Every piece of creative that you produce whether text, images or video and for social media, campaigns, TV adverts, call centre scripts or corporate communication is content. Content is marketing fuel, it is sales support materials and it drives improved customer experience. Why then is it the one area where brands either [...]
You have created an awesome video, written a gripping article or drawn a masterpiece. You publish to your website and social channels. Being a good marketer, you then amplify the reach of your content by posting, pushing, advertising and emailing your content to all your selected audiences through all the channels that you [...]
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has burst onto the scene and is now taking root within the marketing stack. From established vendors to innovative start-ups, specific applications are emerging that are simplifying tasks, enhancing analytics, freeing up resource and most importantly, creating new and exciting opportunities for customer engagement. While AI is at its best [...]
Pity anyone within a blue chip business who tries to unravel the complexities of their content programme. For a start, it won’t just be one content programme as multiple brands, agencies and functions will be actively creating an exponentially larger amount of content, akin to feeding a ravenous beast with an insatiable [...]
Like algae blooming in a nutrient-rich lake, the amount of content being produced by companies today is growing at an exponential rate. How much content is being created, which functions within the business are creating it and how much of it is being exposed to customers is, for the average business, [...]
Intelligent Customer Engagement began from a simple premise: content is the best way to have meaningful engagements with your target audience but most content marketing lacks strategy. Why is that though? The answer is really quite simple: companies are creating lots of content in lots of different channels but failing to join that [...]
Building a business case to break down the communications silos within a business does not only require a clear understanding of the business benefits that will be achieved but a considerable amount of internal alignment of different functions. While both are obvious points, they also pose significant challenges. To a degree, it is [...]
When was the last time you thought about the way in which your business communicates with your customers? Not what you are saying or how you are saying it, or even the KPIs of your call-handling; such considerations are commonplace because they, fundamentally, involve looking at individual communications. Rather, the totality of the [...]
As you start to investigate where your customer contact/communications are causing problems with your customers you will quickly realise that what you need is a contact strategy. Your next question will be “What is a contact strategy?” if you have not come across this before. At a most basic level it should be [...]
In the article “Houston we have contact!” we talked about the first three steps to take in designing and implementing your contact strategy. Whilst these are all necessary steps, they are still “tactical”. What we mean by this is that these steps are required to stop you hemorrhaging, but at the same time [...]
Why do you need to do anything differently when it comes to the way you contact your customers? Because change is inevitable and your customers have already changed and in many ways. When things change and new information comes into existence, it is no longer possible to solve current problems with yesterday’s solutions. [...]
Better customer communications can be worth millions in annual revenues. This is because there is a strong correlation between the customers’ experience and loyalty [Forrester Report: Customer Experience Index]. So, companies that manage their communications with a strong contact strategy can create better experiences for their customers and tend to have more customers [...]
Picture yourself sitting in the senior management meeting where you are seeking buy-in to a contact strategy change management programme. You have spent several weeks developing the proposed approach and building the watertight business case to the point where you believe you have tacit approval from many people around the table for what [...]
Have you bought your competitors product? This might sound like madness, you probably do competitor analysis if not regularly at least once in a while to keep your positioning fresh, why would you need to go further than that? The answer to that question is that you need to experience their whole journey, [...]
Customer journeys. That age old process adopted by marketers to define the behaviour of their target audience when they are trying to persuade them to buy their product or service. Most commonly visualised as a marketing funnel, customer journeys aim to cover customer touchpoints across multiple channels and with different customer segments that [...]
In the previous article, "Every journey starts with a single content step", we explored the need to define your customer’s buying journey from their perspective and then use this to create truly customer-centric content. This approach creates an end-to-end content journey, as content is the tool being used to facilitate your customer’s journeys. [...]
Customer Journey mapping is a term that is increasingly being used within the marketing industry, the but definition of what exactly it means is still very much in dispute. Many commentators refer to Customer Journey Mapping (CJM) in a way that is more user experience design (UX) such as what web layouts optimise [...]
PR and marketing has fallen into a trap. This trap is something we call the ‘spinning wheel of engagement’. PR and marketing teams have become very good at engaging their target audiences online and within social media. Like good little hamsters attracted by some food, the target audience are being drawn in and [...]
In the article The New ROI of Marketing we looked at how the accounting based calculations are made to understand our ROI and profitability. The conclusion being that becoming a customer-centric business will unlock a better engagement with customers that will have direct commercial return. As marketing leaders you will be on a spectrum which [...]
