Digital Influence Mapping Project

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. 

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. 

 

The 4 Vital Qualities for Digital Transformation

What is Digital Transformation?

Digital transformation describes the change inside an organization from the historical approach to designing products and services and delivering customer value to new approaches that leverage digital tools and behaviors.

The purpose of digital transformation is to remain competitive today and tomorrow by aligning more closely to new customer needs and behaviors while adopting new work methods and tools that boost productivity and are attractive to the next workforce.

Here’s an alternate definition of digital transformation from Bill Schmarzo is the CTO, Dell EMC Services in CIO.com:

“Digital Transformation is application of digital capabilities to processes, products, and assets to improve efficiency, enhance customer value, manage risk, and uncover new monetization opportunities.”

Here’s one more definition from The Enterprisers Project, a CIO community:

“Digital transformation is the integration of digital technology into all areas of a business, fundamentally changing how you operate and deliver value to customers. It's also a cultural change that requires organizations to continually challenge the status quo, experiment, and get comfortable with failure.”

Each of these definitions covers some big ambitions for an organization.

• “aligning more closely to customer needs and behaviors”
• “remain competitive today and tomorrow”
• “improve efficiency, enhance customer value, manage risk and uncover new monetization opportunities”
• “a cultural change…continually challenge the status quo, experiment and get comfortable with failure”

Many companies have been on multi-year journeys to make their business more “digital.” Some are just at the beginning stages. Either way, digital transformation remains a priority for many C-suite leaders. Some of these folks are recent converts who look to their daily Amazon Prime deliveries as evidence that things have changed, and even if they cannot smell smoke yet, there may be a smoldering platform somewhere in their organization.   

 

The Key Elements of ‘Digital Masters’

One of my favorite quotes on digital transformation is from George Westerman at MIT Sloan:

“When digital transformation is done right, it’s like a caterpillar turning into a butterfly, but when done wrong, all you have is a really fast caterpillar”

If all you did was pursue back-office efficiencies through digital or a “paperless” initiative, you might miss the bigger opportunity – inventing new products and services, serving your customers in new, more profitable, ways, evolving your business model. Organizations have the chance to get off their back foot and, by adopting new ways of operating inspired by and made possible by digital tools and behaviors, be poised on their front foot for the future of endless change.

George Westerman identifies four key elements of what he calls, Digital Masters. These are companies and leaders applying digital for some lasting change.

• Vision
• Engagement of employees
• Governance systems they establish
• The IT-to-business synergies they seek

 

The 4 Vital Qualities for Digital Transformation

If George is outlining the “what,” then we need to consider the “how.” How do organizations set themselves up for cultural change and operational transformation? There are four qualities that can be demonstrated by leadership and cultivated throughout the organization. They drive behaviors that can amount to a lasting change, one that is much better positioned to leverage the benefits of digital technologies and behaviors aimed at strengthening long term competitiveness.

STRATEGY: Build a strategic view to perform and transform

Strategy is the only way to align a large organization trying to consistently “win” in a world where so much is changing. Ultimately, strategy is a choice both of where you will play and where you will not play. (See more on strategy here) Digital transformation must help a business reach goals today based upon the current business priorities (“perform”) while setting up the organization to win in the new conditions of the near future (“transform”)

DIVERSITY: Cultivate diverse POVs anchored in a customer obsession

Team diversity injects important differences to challenge thinking while a culture of customer-centricity aligns every team. Pulling teams together from across functions that don’t normally mix not only injects diverse and challenging thinking, it breaks down silos that resist change. Proactively staffing teams from different ethnic backgrounds, gender identifications, beliefs strengthens a team’s capacity for empathy and curiosity about our customers and ourselves.

AGILITY: Design an agile operating model within an innovation ecosystem

Sustain an intentional ‘innovation ecosystem’ to generate adjacent and disruptive change and an agile methodology. Innovation doesn’t just happen. A thoughtful innovation ecosystem that aligns innovation with business, seeks outside thinking via partners and startups (possibly via accelerator or VC relationships), empowers employees via crowdsourcing (think “innovation jams”), and produces internal capacity to experiment will focus and stimulate innovation. Faster ways of working – agile, sprints, experiments – that deliver user value earlier and then iterate are leveraging digital platforms and expectations for an advantage.

