another to offer practical and detailed content to help manage that risk.  The latter shows your expertise and lets the user come to their own conclusion as to whether you have smarts in that space or not. It’s more believable than a claim. Native advertising is a great leap forward.

The measurement of native content and advertising remains behind the times, though. Too many publishers venturing into this space have not cracked the code on measuring effectiveness. Too many rely on the metrics of display advertising (e.g. clickthroughs) or on “engagement” metrics with no context.

Two Types of Native

Think about two different expressions of native advertising. Working with an experienced publisher – Bloomberg, Forbes, NYTimes, etc... - brands can create co-produced content that appears on the publisher’s site. Advertising across the site drives publisher traffic into the content. Links within or adjacent to the content drive clickthroughs to the brand’s web site. For simplicity’s sake, I will call this approach ‘native content.’

A variant comes from the native ad networks like Taboola, Sharethrough or Outbrain that distribute content headlines into contextually relevant places within established content sites across the Web. My brand story on supply chain risks for small business might sit at the bottom of a Businessweek article on supply chain and drives interested readers directly to my site. Let’s call this a native network.

 

Need a Step Change Improvement on Native Metrics

Both are examples of native advertising. Both need a step-change improvement in measuring effectiveness.

With native content, brands want to drive engagement metrics (i.e. time spent, pages consumed, shares) with the content itself. They also want to improve brand metrics through some combination of delivering authentically valuable content and doing so alongside a trusted media brand. Are clickthroughs important? If I have an article on Businessweek on supply chain risks and one on my own brand Web site, my goal is similar. I want to connect with prospects/customers before the buying cycle. I want them to get value out of the content and associate that value with my brand. That happens when they consume the content or share it. They don’t need to clickthrough. Still, clickthroughs from native content to my Web site help connect readers with similar content and establish my brand as the source of the expertise. Clickthroughs are important, they just aren’t the only KPI nor the way to justify the expense of a native content program.

The WSJ blog covered the problem as reflected in a recent ANA survey:

“The lack of consensus on those questions (how to measure native) was highlighted by a recent Association of National Advertisers survey, in which marketers reported using a wide range of metrics to judge their native ad campaigns. When asked which measurement is “most important,” respondents said everything from brand lift and awareness to click-throughs, social media sharing rates, time spent, purchase intent, lead generation and more.”

 

 

Engagement Metrics, Attribution and Brand Lift

The get it right, to know what these native content programs do for our marketing mix and how to price and therefore pay for them, we need to focus on engagement numbers, crack the code on attribution – both short term and longer term – and value ‘brand lift.’

Time spent on a site or with an article is valuable. Number of pages read within a site of related content also matters. How many times a piece of content is shared is also a really good thing. These KPIs are at the heart of the value of a native program. But too often we lack any type of benchmarking or context. The publishers are just now accruing experience with brand programs. We don’t have a bank of benchmarks to compare performance of brand content specifically. Publishers routinely don’t want to share editorial performance metrics as a benchmark believing the advertiser-sparked content is a different species all together.

@BrianHonigman wrote an interesting piece on the Skyword blog about focusing on engagement or “attention.”

 “Take the social sharing your sponsored content receives and measure it against the attention minutes each piece of content drove while considering clicks, conversions, and referral traffic as a part of the equation. This will help you determine how much of an impact your content made on readers or viewers. By analyzing the social shares your sponsored content generates, you’ll likely be able to see the brand lift achieved by leveraging a publisher’s brand equity. In other words, you’ll get a better idea of the trust you’re developing with customers by sponsoring content on a trusted publisher’s website.” 

How does engagement sell? That’s always the next logical question. We need to adopt a view of the buyer journey that puts value on engaging someone over a longer buying cycle. That requires some POV on how content engagement plays an ‘assist’ role in a sale. Part of that might be reflected in brand lift metrics. These are usually done by the publisher and ask survey questions about preference or demand.  Of course, brand metrics require business leaders to believe that ‘brand sells,’ but that is a whole different argument and blog post. For the sake of this one, I believe strongly that brand sells.

One way to value how content contributes to sales is to understand the hand-off between native content or native networks and brand web sites where the latter have strong calls-to-action as readers move further into the journey (e.g. when business leaders wrestling with supply chain problems are ready to consider and evaluate commercial insurance to protect them from supply chain exposures.)

