Presented by: Matthew Preschern
Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer
HCL Technologies
SESSION ABSTRACT
A company’s brand proposition and means of customer engagement have been transformed by the shift to digital, including the tremendous influx of data and a business environment that is mobile-first and always on. Customers expect personalized, experience-driven interactions for engagements that come at micro moments and require a brand to be nimble and active in encouraging next steps.
The key to using data to encode insights and deliver this level of customer experience can be found in account-based marketing. A well-conceptualized ABM plan when designed and executed in partnership with sales can be a strategic differentiat or and a trigger for exponential growth.
The true power of ABM lies in the programmatic choices, both in-person and in the digital space. Participants learned how the elements of an account based marketing approach can allow a powerful customer-to-brand connection and examined the ways in which account based marketing can bridge the analog and digital elements of marketing for a cohesive experience.
KEY TAKE-AWAYS
- A framework for account-based marketing
- An understanding of the elements of a successful ABM program, including customized customer experiences
- Insight on ABM as a means to trigger double-digit growth coupled with reinforced brand equity
- A guide for using the data collected to endear customers and drive
brand awareness
OVERVIEW
- Client challenges: Message clutter, lack of personalization, lack of trust in other companies
- Marketing challenges: Micro moments, individual to individual, mobile first, connect emotionally, always on, multi-channel, experience driven
- The world is moving towards more personalization in the purchasing process
Account Based Marketing: Augment business traction and be a “strategic partner” to the client, enable, up-sell and cross-sell, infuse thought leadership, and create and leverage loyalty
Key Question: How do you arm your sales team with this account based marketing information? How do you get them to allow you to get involved when sales tries to “own” the account planning process?
- Sales should own the execution of interaction with client, that’s a good thing
- Convince them to engage in a thoughtful manner while planning
- Accounts will grow if both are involved in the planning; however, relinquish power when it is time for the sales team to execute with the client
TAKE-AWAY
“Alice in Wonderland” lesson
- If you don’t know where you are going, it doesn’t matter how fast you’re running – don’t deploy everything
- Utilize best marketing tactics in concerted effort, deploy some technology, research accounts, and take your time so you know you’re making the right decision
- Don’t waste time and money because you didn’t research accounts or clients fully
IMPLEMENTATION GUIDELINES
What to consider in account selection:
- Current competition landscape
- Account maturity – right engagement ecosystem of sales, delivery and marketing
- Do you have a coach or advocate in the account you are serving?
- Business potential – wallet share versus potential wallet share
- What specific accounts are you going to target, and why should you go after those particular accounts?
- Very strategic – who are the decision makers in the other companies?
- Are you getting a large part of their wallet share – are they buying just one of your products-or more?
BEST PRACTICE
Map marketing activities into three buckets
- Demand generation
- Brand awareness
- Thought leadership
- Determine tactics and information shared in order to “move down the funnel”
- Create a custom plan and utilize what works as you get more involved with a client
- Identify target accounts and prospects
- Identify digital channels –> optimize –> measure
ACTION ITEM
You need a framework for how you will act on each account:
- Client engagement framework
- Craft an account level campaign plan
- Measure and monitor
- Utilize both relevance charts as well as organizational charts
- Plot an ecosystem chart of key external influencers
- Create a RAG map for all stakeholders
- Craft a plan specifically to expand new/unknown decision makers and influencers
- You need to combine relationship map with account selection
- Very quantitative analysis -- you need to know hard numbers and revenuestreams to fully understand what share of the client’s wallet you are receiving (i.e. is there the potential for more?)
FINAL THOUGHT
Move slowly at first, gain traction before diving “all in.”
By Spandana Lakkamraju
Global Omnichannel Manager
Digital Marketing
Cisco
Omnichannel is possibly the most misused term these days. No matter how you describe it though, you probably have at least one aspect of omnichannel down. It is also worth noting that the digital and physical worlds are colliding. We all live and breathe it today. Half the time we live on the internet and the other half in the physical world.