COMMUNICATION: Constantly communicate and build belief

Soften uncertainty by proactively communicating purpose of key initiatives and approach in business terms. Keeping the top three layers of leadership on board and aligned takes constant communications. Building belief, inspiring and activating a workforce takes great communications. Perhaps ‘communication’ isn’t a sufficient word. What we need is constant engagement with leadership to keep them involved and with skin in the game. At the same time, we need constant reinforcement and empowering communications to change employees’ behavior. Either way, it’s about building and sustaining belief by being a great communicator.

Change is good. Change is hard. Never stop growing and changing. 

 

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. 

Three Ways to Scale Humanity in Marketing Technology and Automation

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

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

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

 

Show me my field rep

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

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

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

 

Handwritten notes at scale

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

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

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

 

Chatbots: friendly but not chatty

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

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

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

 

Humanity Builds Trust

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

Credibility + Reliability + Intimacy / Self-Orientation

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

 

From NextNow Digital:

The Next-Gen Digital Marketing Strategy Framework

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

The Next-Gen Digital Marketing Strategy Toolbox

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

The Next-Gen Digital AdvertisingToolbox

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

The Agile Marketing Strategy for Small Business

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

How Tourism Embraces Content Marketing: #NewMexicoTrue

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

 

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

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

 

A Strategic Approach to Marketing

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

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

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

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

 

Content for All Parts of the Journey

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

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

 

Discovery

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

 

Inspiration & Research

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

Planning

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

 

Remember

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

 

Success In The Future

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Three Examples of Content Marketing to Enable Your Sales Channel

If you sell through a sales channel and especially if you sell through an independent sales channel, a portion of your marketing effort goes towards enabling their sales effort. That’s old news. Most B2B marketing started by creating sales collateral to put in the hands of the sales staff. Then came the “consumerization” of B2B marketing where marketers connected directly with prospects and customers via digital channels and began building trust and laying the groundwork for preference.

How marketing supports sales channels is changing. This is largely because buyer habits are changing. Three-page sell sheets may still have a role but it’s a smaller one.  Buyers are doing their own research online. They (we) look for quick ways to get smart on a subject like retirement, insurance or home buying, that may be complex or jargon-filled and inaccessible. Then we talk to a sales agent.

Think about how investment firms like Blackrock create awareness and demand from investors while helping the financial advisor with content that helps them be smarter or actual content they can pass along to their clients.

Content that respects our time – short explainer videos, “Three Tips…” articles, 1-minute diagnostic quizzes – help us get smarter without having to take a sabbatical from work. Content needs to be designed to be of-use and responsive to whatever decision is likely in front of a buyer. That’s the new interpretation of ‘customer-centered.’

We want it on our phone and on our laptop. We discover it via our social feeds as well as search. We favor content passed along by a connection. Anything like a twelve-page whitepaper feels old-school or, at the very least, requires a time investment we keep putting off into the future. (How many 10-page pdfs sit on my hard drive waiting for that perfect moment when I can actually read or scan them?)

To help the sales staff today, we need to do three things:

• Educate sales about their buyer – how habits are changing, what is different about them today and will likely be different tomorrow. The notion that the sales person has the sacrosanct knowledge of their customer and how to sell to them is just, well, over.
• Give sales digital content that helps them connect with today’s and tomorrow’s buyer – more of that bite-sized, utility content designed around what the buyer needs to get done and native to the many screens they use.
• Train sales to become social sellers – tune-ups on how to connect via LinkedIn and Facebook and even interact digitally (e.g. text & email) with the next generation of buyers who just expect that.

Here are three examples of how brands or technologies are working to enable their sales channel to adapt and succeed.

 

Freddie Mac and the Borrower of the Future

Freddie Mac wants their lenders to be more familiar with today’s home-maybe-buyer. The core premise of the research and insights-heavy site - The Borrowers of the Future - is summed up, “What's on the mind of future borrowers? It may not be what you think.”