Peter Chen @ZPCeee, a marketing consultant, is thinking of ways brands can get at this value.  The Content Promotion Lifecycle is one way to better understand if the yield of native advertising networks (e.g. Taboola, ShareThrough, Outbrain) is valuable or too unqualified

“We can quantify the effectiveness of native advertising in two dimensions. One dimension is the advertising metrics measuring the efficacy of the ad itself – did the audience actually engage with this ad?

The other dimension is the engagement metrics assessing how people engaged with the “product” after viewing the ad. In theory, those who clicked on the ad were qualified, but how can we find the ads that generated the most amount of qualified traffic?”

 

DIY Content Metrics for Brands

Even as publishers refine their native content opportunities for brands, they will continue to lag in terms of the most relevant metrics. Their sales force sells against cpms, clickthourghs and the like. That ocean liner will take a while to navigate to a new course.

Brands will have to establish their own values for engagement with their content and begin to amass benchmarks from working with several publishers.

 

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The Marketing Technology Stack Dilemma

Marketing automation and intelligence aims to make marketing and, potentially, sales more efficient. They can become the high performance engine that marketing never had. Investments in marketing technology continue to rise in many large companies making the CMO a primary technology buyer. Foundation Capital pegs the level of spend, “We expect technology spend by CMOs to increase 10x in 10 Years from $12 billion to $120 billion.”

Just what you are trying to automate or instrument depends on the nature of your business. Are you a B2C or a B2B company? Do you own your sales channel? Do you sell direct to end customers and do you do so online (ecommerce)? And so forth.

Depending on your answers, you may need a marketing stack of technologies that help you find and qualify leads, retarget the right prospects with advertising, cultivate customers to repurchase and more.

Operations vs. Innovation

But for many of us, marketing technology is not just about operational efficiency, it is about innovating in how you market, or how you connect marketing with sales, or in some way how you sell your product. It is possible that new technologies will allow a business without a practice of lead generation and nurturing to actually start to do that for the first time. That’s innovation. Yet marketing technologies require significant green dollar costs (actual purchase and licensing costs) and often greater grey dollar costs (time and opportunity). It is much easier for companies to invest in operational infrastructure meant to make a known process more efficient with a calculable return on that investment. Investing in innovation requires a different mindset. This presents a dilemma to marketers creating a tech strategy and selling it in. 

Just read Roger Martin’s The Design of Business. He makes the most cogent case for the tension between innovation and operations within business. Making the case for how a well-planned marketing technology strategy can change how you market and sell is very different than the one you might make to improve what you are already doing.   

Strategy vs. Technology

The “marketing technology stack” is a catchy topic for the CMOrg (chief marketing organization – i.e. those that work at the marketing center of an enterprise). We all look at the insane landscapes from Chief Martec (Scott Brinker) and try to sort through the providers for various functions and services from email marketing systems to customer databases to retargeting partners and so much more. “I need one of these and one of these…”And so on.

But do you need a better email marketing platform or do you need a way to nurture sales channel relationships (or customer relationships)? If you are innovating (vs. simply operationalizing something that sort of already works), starting with confirming your strategy seems like the stronger suit. But we are talking tech investment here. Every choice is a commitment. I mean, even if the annual service fee for a SaS component isn’t that large, you will pay through the nose with the internal IT compliance and integration. The strategy ought to be a pretty solid one for the foreseeable future.

Strategy sounds more like:

 

• I need a way to engage my sales channel relationships and drive sales action with increasing effectiveness and efficiency

• I want to use data and content to generate ever more qualified prospects and refine those into actual leads with an ever-improving quality and conversion rate

• I need a way to nurture my customer relationships. This should include an increasing level of personalization such that this greater relevance drives retention and accelerates the growth of customer value

 

Any one of these ambitions or the ones that any marketer might have for their organization is loaded with implications for the right technology stack.  They speak more clearly about the problem to be solved vs. I need a better email marketing platform.   

Check out:

• These great efforts (“The Stackies”) to visualize various views of the marketing technology stack

• This article from Brian Hansford in Business2Community called, “Building A B2B Marketing Technology Stack”

 

Future vs. Now

Investments in innovation beg to be piloted or otherwise proven-out before a complete investment is made. That is hard when you are talking about technology infrastructure. But it can be done.

Use a new CRM approach and technology for one business unit and prove out the efficacy before rolling out to the others.

