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 questions may have left you slightly puzzled. That is probably because…
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 difficult to assess if you need a new component or application…
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…
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…
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…
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 comms footprint.…
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 the pace…
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 with what…
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 what it…
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 response rates,…
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 at one…
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, from how…
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 you are…
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 rules that…
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, an utter mystery.Being polite…
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 when it is…
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 are present…
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 have no plan…
How much does your business spend on content each year? If you are following global trends, it is an amount that is set to have doubled between 2016 and 2021; global spend on content marketing was assessed at $200bn+ in 2016 and in on track to exceed $400bn by 2021.However, that only covers content that…
Watch an online ad, navigate around a brand’s website or consume some social content on the likes of Facebook or Linkedin and you will notice one similarity – none of the content is connected.You read, watch or consume the content and then, if you’re lucky, it might link to a landing page. However, most of…
Growing the size of your customer base and managing it has been the mission of a number of methods, movements, technologies, approaches or business functions (take your pick!) for around the last 30 years. First there was Customer Relationship Management (CRM), which started as simply having a customer data set rather than product management systems…
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.The Hippocratic Oath…
Brexit has impacted consumer and business buying behaviour and will continue to do so throughout the chaotic process that Britain is enduring. As a result, marketers targeting UK buyers (B2B or B2C) have never needed up-to-date insight more than they do today.All the latest trend data underlines the degree of uncertainty marketers face:The ONS shows…
Who are these socio-demographic twins?Both maleBoth born 1948Both grew up in the UKBoth have divorced and re-marriedBoth have grown up sonsBoth are very wealthyBoth like to spend their holidays in the alpsBoth are world famous …. If they are both in the same segment, what would the potential results be:If we used the same tone of…
There is considerable amounts of noise and “trending” around customer journey mapping at the moment. While it is good to see that this now includes more about what content is required to guide customers through the stages of the marketing and sales cycle, there appears to be a lack of depth around the customers’ actual…
As marketers begin to seek practical applications of AI, they are encountering the first challenges. However, the biggest challenge of all is data. Almost all AIs require “training”, this means preparing historical data so that it can learn what has happened in the past to predict what might happen in the future. This “predictive model”…
A few weeks ago, I treated myself with a pair of Bose SoundSport Free wireless headphones. They’re brilliant. I love them. But even though they have been available for some time and I love Bose equipment, I only bought them just a few weeks ago. Why not sooner? Because I wasn’t finished with my buyer's journey.You see,…
What is “customer timing”?In my previous article (https://bit.ly/2F1Cq0i), I talked about mapping the buying journey so that, as marketers, we could better help the customer through the process of buying and making a decision by gaining a better understanding of the true buying process. Customer timing is being ready when the customer is ready, it…
Personalising content is not hardThe quest for personalisation remains a marketing obsession, and rightly so. Simply treating customers as a collective mass where the individual’s needs does not matter lacks common-sense and conflicts with customer expectations.However, achieving personalisation is considered hard. After all, to truly personalise the customer journey you need to understand individual needs…
Can all content be centrally planned?Simple answer: yes.However, for many organisations the gap between how content is currently planned (i.e. within lots of separate teams) and planning content centrally may appear too enormous a challenge. To cross the gap, you need to take a big step back.Talking about ‘central planning’ has a ‘command and control’…
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 majority of…
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% will ever actually buy anything. That means that of the…
“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 discipline that had ROI at its heart. After all, the rise of content marketing was…
You may be familiar with this type of model that describes the capabilities of an organisation:(This example has been cut down to just consider the areas that are required for customer communications.)Current methodology for using this sort of model would have you colour code this from red to green to indicate how well you can…
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. Once you have a list of ideas you then apply this…
Effective content doesn’t happen by chance. It is the result of a strong centralised content strategy.When content is out of control it might not appear on the surface that it is a problem or that it is affecting your business performance, but it is. It goes unnoticed as teams are most often focused on technology…
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 appetite.It’s not overly…
All too often Customer Journey Mapping (CJM) is constrained to the customer’s online journey and even then may only be the journey from entering your website through to the point of sale. However, creating true business success from CJM can only be achieved by considering the customer’s entire journey and that means looking across six…
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.…
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…
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…
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 is being drawn in and clicking their ‘follow’…
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 the customer’s…
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. But what…
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 all lead…
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 who will…
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 they are…
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 communications you…
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 the challenging…
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 together into a…
Two questions with profound consequences for how your market and sell to your customers todayQuestion 1: How many customers make it from your marketing activities through to a sale?Question 2: How many customers are making it from your marketing activities through to a sale right now?Nonsense questions? Not so, although you will be surprised how…
The no brainer business value of speaking to your customers’ needsIf I’m going to buy from you, I need to know you can meet my needs; that’s a no brainer. If I’m going to engage with your company’s marketing, I also need to feel it’s relevant to my needs; that’s a no brainer also. The…
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 these…