Articles sum up the ‘so what’ for lenders and convert societal trends into very practical terms:

• How Are Home Sharing Platforms Affecting Home Buying?
• Want to Help Millennials Become Homeowners? Try Townhouses
• High Housing Costs Are Root Cause of Low Homeownership Rates Among Young Adults

Experts from academia and Freddie Mac capture ideas in short videos. That places Freddie Mac at the heart of the solution. The whole site demonstrates their expertise vs. claiming it. It positions Freddie Mac as the “guide” not the hero of the story. In this B2B site, the lender is clearly the hero. As Donald Miller outlines in Building a Story Brand, being the guide is a powerful role for any brand to play.

 

State Street Listens

The investment firm, State Street, wants to help advisors and investors stay abreast of trends that will affect their investment strategies today and tomorrow. As a big firm, they have research budgets and capabilities not everyone would invest in. Their new “Listen” site publishes topical summaries of trends in five categories: Culture, Innovation, Markets, Perspective, Clarity. While these themes may be broad or high-minded, the actual articles get a little more down-to-earth (although not as practically titled as Freddie Mac):

• Building a New Workplace for Generation Z
• Memorize This: Three Tips for Remembering Clients' names, Faces and More
• Overruling the Heart: How Science, Data and Experience Can Curb Lovesick Investing

The articles are by-lined by State Street Advisors thus establishing their expertise. ‘Listen’ articles feature in their LinkedIn channel making them easy for advisors to pass along in their own feeds. State Street is working to give their advisors more that they can use to engage their clients and prospects more often. This goes beyond the robust research reports they are known for into more scannable content with a quick POV. 

 

Sales Content Platforms: Seismic

Seismic is a platform for sharing content with a distributed sales force. There are a few solutions like it out there. Conceptually, I am more than intrigued by the promise of a platform like this. Practically-speaking it does seem like advanced science for most sales people and organizations.

The breakthrough of this type of platform is how it connects marketing with sales via a data-driven solution.  Marketing wants to create content that works hard for sales. The performance and sales analytics – what content is being used most, what content is associated with a sales event- remove the guesswork or biased anecdotes from well-intentioned sales leaders. Now we can know what content works hardest.

The platform puts more content in more formats at the fingertips of sales people. They can find it easily. They can sort it and think about how content aligns to wherever a prospect is within their buyer journey. With Seismic securing another $100M in Series E investment and with John W. Thompson, Chairman at Microsoft, joining the board, the VC community is demonstrating belief in their platform.

 

Marketing and Sales Alignment

Marketing has always supported sales. The change that’s coming is the full instrumentation of the sales and marketing functions and their technology-enabled integration. Business leaders will overcome the tribal conflicts between sales and marketing as each function aligns around common KPIs revealed in a completely transparent dashboard of performance. Marketers can scale the impact of sales and know when they are truly winning. By delivering content that helps people make decisions quickly and easily wherever they are in their day or in the journey of their lives, marketing and sales can be aligned in serving today's customer.

 

From NextNow Digital:

The Next-Gen Digital Marketing Strategy Framework

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

The Next-Gen Digital Marketing Strategy Toolbox

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

The Next-Gen Digital AdvertisingToolbox

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

The Agile Marketing Strategy for Small Business

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

Three Predictions for Brand Marketers in 2019 (It's All About the Data)

If I really knew what was coming down the pike, I would quietly invest in the market that benefits from my so-called predictions and be done with it. I am not much of a gambler. Still, that doesn’t mean I am wrong, but I certainly acknowledge that I might be.

With that bold statement of confidence, here are my quick predictions for marketers next year:

 

Brands will need to take a stand on marketing and customer data stewardship

Brands need to protect their customer’s data in two ways. The first is cyber security - protecting the customer data in their care from breaches. The second is protecting customer data and privacy from misuse. Think Facebook and Cambridge Analytica.

Both protections are a part of a brand’s customer data stewardship, but it’s the second risk – misuse – that brands will be held accountable later next year.

