aly.richards@odyssiant.com

Having a customer-centric culture does not make your business customer-centric. Many factors will be behind this but the hardest one to tackle will be the customer communications silos that exist within your business. So why do customer communications silos impede customer-centricity? There are two ways to answer that question. The first is to look at it from the customer’s point of view. Starting with a B2C customer, or indeed prospective customer, they receive a lot of communications from you. In any given week they might watch your ad on television, hear your spokesperson on the radio, see your [...]

Integrating disparate customer communications silos is a major headache for CMOs, as highlighted by a recent survey of 50 CMOs by Marketing Magazine. The article says: “Creating a truly integrated customer experience requires joined-up thinking across the business – and, although steps are being taken in this direction, in many companies this isn’t yet taking place. CMOs are facing the challenge of making departments communicate and collaborate with each other in ways which they aren’t used to. But for the customer’s experience to be truly personalised, from in-store to online purchasing, marketing, IT and sales teams all need [...]

Customer communications silos are commonplace within nearly every business. For large businesses there is no getting away from the fact that the natural evolution of the various business structures and processes has led to different parts of the business communicating with customers and, for that matter, prospective customers. However, those communications are rarely co-ordinated. So let’s be clear on what we mean by a customer communications silo. It is when any individual part of the business is communicating with a customer without a centralised strategy for that communication. Typical examples include marketing, contact centres, digital and billing. All [...]

Do you have a "leaky funnel"? By Aly Richards, CEO, Odyssiant Useful things funnels. In the real world they allow you to pour accurately into narrow containers and in the marketing world we use them as a way to describe the channelling of customers towards a sale. Except, bizarrely, that is not what marketers now use the term funnel to describe. Instead of neatly moving all customers towards the sale, in the same way that in the real world you would use a funnel to pour petrol carefully into a lawnmower, we use the term ‘funnel’ as a [...]

The all knowing content hub By Scott McLean, COO, Odyssiant In the new world of marketing and financial accountability, data, or more accurately insights from that data, have become one of the most important elements to get right in order to be successful. However, with the explosion of digital content across multiple platforms that can be shared and accessed anywhere in the world, coupled with the important issue of data protection laws, how do marketers get meaningful insights on their audience in order to drive growth? The key is to have a central location for your audience to [...]

ROI of Content Seeding vs native advertising (HBR Response) By Adam Henderson I recently read an article in Harvard Business Review (HBR) named ‘Comparing the ROI of Content Marketing and Native advertising’ which although containing some interesting information, I felt was misleading. It was not a discussion around real ROI from content marketing but more a value for money argument over how best to promote content: i.e. native advertising vs. content seeding. For those that are unaware, native advertising is promotional content that sits within another brand or publisher’s property in the form of sponsored content - i.e. [...]

The commercial benefits of Customer Journey Management By Aly Richards, CEO, Odyssiant Chief marketing officers (CMOs) who design and incorporate customer journey management as part of their overall activities outperform all others by 54% (24.9% vs 16.2%) in annual improvement on ROMI (Return On Marketing Investment) according a recent report from the Aberdeen Group (see image above). But the respondents to the survey cited that a big challenge is the ability to manage these journeys through content both because there is wealth of competitive content out there and because content production is difficult. As a solution to this [...]

Google’s Phantom 2 update: Higher SEO for content mapped to your audience’s full buying journey By Adam Henderson It was great to see details about Google’s latest update to their algorithm called ‘Phantom 2’, because it aligns completely with our thinking here at Odyssiant about the need for content to facilitate an audience’s full buying journey and not just a company’s sales funnel. For those who are unaware, Google’s Phantom 2 update looks at the length of time an audience engages with a piece of content and whether they click to the next piece of content. These two [...]