Information is at our fingertips today as it should be for us to keep progressing. So for the sake of this progression, we need to make brilliant transformations in marketing today. In order to deliver real transformation, it’s extremely important to make a true omnichannel strategy a part of your overall corporate marketing strategy. Here’s why:
1. Revenue: A Seat at the Table
Marketing is starting to take on bigger quotas and bookings goals. It’s evident that online research is where people start when they begin their buying journey. Omnichannel can help bridge the gap in terms of funnel conversion and aid in new avenues to generate revenue. Beyond that, if you are considering going direct with an e-commerce platform, having an omnichannel strategy with built-in, in-app notifications will significantly drive sales.
2. Real-Time Optimization
How many of you are having conversations around goals right now? The company sets its annual targets, and you are asked to create a road map for the rest of the year. Where do you start? If you have an existing inbound practice, you can base it on your current run rate and reverse waterfall. How do we bridge the gap if the two numbers don’t match? You guessed it!
In an omnichannel world, you can go into specifics. If you set up ‘always-on’ campaigns, you’ll know on an average how many leads you can bring in a week or a month. On top of that, you can set up growth rates and optimization goals to drive real time results.
3. Unified Goals and Cross-Team Collaboration
One of the best things about omnichannel,is that it gives the entire marketing organization unified goals. How many times have we set up a brand campaign with awareness goals and not been able to show conversions? In an organization focused on omnichannel, all teams work together to feed into each other’s goals. The customer journey becomes a relay match, the teams in the marketing organization work together to deliver a delightful customer experience.
4. Better Messaging to Drive a Seamless Customer Experience
As stated above, we live in a digital world. and our customers consume content in multiple places using multiple devices. So, we need to be sure our brand messaging is consistent across channels, and in real time. All organizations need a strategy to do so.
Omnichannel isn’t just about conveying the same message across all your channels. It’s about understanding the relevance of different platforms and presenting the right messages per channel. A blog post has no place on Instagram and a whitepaper has no place on Facebook. Take aspects of the whitepaper, however, and post an image of significant learnings from it on Instagram. Boom, instant conversions.
Omnichannel can be used to help get the story to flow from one channel to the next. It can help spread the right message, at the right time, in the right place to the relevant audience.
5. Capturing Customer Pain Points and insights
Customer experience goes beyond messaging; it also includes solving your customer’s pain points depending on where they are in their journey. In the omnichannel world, you’re not having multiple first date conversations with your customers, you’re honeymooning.
By presenting messages that are relevant to where they move on the internet, you let customers know that you’re listening to their needs. It also gives you the ability to capture valuable customer data and insights.
6. Improved Tech Stack Delivers Better ROI
As an omnichannel strategy requires multiple platforms to work together,it’s important to start making investments in tools that can work together but also build on each other. An integrated tech stack that’s essential for omnichannel delivers better ROI than fragmented tech investments.
7. Allow For Innovation: Play By Your Own Rules
Omnichannel allows for multiple opportunities to innovate and experiment. This is the most enticing reason to be part of an omnichannel organization, in my experience. Gamification of demos and experimenting with augmented and virtual reality and other interactive experiences are vital for creating customer moments that matter. Additionally, when proven successful, these innovations too can be scaled via an omnichannel plan across the board.
To sum up, a well-planned and executed omnichannel strategy allows for revenue growth, real time optimization, unified goals and cross-team collaboration. It helps you address customer pain points and gain insights, improve ROI and also allows room for innovation. Omnichannel arms you to become a successful, trans formative marketing organization!
As Global Omnichannel Manager, Digital Marketing, Cisco, Spandana Lakkamraju is responsible for driving an omnichannel strategy for key initiatives across Cisco’s business, and for scaling innovation such as “new digital experiences” created at Cisco. She partners with the BU, Brand, Content, Country/Regional, and other teams in the organization to establish coordination of message, touch points, and frequency across customer-facing channels. Previously, she was an Inbound and Revenue Marketing Specialist, Global Demand Center, for Cisco and a Technical Assistant for the Aerodynamics Department at NASA Ames Research Center.