Before looking at what the new potential is for calculating the ROI of marketing, let us first look at the “old” ROI of marketing. What do you measure at the moment to determine success? In the majority of cases, this is not necessarily what you want to measure but what you can measure. These are things like [...]
Do you work for a business that has prioritised the need to become customer-centric? If the answer is ‘no’ then it is a fair bet that over the next year or two it could very well become a ‘yes’. That is why everyone needs to get their heads around what it is and [...]
The world of customer-centricity can be split into three camps. Firstly there are those that have embraced the need to transform themselves into a customer-centric business. Then secondly there are those who realise that being customer-centric is more than a cultural and behavioural attitude. Finally there is the third camp which contains the [...]
Times, they are a-Changin’ sang Bob Dylan. Marketers around the world should all be singing the refrain. Change is not new when it comes to marketing of course. In fact, change is a constant. But there is a new force of change in the air and few marketers have fully come to terms [...]
You have no doubt heard many times already that your role as a marketer needs to change. In fact, your role as a marketer has always been about change, so this is nothing new really. What you cannot ignore is that the customer world has changed dramatically in the last five years, and [...]
We have already identified the pervasive problem of over communication with customers due to the wide variety of internal silos all communicating at once. But being aware of the problem is one thing, doing something about it is quite another, especially considering the complex nature of organisations and often their ever increasing global [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Who am I to write this article? Well, I have over 20 years’ experience with the Pega decision engine, from way back when it was KiQ and similar with marketing automation/campaign management solutions. I have run and implemented a few! My experience is not just as a technologist though, but also as a marketer using [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Know How: What is missing in your marketing technology stack? The reality is that no one technology platform will serve all your marketing needs. It is more normal now to have a marketing “stack” where you select the best in breed for your needs, your budget and for each task. But it can be [...]
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 [...]
Content Challenges: One audience, many content strategies How many content strategies do you have within your business? Indeed, how many content strategies do you have within your marketing function? Just the one? Fingers-crossed that is the case, but can you place your hand on your heart and swear to it? The above [...]
Know How: Audience Journey Planning is the first step to commercialising content marketing “Holy Grail”, “Elephant in the Room”, “64 million dollar question”, whatever idiom you want to give it, the marketing industry is quite rightly obsessed by ROI. In the world of content marketing, the initial feeling was that this was a [...]
The new content marketing funnel By Aly Richards, CEO, Odyssiant Professor Hugh Wilson at Cranfield University kindly asked me to speak at his quarterly Cranfield Customer Management Forum (CCMF) last week. The forum is a syndicate of leading companies such as British Gas, BP, HSBC, London Symphony Orchestra, Mercedes Benz, Royal Bank [...]
Disruption or just evolution and change? By Aly Richards, CEO, Odyssiant Since 2000, 52% of companies in the Fortune 500 have either gone bankrupt, been acquired, ceased to exist or dropped out of the Fortune 500. The reason why: change is inevitable. When things change and new information comes into existence it [...]
Frustration and Innovation By Aly Richards, CEO, Odyssiant They say that laziness is the mother of invention. I have found that frustration has made me more inventive than laziness. I have had a long career in the world of CRM and Marketing and I have delivered some big hairy projects with great financial [...]
Know How: Planning your content production Audience journey planning can transform your approach to planning content production. This is because for the first time you can have a structure in place for determining what content to produce that is inextricably linked to your commercial goals. The result is that every piece of [...]
Content Challenges: What content to produce next Content marketing is not a volume game, although those running such programmes admit they often feel like they are. It is no doubt why the phrase ‘feeding the content beast’ has, sadly, become more and more common. However, the reality of running a proactive [...]
Content Challenges: What is a content strategy? Current accepted thinking on a content strategy is that you think of some themes that you want to create content around - you may well call these content pillars - and then you brainstorm some ideas about what content would fit around these pillars. [...]
Content Challenges: Proving the value of content marketing There is a truism that you get what you measure. When looking at digital content marketing the standard industry approach is to measure clicks. This gets translated and interpreted in a number of ways and there are all sorts of meaningful insights that can [...]
Content Challenges: Painting a picture of content marketing efficiency Only 38% of marketers say they are effective at content marketing which is clearly a problem if the average organisation spends 30% of their marketing budget on content; a figure that is increasing year-on-year. There is a saying that if you fail [...]
Content Challenges: Commercialising a content strategy Recent research shows that because of the ubiquity of content, most buyers will be 60% of their way to a purchasing decision before they speak to sales or make a purchase online. Of those that are 60% of their way to a decision, only 26% [...]
