Marketers engage with their customers in more ways than ever before. Although email and display advertising still dominate the marketing mix, social and mobile are expanding rapidly and new channels are developing all the time. Findings from our recent piece of research show that organisations are striving to deliver consistent experiences but very few feel they are there yet.
In this webinar, Abdul Hamid Ebrahim will discuss the importance of integrating your marketing to achieve a connected customer experience and offer advice for improving your marketing campaigns across multiple-channels.
45. Your Questions
The Modern Marketers Guide to Connected Customer Journeys
Abdul Hamid Ebrahim
Marketing Advisor – Strategy & Planning
Oracle Marketing Cloud
Noelle McElhatton
Consultant Editor
Marketingfinder.co.uk
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47. The Modern Marketers Guide to Connected
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Notes de l'éditeur
Great marketing starts with a great customer experience. Think back to the corner store, where the shopkeeper not only knew your name, but knew what you liked.
While the experience was great, the customer lacked choice. And the marketer lacked scale.
This lead to the big box stores. The marketer got their scale, and the customer got their choice, but it was at the expense of the individual customer relationship.
And because of the scale, the marketers changed from individual conversations with customers, to a broadcast to the masses campaign approach.
This is the challenge faced by marketers – how to achieve both.
A study recently conducted by the CMO Council reports that
“88% of CMOs said they don’t have a real-time, well-integrated view of customer interactions across their enterprises”
And... <click>
“Over 70% of CMOs feel they are not well prepared to exploit opportunities presented by achieving a customer-centric culture.”
So there is an awareness of the need for a better marketing technology solution, but most of you are struggling to find and implement it.
Today’s customer has moved on.
We are still seeing campaign centric instead of customer centric strategies. Whilst many may talk about customer centricity, the reality is that too many marketers are stuck in the old paradigm.
The problem is that a campaign centric strategy actually puts the customer experience last.
Think about it. The campaign dictates what the message will be. The campaign dictates what channels will be used. The campaign dictates the timing. And only at the end of the process does the campaign dictate the audience.
In fact Forrester says that marketers spend almost 80% of the interactive marketing budgets on mass acquisition vehicles. That means very little is being spent on actually building a relationship, and focusing on the customer experience.
Instead, with the old mindset, the marketer is focusing not on the customer, but on maximizing campaign conversions.
[CLICK] They’ll run these campaigns, and if they’re lucky, 3% will convert.
[CLICK] For the other 97%, your best case is that they ignored it… and your worst case is that they were actually annoyed by it.
[CLICK] And since no relationship has been establish, that 3% that actually converted… they go back to the mass market bucket, and you have to start all over for the re-conversion.
Is that a great customer experience?
There has been a drastic shift over the last decade.
Your responsibility now extends throughout the customer lifecycle.
Last year the Google and Corporate Executive Board study showed that buyers are 60% through their decision process before engaging with a Sales person.
This means marketing has to play a much bigger role in the selling process and presents you with a huge opportunity.
For the first time, you now have the ability to guide and own virtually the entire customer relationship.
When so few organisations are able to track and measure activity, it comes as little surprise that the research has also identified a significant skills gap, not only of technical and channel skills within the department, but also particularly when it comes to the more quantitative side of marketing.
In fact, many marketing departments admit that the skills they most lack are data and marketing technology skills, including the ability to analyse campaign results, followed by channel-specific skills, such as those required to address the challenges of mobile and social.
Resources, or the lack of them, are also a common problem. Over half of marketing departments don’t have the resources they need to manage or analyse data properly. They also struggle to manage social and create content, which may serve to push these important areas out of focus.
Additionally, only 26% of respondents are benchmarking their activities against internal or external best practise statistics, which begs the question of how do you know you are doing the right thing and doing it well?
But along with that opportunity and increased responsibility is the expectation to deliver attributable revenue.
In the Forrester/Business Marketing Association May 2013 Global Marketing Online Survey, more than 100 marketing leaders said:
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“Marketing is asked to take on new responsibilities without change in budget or resources.” -- 89%
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“Marketing does things today no one thought it would be responsible for three to four years ago.” – 76%
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“Our leadership team judges the success of marketing initiatives faster than ever before.” – 76%
So you’re expected to deliver more with fewer resources and the same (or less) budget.
It’s time for Marketers to Take a Different Approach.
It’s time to become a modern marketer.
McKinsey agrees with us. They said “Companies will be better off if they stop viewing customer engagement as a series of discrete interactions (i.e. campaigns) and instead think about is as customers do: a set of related interactions that, added together, make up the customer experience.”