By Chris Moloney
Chief Marketing Officer
TaxSlayer
Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs), along with many other senior business leaders, exhaust a lot of energy discussing the critical importance of being strategy-driven. So, why do many leaders have difficulty creating enough time for strategic planning? We all know it is essential, but the magnetic forces within our companies are always pulling us toward more operational projects. I have found in my eleven years as a Chief Marketing Officer, that most organizations often stereotype the marketing role into advertising and communications production, with a campaign-centric approach. As a result, marketers must create a constant counter-balance to the daily pull toward tactics.
The Chief Marketing Officer is largely responsible for driving growth and profitability. However, it is increasingly essential that we serve as the “voice of the customer” by maintaining a regular pulse on customer trends, needs and behaviors. When I first became a CMO, there was no concept of an iPhone. I can recall people saying that they would never make calls from their “iPod”, assuming the iPhone was just that… an iPod with a phone. Ten years later, iPhones and other smart devices have radically changed the way consumers interact with companies and each other.
The change is more radical than we could have imagined, but there were a few leading indicators that gave some hints along the way. A few years before the iPhone, the CIO of Scottrade and I gave a keynote on how “widgets” and “gadgets” were likely to overtake web pages and further discussed how we should prepare. Subsequently, widgets became the immediate precursor to all apps. Without our strategic planning, we would have been caught off guard. This is one of many trends that reminds us we must think long-term and build plans that offer flexibility. As leaders, we must pull the organization out of the day-to-day operational mindset and strive to define and refine strategy regularly based on technology or market changes.
How often do you think about where you want to be in three years? While a three-year view (or even more, a five-year plan) can seem outrageous, you’d better have one! The future is truly unpredictable, but a strategic framework allows you to evaluate numerous outcomes. Some of these outcomes may be close to the truth, but if they are not—you still have the core framework to rely on to keep you confident in your path.
As things change, revise the plan, but review it often and keep it a living and breathing document. Even consider creating visuals around the plan that you can post and share with all levels of the organization. Your team wants to know where you are heading and they need to be fully invested to help you get there. Partner with your CEO and others to enthusiastically share and MARKET the plan internally.
All too often in the media, stories about marketing focus on celebrating a winning campaign or marketing tactic that worked well. When reading articles about marketing successes such as a campaign that took off or a product that exploded in season, there is an implication that the marketing organization, ad agency, or leader “got lucky.” These stories often mislead one to believe a slot machine moment drove success. In fact, behind the scenes, marketers are typically studying customer attitudes, needs, and trends to re-define their customer benefits. The journey of how customers find us and what they experience along the way is a changing ecosystem and marketing must be at the center of sharing these insights.
When a company delivers on a big success, some doubt that the leaders had a vision. Luck is easier to fathom. But, in my experience, great marketing successes are either the result of a long-term vision or good fortune that occurs as the result of being at the right place, at the right time. Luck and strategy together are the perfect cocktail. That said, there are great products that fail because of bad marketing, but there are also bad products that fail despite great marketing. This is not to sound aloof or arrogant. Quite the contrary, marketers must embrace their role as the voice of the brand and realize how important it is to get their jobs right each day.
After all, marketers are expected to keep the communications flowing, the ads running, the leads coming in, and other operational initiatives moving at a rapid pace. If we aren’t making our best effort to look forward with a long-term view of our customers’ needs, we are missing out on something very important.
Big and Small Companies Alike Struggle
Often, I find the strategic planning process just as difficult in the large and well-funded organizations as it is for the medium to small organizations. In a large organization, there are immense resources and several people who weigh in on a long-term vision. However, each year it seems more like a budget planning exercise when the final strategy is delivered. In a small to medium-sized organization, marketers must be bolder, especially if they represent a challenger brand. The mission and vision must break through the clutter of those who might have deeper pockets, abundant resources, or a bigger brand. There are fewer “committees” and often a clearer understanding of the budget as “investment” versus “expense.” Those two words alone seem to be emblematic of whether a company thinks long-term versus short-term.