Only automate what must be automated to prove out efficacy. Don’t yet worry about efficiency. So, in a lead gen program, you may need tech to capture leads from Web activity and then to match against third party data but you can always ‘hand-deliver’ these leads to the salesforce to input into a sale tracking system. Later on you can integrate these two systems.

Get a partner to manage the ad retargeting program before investing in the necessary ad stack to manage in-house (if that is ever the most efficient way to go)

 

Choosing the right marketing technology stack is hard but essential. Making the business case internally requires a different approach if this is truly an operations enhancement vs. an innovation to how you market and sell today.

As any forum of CMOs and business leaders will tell you today, the imperative to apply technology is there. The promise of automating processes, combining data (big data and medium-sized data), and measuring effectiveness is terrific in marketing. Now we all have to choose wisely. 

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11 Ideas Driving the Modern CMO

Being ‘modern’ sounds quaint. It’s one of those baffling descriptors used for architecture and even art that more often than not describes something created a long time ago. But the simple definition of modern means “of, relating to, or characteristic of the present or the immediate past” and “involving recent techniques, methods, or ideas.” It’s neither futuristic nor anchored in a naïve, Worlds Fair-image of the near future.

The modern CMO is about using the tools of today, sometimes in new ways. This isn’t about Google Glass, neuromarketing or even the Internet of Things. We are talking about near-term realities – the increasing precision in targeting communications, shifting to a “pull” strategy via content marketing, and combining data with creativity to be more relevant to people. Since people’s daily field of vision is hopelessly cluttered with commercial messages, media choices and the routine celebrations of family and friends (just judge your Facebook newsfeed), marketers must earn a place in people’s lives by delivering value above messages or at the very least delivering exactly the right message to the right person at the right time to be of-use.

The modern marketing organization looks and behaves differently, as well. It’s not an advertising factory. Nor is it the loose collection of marketing and communications disciplines intended to intercept people from “360 degrees.” All disciplines must be data-driven or, at least, data-informed. Data tells us how marketing really works. We design communications programs around how journalists use information. Content marketing sparks sharing or the data tells us it isn’t relevant. We optimize the effectiveness of digital advertising by pulling data-connected levers in near-real-time. Integrated marketing doesn’t just connect marcom disciplines long overdue for alignment, it ensures they are responding to similar data, insights and, ultimately, the customer.  

Now marketing must be reconnected with sales. These cannot be two, separate functions each in denial of the other’s relevance or contribution to business health and profits. If we care about our customer first and are committed to becoming increasingly customer-centered, then we need to be wise about the entire buyer (or customer) journey – from before they even know us to when they are a valued customer in their tenth year of service.

This is about what it means to walk-the-walk today of the modern chief marketing officer and organization. While ‘digital’ is certainly a part of that experience as is data, speed-to-market and so much more, it is not defined by any one of these. The job of the marketing organization, in the appropriated words of David Ogilvy, is to “sell or else.” How a leading marketing organization does that today is very different than fifty years ago.

11 Ideas Driving the Modern Chief Marketing Officer & Organization

Embrace new digital behaviors – No question that the growing ability to move information across digital networks has and will change our behaviors profoundly. We shop differently. We trust differently. We make decisions differently. In some cases these may be small, additive changes (we still look to an insurance agent to explain our choices even while we research those choices ahead of time via Google). In some cases these will be fundamental and disruptive changes. Predicting which will be which or the speed of change is hard.  One tip for actually understanding these changes better? Embrace these new habits within your organization. Employees should be encouraged to interact with the brand and its customers online. How else will we understand these new digital behaviors if not by practicing them ourselves?

It’s a buyer’s journey – Hoping to romance and sway customers at the point of purchase alone will not win. We need to recognize that buyers telegraph their intent earlier and earlier in the journey towards buying something. And that their/our needs are different when we are understanding a problem or need, gathering information or are actually ready to buy. Marketers must adopt the fundamental principle of designing marketing around the customer journey. Understanding what a prospect or customer is trying to get done or decide that leads to initially discovering your product is a very different proposition than prompting them to pick your product now. 

Mining data for insights and actions – Big data, little data – what we really need are more actionable insights from data and ways to trigger actions based upon data and insights. Data science is hard. While it takes more geeky collaborators than the creatives who bring advertising ideas to life it is hardly an exact science nor does it need to be. Direct marketers believe the customer can be instrumented to the point of becoming a truly predictable wind-up doll. Or more accurately, they live and die by the numbers with little concern for the prospect or customer save for the action they wish to stimulate. The modern CMO never loses sight nor compassion for the customer. They see data and insights as a better way to empower a test-and-learn marketing machine. 

