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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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”…
“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…
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.…
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…
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…
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…
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…