Marketing is at the Top
Fundamentally, marketing is all things that make up our products, services and benefits—packaged together in a way that appeals to the overall marketplace. Marketing is a connection of who we are as a company and what we deliver to the overall marketplace. Stop thinking about marketing as a place where advertising is created. Stop thinking about marketing as a place where short-term goals, objectives, and quick wins are the benchmark for success. In today’s marketplace, the marketing leaders must look ahead and have a vision that is both inspirational and reasonably accurate. Chief marketers must execute the short-term strategy with a clear insight on how it affects the long-term strategy.
Marketing is a wild mix of being fun, incredibly challenging, yet extremely rewarding when you get it right. It reminds me of the game of golf where you have that moment when you hit the ball and many things come together at once to make the shot. It is important to remember there were many missed shots before the good one. As marketers, we should think of ourselves in some ways as golfers. No matter how many times you do it and no matter how good you get, there’s always room to learn more, take more lessons, and think about your long-term objective whether that is to have fun, win, or hand over your expertise to the next generation.
Chris Moloney is the Chief Marketing Officer and Head of Partnerships for TaxSlayer, a leading provider of tax and financial services tools to U.S. consumers and financial professionals. TaxSlayer has been ranked #1 by the National Association of Tax Professionals (NATP) for many years. TaxSlayer is headquartered in beautiful Augusta, Georgia - home of The Masters Tournament.
His prior roles include roles at two digital leaders as Chief Marketing Officer of CAN Capital, Chief Executive Officer of Gremlin Social Media, and Chief Marketing Officer for three major brands (Wells Fargo Advisors, Experian, and Scottrade). Chris is a big believer in the power of marketing to drive business growth and his expertise lies in driving companies to be highly successful in their digital and social media presence with measurable results.
By Doyle Buehler
Chief Executive Officer
Senior Smarty Pants
The Digital Delusion
Defining your ‘why’ is actually about defining your digital strategy. Delivering your true value to your audience is the embodiment of your digital strategy.
When push comes to shove, those businesses with a solid digital strategy are better able to weather any storm that comes, and better maximize and leverage the opportunities when they arise as well. Whether it is from economic or political factors or other external or even internal factors, if you are prepared and understand the roadmap that you are on, then it can be easier - not only during troubled times, but also during times that you can take advantage of.
The challenge? Most businesses don’t have an overall strategy, nor even a digital specific one, either. This leads many businesses to the SOS or, “shiny object syndrome” - trying to leverage the newest and flashiest sparkly thing that comes along, only to see it fade away within months of launch. This costs you and your business time, money and resources.
So, what are the Top 10 things about digital strategy that you are probably missing out on?
- Develops your ‘why.’ If you don’t understand the ‘why’, do you think your customers will? Probably not. Not so much the “why you are doing this”, but also the “why do you provide value?”
- Gives you focus. How hard is it to figure out what you need to do every day as it is? What if this was already taken care of for you?
- Helps you understand your market. Have you spent the time to actually fully comprehend who your customer is and what they want to become?
- Creates improved competitive forces. Yes, you get better, faster and more efficient if you are thinking long-term. What will your competitors think when you surpass them?
- Gives you and your staff and customers something to think about. No, it’s not just about a single sales transaction. If it is, a strategy will not help you.
- Prioritizes how to tackle projects. Stuck with what to do, next? Having a strategy will help you clarify what is really important and what forms the essence of your business for projects to undertake.
- Creates comparisons for debriefs and reviews. If you have a strategy, you will actually be able to measure your success and failures.
- Expands your market. Now you can actually look at new projects, as well as entering new markets, as you can understand what resources are required to be effective.
- Improves your customer base. If your customer can understand the strategy or rather interpret it through your themes and values, then they can become a lifelong customer.
- Provides direction on what is next. Now you can decide when to launch a new product or improve your existing ones, and all with a better understanding of your customers and overall business value.
Digital is not an overnight success - it's the long game. It starts with planting your roots - your strategy. Only then can things really grow your business, otherwise you will eventually land out chasing your own tail - not being able to decide what to do, when, and more importantly, why.