Designed for testing and agility – Building a marketing organization that can plan and create fast while turning on a dime isn’t as it easy as it might appear. It takes the A/B testing methodology of direct marketers, the ability to create content, not just advertisements, quickly and in response to data, and the discipline of deciphering performance immediately. Think about how that affects review and approval cycles. Creative and content are now never “perfect” but simply ready-to-publish. In short, it changes everything.

A culture of collaboration – No one discipline rules the roost and the only way to ‘punch above your weight’ in a world gone made with ad spend is to plan integrated programs and get every discipline to work together. Planning models can help. Fostering a culture where people are rewarded for collaborating with a method of working by which the best collaborators become the best marketers makes all of the difference.

The addressable individual – Not all that long ago, we talked about building addressable audiences. Brands did that through their social channels and through partnering with mysterious companies in the ad stack that could create and maintain custom audiences. Meanwhile, the customer experience team defined an ambition to treat every customer as an individual promising to deliver increasingly personalized services relevant to the individual. The addressable individual – whether they are an existing customer or a prospect – is clearly where we are heading. That means thousands or millions, depending on your business, of micro-segments and ultimately individuals getting customized treatment from the brand. What IBM and Salesforce label “the connected customer” where we evolve past segments to addressing individuals will require a lot of technology and technology mastery to execute.

Being of-use – With an onslaught of media choices, channels, shows, messages and more, the one thing none of us have enough of is time. Marketers cannot hope to sell through interruptive advertising. It just won’t break through. We need to learn how we can be of-use to people such that we deliver welcome value. Great content, better or more complete service, personalized value and even discounts, even new products can all address genuine consumer needs. We can shift from an annoying “push” model of marketing to a “pull” model where even our marketing becomes a welcome contribution.

Content marketing – Content is at the heart of the “pull” ambition for brands. Can we create useful and/or entertaining content that connects with people at the right moments in their journey as customers (customers-to-be)? Most organizations can create the white paper, the how-to video series, even the entertaining content partnership (or more realistically, the content ‘sponsorship’). Building a content culture and machine inside the marketing function is a lot harder. As with many good ideas, the devil is in the doing (or the details of the doing). Applying a data-driven approach where speed-to-publish matters more than creating the one perfect communication is hard. It’s not just a process shift with different job functions (e.g. editors and writers) but a culture shift as to what gets approved and out the door.

Reducing friction – It is difficult to draw lines between a marketer’s job and those directly responsible for a seamless and friction-free customer experience. As marketers shift from pure ad messages to creating content that is valuable to prospects and customers alike, they inevitably will think about ways to reduce the friction people experience when doing any kind of business with a brand. It can be reducing a few button-clicks in a process, standardizing form design, providing some useful how-to content. Every service interaction has the potential to strengthen a relationship and drive advocacy or do just the opposite.   

Relentlessly accountable – Building brand for brand’s sake only makes sense in the most marketing-centric of companies. For most other companies, we want to know how marketing drives sales-related metrics. That requires getting more complex attribution models, combining online and offline data, and subscribing to the customer journey planning model. Most modern marketers know they need a “dashboard” – that magical interface that funnels all marketing and sales data into some natural synthesis. Fewer start by designing the measurement model that will facilitate marketing investment decision-making and performance optimization. This step ensures that the dashboard displays meaning not just data.

Building belief – Marketing’s role inside the enterprise is changing. As it becomes more accountable and data-driven, it will be seen with less suspicion and envy within the enterprise. That’s the long view. CMO’s, like any business leader, need to build belief in their fresh view of modern marketing in order to galvanize peer support. That’s what leads to thoughtful budget increases and informed decision-making. 

 

(image from Tron software art c/o cargocollective.com)

Hacking the Brief: A New Service for Brands and Agencies

Hack the Solution

Watching the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon in London this past weekend, I was reminded about all of the live collaborative creative sessions that I have been a part of over the last several years. (BTW Infected Flight - a way to visualize and track disease spreading won.) From Facebook Publishing Garages to creative “hacks” at Ogilvy to more technical hackathons like the TechCrunch event. There are two types of compressed collaboration in these examples. One challenges a team against other teams to develop a promising solution. TechCrunch Disrupt London had 80+ teams staying up all night to pitch their solution.