So far, brands have largely ducked the issue in regards to marketing data. Many are happy to let Facebook take the heat while growing their use of that ad platform (and other data targeting) to reach prospects and customers. No brand wants to be accused of misusing customer data. Better to let these monolithic media companies take the blame. And just what is “misuse” anyhow? Using new data sources and combinations to more effectively reach and engage people with content, offers and messages that are increasingly relevant to them is the positive promise of advanced customer data management. The dark side is the misuse of the new knowledge that brands may accrue on their customers. The examples often cited are health care insurers amassing behavioral data about customers that cause them to stop insuring them. I don’t know if that is happening but I can certainly imagine it.

The Cambridge Analytica example is similar. Gaining access to Facebook user data and unbeknownst to the end user, a company mined that data “to develop "psychographic" profiles of users, and target users with pro-Trump advertising, a claim that Cambridge Analytica denied."

Consumers are paralyzed by the complexity of data and privacy. According to the NYTimes,

“Research by Professor Turow and his colleagues has found that most Americans give up data for relevant ads not because of convenience, but resignation. Rather than participating in a rational exchange, he argues, consumers are giving up their personal information with “a feeling of futility.”

In 2019, the inertia caused by the complexity of the consumer problem will likely be broken by a confluence of events: the application of the GDPR-like California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018, the next brand-goes-too-far data-use scandal, the hubris of the VC community eager to back marketing data startups (especially AI) that promise an invasive set of capabilities and the 2020 election cycle which will show some of this ‘misuse’ in action.

As brands get serious about strengthening customer trust, a few will step forward voluntarily with their own, “customer data stewardship promise.”

Marketing personalization will remain nascent until 2020

Marketing personalization is a hot topic. Customers want it as revealed in the Segment 2017 study summarized by eConsultancy (chart above). Marketers are investing in more advanced capabilities to deliver the right message to the right customer at the right time via the right channel. The martech stack for personalization expands. And so on.

Ecommerce companies are the leaders. They can immediately see the direct impact on sales for sites and email now governed by personalization engines (i.e. “Customers like you also bought…”). The investment has short term gains. But even becoming Amazon overnight is hard.

Then there are the other businesses who can imagine the benefits of personalized marketing. Pretty much every brand out there. 

Since this new capability hinges on solid customer data, it’s going to be slow going for a while. The VC and consultant community will push hard for personalization in 2019 eager to see their investments pay out. But brands who get serious about personalization need to get their house in order on data and that requires a cross-enterprise solution. New, significant case studies on marketing personalization won’t start to materialize until 2020. Think of 2019 as the year most marketers figure out just how hard it is and the foundation they need to have in place with data.

 

Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) will really become a thing

Customer Data Platform is a made-up term. But so are so many terms in marketing. Who would have guessed that ‘account-based marketing’ would have grabbed hold the way it has?

The marketing data world is awash in jargon: DMP, CDP, data lakes, CRM, data warehouse, datamart, and more. Browse a few marketing blogs to compare the definitions for just DMP and CDP and you will see it’s still a little wild west out here. (You can check out my post on the difference here) 

A workable definition for Customer Data Platform comes from the CDP Insititute:

"A Customer Data Platform is packaged software that creates a persistent, unified customer database that is accessible to other systems".

This definition has three critical elements:

- "packaged software": the CDP is a prebuilt system that is configured to meet the needs of each client.  Some technical resources will be required to set up and maintain the CDP, but it does not require the level of technical skill of a typical data warehouse project.  This reduces the time, cost, and risk and gives business users more control over the system, even though they may still need some technical assistance.

- "creates a persistent, unified customer database": the CDP creates a comprehensive view of each customer by capturing data from multiple systems, linking information related to the same customer, and storing the information to track behavior over time. The CDP contains personal identifiers used to target marketing messages and track individual-level marketing results.