To achieve this, first you need to flip your marketer’s experience.
Instead of starting with the campaign, where you first create an offer, schedule it in the calendar, and then select your mass audience, you need to start with the customer.
This means you need to start building individual profiles. Then you can design automated experiences, which enables you to interact with each customer individually.
And customers are flocking to brands that can deliver individualized experiences.
Customer centric companies earn positive sentiment, with customers saying they “understand my need,” “have earned my loyalty,” and “values me as a customer.”
While campaign centric brands have seen the opposite – negative sentiment. Customers are staying things like they “disinterest me,” that they “frustrate me,” or they “don’t recognize me as an individual.”
And knowing your customer starts by building a more complete picture of them through their online behavior, what we call their Digital Body Language™ (Which is revealed through online activities such as website visits, white paper downloads, social interactions, searches performed and email responses).
Digital Body Language offers a wealth of knowledge, providing valuable insight about your prospects and customers.
But you must collect all of it. No matter where it is or what it is, and regardless of whether it exists in separate silos, databases, or systems. If you don’t you are building an incomplete and inaccurate view of potential customers, which makes it virtually impossible to truly know them.
But it’s difficult to do that in the current environment where you’re dealing with multiple data sources, multiple channels and people in multiple and indistinct lifecycle stages.
Which leaves you trying to collect it all from disparate systems and data silos, then kludging it all together manually on your own.
Modern marketers know that they need to deliver amazing individual customer experiences. So the first thing they do is focus less on the transaction.
[CLICK] Instead, they focus on the relationship. They start this process by building actionable customer profiles.
[CLICK] And send individually targeted messages that, on average, deliver a 3x higher conversion.
It boils down to delivering the right message, to the right person, at the right time.
To effectively communicate you must connect with consumers in real time, in a consistent, orchestrated way through the entire lifecycle across every possible channel.
*Cloud-based marketing technology allows you to become a trusted source by supporting and guiding the customer relationship throughout the entire lifecycle: from suspect to prospect; prospect to customer; and customer to advocate.
This is a continuous cycle of attracting and retaining ideal customers that goes well beyond the traditional, linear sales process.
You become an invaluable part of their process at every stage. A trustworthy source of information, because you are participating on an ongoing and deeper level. You are communicating with them, instead of just selling to them.
Once you are properly communicating with the right people, with the right message at the right time, you now can maximize the benefit of that relationship for both you and them. It’s a no brainer that engaged, happy and loyal customers result in more revenue.
But achieving that requires more than a singular, linear marketing effort.
We call it marketing orchestration. And it means individualizing customer experiences, over time, and across channels.
Not necessarily needed for the slide, but the text below walks through what happens to a customer in this program.
Let’s take a look at how Jaxon’s, the fashion retailer interacts with a customer named Melissa.
This program is launched automatically after Melissa browses, but doesn’t purchase, dresses online at Jaxon’s. First it looks into Melissa’s profile to see if she has the Jaxon’s Mobile App installed. If it does, and she’s given us permission to communicate via Push Messaging, it’s going to follow-up with her to let her know about all the great dresses Jaxon’s offers. If she doesn’t no worries, we can do the same thing with an email.
Then we wait, in this case 24 hours, and no we want to check if she’s opened our message. If she hasn’t, we might want to back off a but, not look too push, so let’s follow-up with a personalized display ad, perhaps providing her a discount. If she has opened it, let’s encourage her to share some of those great Jaxon’s messages via social.
Again, all this can happen automatically, and can be different for every customer, at each stage of the lifecycle.
So let’s discuss a use case that could only be possible with the Oracle Marketing Cloud.
A company that sells construction equipment runs an integrated campaign
Their main target for this is for senior decision makers at the VP level within the construction industry who have an interest in equipment, so they create an audience profile in BlueKai to reach people matching that profile.
They get someone with this customer profile to visit the website page. He downloads a whitepaper. As he registers his details in order to download the whitepaper, an account is created within the Oracle Marketing Cloud and they are automatically added to a relevant campaign.
Automated lead scoring ranks the lead a prospect available for telesales to follow up.
With Oracle’s Cross-Channel Marketing solution, the marketer tracks his behavior. Because they don’t want to lose her business, they actually follow up with relevant content highlighting the safety benefits of their equipment.
This convinces him to purchase, so the lead is converted into a sale.
Because he had a positive experience, he shares the review on social channels, advocating for the product.