The other model combines a disparate group of people to think through a problem and offer solutions. In Facebook’s Publishing Garage episodes, the media company (that’s what they are), brought business problem owners (brands) together with creative and technologists to define a content strategy and then create content emblematic of that strategy.

All of these examples are pulling people together in a compressed collaboration to sketch up a solution.

How about we do the same thing to bum rush the brief.That's a service brands and agencies could embrace.

 

Hack the Brief

We have a terrific Marketing Brief where I work. A bunch of seasoned marketers took the best of the best and distilled it down into a document that lays a terrific foundation for any creative work. My favorite parts are the fields that tell us what we want people to actually “do.” Second favorite section is where we inventory insights or, more often, potential insights.

The brief is not magic. But what goes into it can set us up to do some awesome work with a network of creative and often unlikely partners.

Let’s bring people together to hack together a terrific brief. Rather than just leap to tactical ‘what-ifs,’ let’s get creative people of all types together to build the brief together. If possible, we would carve up time to then have disparate teams – brand and partners, tech and creative, business and communications – brainstorm ideas to fuel a future ‘hack’.

If I were creating a broad video strategy to drive goals around relevant awareness, engagement, sales enablement, actual sales and lead gen, for example (let’s say I had both a sales and direct channel to satisfy), I would invite:

 

• Business owners from within the brand (both business and marketing leaders)
• Digital agency strategists & creatives
• Google & YouTube creative and media strategists
• A complimentary multichannel video network partner (e.g. Fullscreen)
• Video innovator, e.g. Outrigger Media (their innovative OpenSlate and Vnetic make them strong players)

 

Read how they were applied to an UGG of Australia program here – “To build essentially its own YouTube "network," Palisades tapped Outrigger Media’s OpenSlate, a tool that assesses and scores 220,000 YouTube channels based on measures of influence, content quality and engagement.

The platform assigns a SlateScore that filters out suggestive content or profanity. Advertiser demand for OpenSlate drove the rollout of a tool allowing media planners to curate their own premium content networks from among approximately 70 million ad-supported YouTube videos. That tool, called Vnetic, rolled out in June.”

 

 

Homework & Structure

All good things come in thirds. And all good things require prep and structure. This ain’t your mother’s unconference.’ The first third of the day is building the brief together. The second third of the day is group brainstorming on solutions. The final third is spent on read outs and refinements.

Team participants come in with the following as a very good strawman:

Challenge Statement: In 1-2 paragraphs, we should be able to capture the spirit of what we are trying to do with enough notation to reflect guardrails or conditions we need to work within.  

Objectives: These should be clear business objectives against revenue or value-related goals. This is the green fees of any good brief and confirms that we understand what drives our business and

Audience: This is the second most misused field mostly because we rarely get beyond some key demographics. The trick here is to adequately describe who our audiences are such that we know their major common life needs (e.g. paying for college, buying their second house), their most contemporary drivers and barriers when it comes to our products and services, and how they get their information.

Actions: What do we want people to do? What action do we want them to take as a result of our communications?

 

All team participants come in with ideas on the following to share and build with the team:

Insights & Disruptions: Okay, this is the most misused field. Insights are hard to uncover. They take a good creative mind and meaningful data. Finding 3-4 potential insights about our audiences and the role our products or services can play in their lives is key to the hack. This is what collaborative creative teams will chew on.  

Channels: What channels have we already committed to and have infrastructure around? That’s not to say that we shouldn’t innovate on channels. The hack should go wherever it needs to.

Success: Define what success looks like from KPIs to qualitative evidence.

 

All of that happens in the first part of the day. Then the group breaks up into manageable 8-person, cross-disciplinary teams to brainstorm solutions (volume, volume, volume). Finally, these teams come together to share their ideas. Very little refinement has happened. We are saving that for the after party.

The After-work is the Real Work

At the end of the day, you have a terrific brief. Business owners have demonstrated buy-in. An eclectic group of strategic and creative thinkers have come together to strengthen the brief and start the process of thinking creatively. And finally, valuable partners are given a brief they can get creative on over the next few weeks to come up with some awesome ideas.

Getting teams to work together on the brief and the solution can unlock creativity from how we define the challenge, itself, to the actual ways we aim to meet that challenge. 

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