Take what is best about your business, define your value, and create a compelling digital strategy that provides remarkable value to your perfect audience.
Easy, right? :)
What's your digital leadership quotient? Find out now: www.leadership.digital
Doyle Buehler, MBA, is a best-selling author, global entrepreneur, international speaker and digital business thought leader, specializing in strategic digital branding and marketing. He has mentored, coached, trained and inspired many in the areas of startups, digital leadership, digital innovation, disruption, transformation, online marketing, social media and entrepreneurship.
Doyle runs a worldwide strategic digital marketing agency for companies who want to create disruption in their industry. At the intersection of innovation and strategic marketing, he is best known for effectively connecting business leaders to their entire digital ecosystem, to help them build a remarkable business online. Doyle is the author of the best-selling book on digital strategy and digital leadership: The Digital Delusion: How To Overcome The Misguidance and Misinformation Online.
By Adam Kahn
Senior Director, Marketing Operations & Demand
Frost & Sullivan
The 18th Annual Digital Marketing: A Frost & Sullivan Executive MindXchange might have ended, but during my time at #FrostMar, I gathered seven key takeaways that marketers of all shapes and sizes will find useful.
The event took place in Nashville on July 17-19, where 150 marketing minds gathered to exchange ideas, build relationships and learn from leading organizations like RSA, GE Digital, TaxSlayer, Jet.com, Vanguard, MetLife and many others.
If you missed this outstanding event, don’t worry – we’ve got you covered with our Executive MindXchange Chronicles! You can benefit from videos of the keynotes and focused session summaries of the entire event, including key ideas and takeaways, plus guidelines for implementing these strategies at your own organization. The Executive MindXchange Chronicles are the next best thing for those unable to attend and those looking for best practices in the industry.
Without further ado, here are my top takeaways from the event:
1. Embrace Disruption for Growth
The companies that are actually disrupting are the ones that are making successful strategic digital marketing decisions based upon critical digital strategies. This is where the disruption starts. It’s not about the technology. It is about rethinking how you assemble your team and formulate your core digital strategies that affect disruption.
It’s critical that we create a disruption strategy that includes 5 critical steps:
- Define the Purpose
- Uncover Patterns
- Develop a Platform
- Create a Process
- Produce Results
Once we develop a disruptive strategy, we’re on our way to redefining our future. Status quo is NOT sustainable in the age of disruption.
2. Know Your Customer/Prospect Brain Types for More Effective Communication
When you market to “brain types” you can bypass personalities. This key point simplifies a communication plan into four key brain types: Controller + Manager, Innovator + Influencer, Nurturer + Harmonizer and Analyzer + Systemizer. Once we understand the dominate brain type of the audience we are marketing to, we can properly frame the communication in these easy steps:
- Identify your audience’s brain type
- Recognize what’s important to them
- Frame your message to get their attention
- Trigger emotion, use metaphor and story
- Sell the end result or absence of it
3. Data Is Still King
With marketing technology’s dramatic growth, data continues to drive our customer insight, engagement and conversion. We’re now starting to see emerging areas like AI, Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality and IoT as additional tools and resources that will continue to help us, as marketers, generate higher quality leads, retain existing customers and enhance relationships thru visualization, predictive modeling and trend assessment via unprecedented volumes of data we now have access to.
4. Quality Journalism Skills Are Imperative, but Challenging To Find
If Data is King, then Content is the Queen that drives community engagement. During the course of the event, we had countless conversations about content marketing strategy, campaigns and creation and I quickly recognized a theme – “marketers lack basic writing skills.” Much of the content creation tends to fall on young professionals who don’t possess proper journalism skills. Where do you find professionals who possess a strong editorial sensibility, as well as a solid foundation in journalism fundamentals? Regretfully, I wasn’t able to garner a specific answer, but the take-away is clear – when you interview prospective team members, don’t forget to ask for writing samples and review what they’ve posted online. Regretfully, strong writing skills are a necessity that many marketers do not possess.