Then they orchestrate those experiences based on customer profile data, and where they are in the buying cycle. And by doing that, modern marketers typically see a 5x higher conversion rate.
Modern marketers know they need to engage with each customer differently. They know customers who have just repurchased from you need to be treated differently, and receive different messages than a customer who you might be trying to winback.
And modern marketers know that they can build automated programs, providing that individual customer experience, but at a massive scale.
*Let’s talk a bit more about content specifically, because you simply can’t have a successful Modern Marketing effort without an effective content marketing strategy.
Content marketing is no longer about just putting information out there that leads people back to your web site. You need to think of content as something that is created for a specific purpose to connect
with a specific consumer at a specific time and place with just the right message - based on that person’s profile data. Ultimately, content delivered through a multichannel approach is the fuel of your marketing engine.
Intelligent content marketing delivers a personalized and relevant experience that leads to higher levels of engagement and response. You can even score the content and marry that with
your segments and lifecycle stages, so it’s far more impactful toward your CX
And your content must be relevant regardless of where and how it is presented. Let’s look at email for example.
According to Epsilon:
“Email open rates are 73% higher
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and click-through rates are 153% higher when triggered messages based on individual behavior are sent.”
So it’s clear that being relevant and timely is critical to successfully building a mutually beneficial relationship with prospects and customers.
Script: After determining personas, the marker must then identify what the target market wants to hear about and in what form. Topic Modeling is an in-app white boarding tactic that allows marketing teams to identify topics, the type of content to create (e.g.: vidoe, infographic, text, etc.) and the channel in which to publish the content asset.
51% of B2C marketers and 55% of B2B markers site producing enough content as a major challenge that they face. Followed by producing the kind of content that engages at 49% and 47% of B2C and B2C marketers, respectively.
Data; http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/B2B_Research_2014_CMI.pdf
http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/B2C_Research_2014-withlinks.pdf
Script:
They enable employees from every one of Bass Pro’s stores to write content. Equipped with an easy-to-use and scalable system in Oracle Content Marketing, Bass Pro’s store employees generate hundreds of pieces of content each month – covering an incredibly wide range of hunting and fishing topics that vary across different regions of US and Canada. With a goal of driving in-store traffic, Bass Pro’s customers are able to connect with their local store by reading their content online. Their new content strategy allows Bass Pro to not only scale their amount of content and topics, but it also allows them to create a better relationship between their stores and their local markets.
Let’s see how Bass Pro Shops is delivering::
——
First, the Bass Marketing team builds out various persona in Oracle Content Marketing (about 40 different persona). One of those personas is “Mark”. Mark is a beginner fly fisherman. He has been fishing for a while but is still learning master-level skills.
Now, we have an Bass Pro Shops employee, David, at the Foxborough, Massachusetts store. David is a seasoned fly fisher with master level knowledge and the sport and deep knowledge of the local fishing area. David, writes a pieces of content about Spring Fishing in New England. He tags content with the appropriate persona (Mark) and Engagement Stage (Awareness). The content sent through Bass’s workflow process, edited and approved and then published to the Bass Pro Shops Blog, sent out via email to subscribers (Responsys) and shared via social media outlets (Oracle SRM).
*But the holy grail is being able to not only track your revenue performance, but also predict where things are heading and benchmark your performance against your peers.
And the right marketing technology will allow you to leverage a myriad of benchmark indexes, compare how you are doing versus the rest of the industry, and use the trends to predict how changes in your marketing plan could impact your bottom line.
So you can not only maximize the effect of everything you are doing today, but also what you’ll be doing next quarter, next year and beyond.
This approach drives results.
Major brands have seen higher open rates, conversion rates, and most importantly increase in revenue.
As such, the world’s most sophisticated brands are now delivering individual customer experiences, at a massive scale.
Last year we sent over 89 billion emails. Have over 5 billion active recipients in programs. And stored more than 1.5 petabytes of data.
[B2B stats – highlight stats]
As such, the world’s most sophisticated brands are now delivering individual customer experiences, at a massive scale.
Last year we sent over 89 billion emails. Have over 5 billion active recipients in programs. And stored more than 1.5 petabytes of data.
[B2B stats – highlight stats]
As such, the world’s most sophisticated brands are now delivering individual customer experiences, at a massive scale.
Last year we sent over 89 billion emails. Have over 5 billion active recipients in programs. And stored more than 1.5 petabytes of data.
[B2B stats – highlight stats]
It’s time for Marketers to Take a Different Approach.
It’s time for Marketers to Take a Different Approach.
[revise]