- "accessible to other systems": data stored in the CDP can be used by other systems for analysis and to manage customer interactions.

eConsultancy has a great grid (from the CDP Institute) that quickly compares the features of different data assets like CDPs:

The reason CDPs will take hold as a concept is that companies already have master data management (MDM) initiatives underway to organize customer and stakeholder data for the benefit of the entire organization – but not necessarily designed around the needs of marketers.

The marketing and customer experience professionals need a marketing-specific resource, one  that is connected to the MDM system yet designed to power marketing content and delivery. CDP’s will become key to delivering personalized marketing. It is certainly possible to design the core functions of a CDP without buying a SaS, CDP-labeled solution. Building it via the IT function is risky and costly business. eConsultancy sums it up,

“A CDP is built with the marketing function in mind. Could you build a CDP yourself? In theory you could, and many custom IT projects try to achieve what a CDP does. Obviously, there are quite some big investments, time and risks involved in a custom project like that.”

CMO’s know that great customer data is foundational to tomorrow's successful marketing. In a recent Forrester study, CMO’s reported the following challenges (and more) to achieving marketing priorities next year:

• Poor quality, inconsistent, or inaccessible customer data                   43%
• Poor alignment or collaboration with IT                                             43%

CMO’s will latch onto CDPs as the marketing data solution that can more easily be communicated to IT while not wholly relying on an IT-build and implementation. CDPs will take hold because marketers need a manageable concept they can rally their people to implement. 

The immediate future of marketing hinges on the strength of 1st party data and 'data agility' - the ability to work quickly and easily to combine 1st party and 3rd party data for some benefit. 

 

Other Interesting Predictions

• 6 digital marketing predictions for 2019 - Smart Brief/Kent Lewis 
• Content Meets Technology: Marketing Predictions for 2019 - Martech Advisor/Casey Wuestefeld
• The 5 Biggest Marketing Trends For 2019 - CMO.com/Giselle Abramovich

 

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. 

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) 

 

The Importance of Authentic Brand Storytelling

To connect with customers and communities, brands need to put more energy into brand storytelling. This is as much advice I am giving myself as anyone else wrestling with marketing at a large, enterprise brand.

It’s not enough to pump out a lot of content engineered to return well in Google search results. Traditional “buy” messages – often called “bottom-of-the-funnel” advertising – are likely not enough for most companies whose products compete against others that are not well differentiated in terms of benefits. Anthem-like brand films are good when you have something to wave a flag about, but even then, this is a lot of “inside-out” messaging.

Brand stories that demonstrate how people within a company work to solve customer challenges are different. And they cannot be constructed from whole cloth no matter how cynical a marketer you are. They are “discovered” within the people and operations of a company and then shaped to be as relevant as possible for an audience.

Two Stories

I want to share two stories from Travelers. We discovered each within the company. They reflect the commitment of people who care about our customers and our communities.

 

 

These brand stories are about people digging into hard problems – the opioid crisis and the growth of cyber risks and crime. Each is told by a real person.

If there is any pride in these storytellers, it is in the knowledge that they are trying to apply their specialisms – safety and health, risk management, recovery and more – to real problems people and business face. Few people wake up each day within large companies solely motivated by improving the share price. Financial health is a means to an end. The impact a thriving business can have on its communities is substantial.

 

 

Brand stories like these help customers and communities know a company and even understand what they sell - beyond the advertised products and services. This is customer-centered marketing in that they aim to frame what we do in relation to the benefit for our customers and their stakeholders.

Lessons Learned for Strong Brand Stories

• Find real stories of people earnestly solving problems
• Tell these stories succinctly in a way that respects the audience’s time and interests
• Use a genuine voice or storyteller to reveal more and, gasp, allow for some intimacy
• Lead people to more content that digs even deeper and does connect to what you sell
• Share the content via the channels and moments that make sense to your customers and stakeholders
• Make brand stories a key ingredient in a content marketing program designed around the complete buyer journey

Relevant Resources:   

• Storytelling, Brands and Some Words Of Wisdom – Forbes
• Why Only 10 Percent of Content Marketers Have Embraced Brand Storytelling – Content Standard/Skyword
• 8 Helpful Brand Storytelling Tips for B2B Businesses – Startup Nation