5. We Must Continually Transform to Survive
As marketers, we want to be strategic, but tend to be reactionary. We must continually look for ways to improve engagement and transform our competencies to maximize efficiency and effectiveness for business growth. In order to transform our teams and organizations, we must be innovators, strategists and change agents. As Dave Sutton of TopRight stated, “To truly transform, marketing must get all 3S’s right: the right Story, the right Strategy, the right Systems, all measured through the lens of Simplicity, Clarity and Alignment.”
6. Org Charts Are Dangerous
As noted by Holly Rollo, CMO at RSA, “Your legacy is your team, not the situation.”
We can no longer operate in silos and effectively meet the needs of our customers and prospects. We must define workflow, not org charts, to place sales and marketing in the same boat to best serve our customers. To be truly customer facing, we have to go big or go home, the Band-Aid must be ripped off. No one said it would be easy, but pain = progress. If we set group values for change and create mechanisms to listen to each other we will succeed.
7. ROR (Return On Relationships) is Amazing!
The Executive MindXchange is really an extraordinary event model. The main emphasis of the event is to establish meaningful relationships with like-minded professionals and that objective was executed flawlessly. Throughout the course of the event, I was able to meet, engage and establish industry relationships that will serve me throughout my marketing career. The variety of networking and social activities was organized in a fun, yet meaningful way. I couldn’t be happier with the outcome – meaningful professional relationships I leverage for best practices and lessoned learned!
Adam Kahn serves as Senior Director, Marketing Operations and Demand at Frost Sullivan. He is a passionate event and digital marketing professional who has worked in the events industry since 1994 for both higher education and for-profit event organizers, including: ZDEvents/Key3Media, iMark Communications, IIR, Diversified Communications and Rising Media. Adam has successfully launched and managed events throughout the United States, Canada and India during the course of his 20+ year career.
Personally, Adam enjoys spending time with his family. He loves coaching his daughter’s basketball team and attending as many of his son’s high school football and basketball games as possible. He loves sports and is a diehard Philadelphia Eagles and Boston Celtics fan. He was born and raised in Philadelphia and has been in Boston since attending graduate school at Northeastern University in 1995. If he’s not attending one of his kids sporting events, you can bet he’s trying to carve out time on the golf course.
By Dan Colquhoun
Senior Vice President, Customer Research
Frost & Sullivan
What is the impact of digital transformation on the marketing function? Will it be, indeed is it, disruptive? How will the role of the marketing officer evolve under these conditions, and what do we need to do to get ready? The 2017 Strategic Marketing Priorities: A Frost & Sullivan Executive MindXchange, held in Nashville, set out to answer these complex questions and more.
Allison Cerra, the Chief Marketing Officer for McAfee, opened the event with an engaging talk, Own the Growth Agenda and You Own the Future, that provided insights into her 20 year career in marketing and the lessons learned. Her career anecdotes were humorous and enlightening at the same time.
Some important takeaways from Allison’s keynote:
- Marketing is the most visible discipline in the C-suite, and hence the most exposed when the company misses its targets or objectives. Marketers live and die by the numbers and this became an oft repeated refrain for the remainder of the day as other marketers took to the stage to add their view of this purported reality
- There is often tension between sales and marketing and this is a sign of a healthy relationship. One way to ensure that the tension is helping the business is to regularly audit the quality of leads that marketing is generating
- Marketers must also speak openly and honestly with product management about the realities of the performance of their product portfolio
Allison closed with the three Bs of measuring marketing value:
- Brand: valuation or equity created; one must “weigh the pig”
- Business: measuring what value marketing generated directly or influenced
- Brain: marketers should consume a constant diet of competitive intelligence, buyer preferences, and research
Boardroom Brain Trust Panel: Aligning Corporate Growth Objectives with Strategic Marketing Priorities
Three senior leaders in marketing moderated by a chief marketing officer took to the stage to discuss the role of marketing in what one panelist described as the “age of disruption.” The panel started by referring back to the keynote with a quick straw poll to determine the panel’s stance on Allison Cerra’s prior assertion that marketers must “live and die by the numbers.” The panel was unanimous in their agreement with the statement, its applicability to the marketing function, and its specific relevance to senior marketing leadership.
The panel discussed the importance of collaboration in an organization, and how marketing is central to achieving high levels of organizational collaboration. Indeed, the panelists suggested that “marketers have the tools to be in charge of collaboration.” Some suggested that CMOs should be referred to as Chief Collaboration Officers to accurately reflect the importance of their position in spearheading collaboration.
ThinkTank: Growing Revenue and Developing Brand Strategy in Whitespace and Adjacencies
The audience was implored to consider the hedge fund as an appropriate financial metaphor for the marketing function. Both have profits and losses and both inherent risks attached.
The essential question for marketers, it was posited, is, “Where I should spend my next dollar for maximum effect?” The fundamental business model of generating revenue, earning margin (profit), and optimizing cash flow was overlaid with a marketing example that starts with deal generation, ultimately leading to deal expansion as customer confidence grows, and finally deal velocity as trust begins to develop, there by creating a loyal customer.
CMO Challenge
Janet Brewer, Chief Marketing Officer at Tennessee Valley Authority, gave the Nashville audience a “big Tennessee welcome.” She opened with a celebration of sorts by suggesting that “this is [marketing’s] moment.” Brewer went on to describe the three roles for CMOs, the traditional commercialization role, the strategy development role, and the third as an enterprise wide profit and loss role.
Brewer implored marketers in the audience to “think beyond marketing as a CMO” and “step outside [those] boundaries.” Finally, skills that the modern marketer must master were enumerated: customer experience advocacy, strategic leadership, innovative influence, data driven analysis, and relevant messaging.
Dan is the Senior Vice President of the Customer Research Group at Frost & Sullivan. This global business unit of the analyst research and consulting firm Frost & Sullivan provides market research services to the company’s broad-based clientele.
Dan has close to 30 years of experience in marketing research including leading the customized research group at Nielsen Canada for close to 10 years where he developed leading edge approaches to measure customer value, consumer needs, brand equity and assess advertising and marketing communications. Before joining Frost & Sullivan, Dan served as vice president of research at an international advertising agency supporting accounts such as GM, McDonald’s and Bell Canada with strategic consumer insights.
By Patricia Jacoby
Publications Editor
and
Elisha Gist
Marketing Program Manager
Frost & Sullivan
Creating compelling content that performs is an essential requirement for the modern marketing leader. Content marketing, or creating and providing useful content to customers with the end goal of a profitable return, will be most successful if you think through your team’s strategy first and adhere to the following checklist and best practices:
#1: Target Your Best Prospects First
The first best practice for effective content marketing is to identify and target your best prospects. This should include your best potential customers as well as your best current customers, as generally 80% of future revenue comes from 20% of existing customers. To identify your best prospects, create a customer persona, or semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer. Personas are based on market research and information about current customers. It’s also important to include demographics and behavior patterns as well as drivers and motivations when creating your customer persona. When putting together your content marketing strategy, focus on these two groups—your best current and best potential customers—first.
#2: Consider Your Source
When creating your content, consider the author and voice carefully. Make sure your content marketing comes from a credible, authoritative source. It is usually best to have an expert or analyst who can communicate from a vantage point of industry expertise. Ideally your content will also be derived from well-respected research in the marketplace. Accept the fact that perception can progress or hinder the message: content written by a vendor, about the vendor and delivered by that vendor, will be viewed as corporate collateral, not credible research. Utilizing a third-party who has evaluated your product or service or who is recognized in the industry is a great way to present outside validation of your brand’s value in the marketplace. This third-party content could be in the form of a video, white paper, customer case study or over a dozen formats you may choose as your content delivery vehicle.
#3: Make Sure You Create Compelling, Customer-Centric Content
Content is no longer just the written word. The vessel you choose to contain that content is equally as important. Infographics are liked and shared on social media three times more than other any other type of content, and companies using video enjoy 41% more web traffic from search than non-video users. Knowing these statistics, make sure your team’s content is customer-centric and deliver it in a format that will appeal to your target market. For instance, a mix of video, infographics and blogs will diversify your channels and can offer reuse or repurposing of older assets. Consider delivering traditional content such as whitepapers or executive interviews in snackable 30-90 second videos or digital eBooks: your buyers are going to look for these assets and you will capture and delight them with a more modern presentation.
Content marketing should be leveraged to keep your visitors on your website longer and a balanced combination of content marketing formats can help visitors continue to engage. Consider your audience’s generation as well as their profession and title when selecting your marketing channels and content formats. A multichannel digital approach would be appropriate for some, while more traditional formats such as direct mail might work better for others. The goal of your content marketing is to give your customer the data, information or context they need. Ideally the stories you tell or the information you share will address your customer or potential customer’s pain points and help them solve a problem.
Utilizing the user personas you’ve developed for your ideal customer, share value added content that will resonate with your buyer. Position your company as a thought leader and only if relevant and additive, work in customer case stories which will provide prospects insights on your company’s client roster and your company’s success stories. Content can be proactive and reactive. Create a library of case studies by vertical to make that instant connection to your audience. Dedicate a section of your website to this content and label it appropriately ‘Customer Case Studies,’ ‘Our Work,’ ‘Success Stories.’ Embrace the idea of repurposing, reusing and recycling to create content that's both timely and lasting.
Learn to support your story with data: use surveys and brief Q&As to collect data and encourage engagement along the way. Be sure to link responses to internal sales and marketing channels by tying their answers to content or even products that match their needs. Finally, for account based marketing opportunities, consider leveraging your current or potential customer’s trigger events, such as a merger or new product in the marketplace and use those events to create relevant, targeted and timely content.
#4: Distribution is Key
When it comes to distributing your content, do so intelligently. Before any content is presented to your audience, make sure your team has a distribution plan and appropriate marketing mechanisms in place. Remember, the goal is to create useful content that brings in leads.
For B2B content, consider distributing via LinkedIn and targeted industry websites and newsletters. For B2C content marketing, social media platforms such as Facebook, Pinterest and even Instagram are channels that should be explored and tested. A social media channel’s popularity can be largely generational, so having your customer personas mapped will help you identify the best social avenues to engage with prospects and customers. “A social media channel’s popularity can be largely generational, so having your customer personas mapped will help you identify the best social avenues to engage with prospects and customers.”
Investigate avenues that are available to your organization for recycling, repurposing and reusing content: a digital newsletter can be a great way to repackage and extend the shelf life of content that might be buried on your website. For a content marketing campaign to succeed, it should be delivered in a mix of formats and channels to align to the myriad of different customer personas a company may be targeting.
#5: Always Track, Measure and Drive
Although it’s very important to track and measure your content marketing efforts, many marketing teams find this to be a significant challenge. Prior to launching any campaign, identify exactly what (and how) you are going to track and then begin measuring what is working—or not. You’ll begin to understand what channels and formats are delivering the results you crave— and you can kick the under performing channels (or formats) to the curb.
Once you have started your content marketing campaign, the first thing you’ll want to track is unique visits. These will provide a standard measure of how many people have viewed your content within a specified time frame. The next thing you’ll want to measure is page views. High page view and unique visitor metrics generally mean that your audience is very engaged and returning regularly to view your content. Another metric to capture is your conversion rate, specifically your micro conversions and macro conversions. A micro conversion is any activity that the user takes towards your primary conversion goal, such as filling out a lead capture form when downloading a white paper. These customers may not have purchased a product yet, but a measureable journey has begun. Macro conversions are any user completing your ultimate conversion goal. These conversion goals vary but generally are a user purchasing from your organization.
You’ll also begin to learn what other data you need to drive results: beyond user name, company name and title, what other data is necessary for you to qualify leads? Once you’ve started asking—and answering that question— you are ready to implement a lead scoring system so both marketing qualified leads (MQLs) and sales qualified leads (SQLs) have a clear destination through a lead nurturing program or even a first touch by the sales team.
