If you aren't marketing from the customer's perspective, you are not doing as well as you could be. To help, we are sharing the core of our digital workshop for B2B marketing teams who need to creating a richer user and brand experience. This is for brands that have most of the pieces but perhaps in the wrong sequence, place or media type. This workshop is customized for clients who need to transition to a richer brand experience and stronger digital strategy. Contact Kim Donlan Kdonlan@RedSwan5.com

1. April, 2017
DigitalWorkshop
Getting truly inside a customers mind to build an unbelievable brand experience

2. RedSwan5
Transform businesses through strategic branding process
Marketing/business strategy + messaging + digital strategy + execution | Start-ups and turnarounds

3. Kim Donlan
Thinker, Idea Launcher, Brand to Customer Connecter,
Messaging Expert, Digital Strategist, Executive Coach
CEO, RedSwan5
Media psychologist
Professor, Bentley University

4. ✤ Start with user personas
✤ Develop a digital experience
✤ Content and creative marketing planning

5. Start with a Persona

6. “You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work
back toward the technology, not the other way around.”
–Steve Jobs

7. The OnlyView that Matters isTheirs
✤ Personas are dynamic
✤ Stay focused on customer perspective
✤ This is the basis of the digital strategy
✤ An empathy map is required
✤ Get to the emotional points that trigger decisions
✤ The basis for the digital story

8. Buyer Persona Customer Persona
User Persona
✤ decisions maker
✤ influencer
✤ champion
✤ gatekeeper
✤ economic or functional buyer
✤ account owner
✤ department(s) executive
✤ procurement manager
✤ end user
✤ future champion
✤ future influencer
Chose your solution
work with your product
Prospects who have a problem
Forrester Research

9. User Persona (dynamic)
✤ Embody the characteristics and behavior of a group of
users.
✤ Based on internal, secondary and primary research
and interviews with users.
✤ Include goals, needs, personality and interests

11. Sample Persona
Based on internal and external consumer insights

12. Unique Persona
Represent distinctly different needs that will impact how they approach your brand

13. Create a user persona based on
segmentation work you did.
Activity
1. Assemble in same teams
2. Use the template provided to translate information. If you are missing
information, just make it up.

15. Based on the user persona…
What is the primary message
you would focus on ?

17. Empathy Changes the Game
✤ It’s an emotional representation
✤ Marketers translate these feelings into Without
mentioning the product
✤ Content strategy
✤ Buyer’s journey
✤ Decision points

18. Empathy Map Resources
✤ Personas
✤ Worldview descriptions
✤ Data from user interviews
✤ Testimonials
✤ Insights from your web analytics (related to customer actions)
✤ Social media mentions
✤ Your marketing story

19. Make an empathy map based on
your user persona.
Activity:
✤ Each of you should write your thought on separate stickies.
✤ Together, begin to transfer your ideas onto the empathy template
✤ Bundle/overlap similar items. Challenge anything that is not from
the user’s perspective and re-write it if necessary.

20. Sample
Empathy Map
✤ 4 quadrants
✤ Thinking
✤ Seeing
✤ Doing
✤ Feeling

22. Based on the user persona & the
empathy map…
What is the primary message you
would focus on ?

23. Develop a digital experience

24. “By 2020, customer experience will overtake price and
product as the key brand differentiator”
–Walker study, 2017

25. Engagement is a great experience
built for the customer’s journey

26. Stages Action Needed
Find purpose and
form coalition
Create urgency
among stakeholders
and partner
Prepare and plan
Map the journey
Validate the journey
Create short-term
wins
Embed and aim
higher
Assemble a core stakeholder group that will take responsibility
Communicate the vision
Choose the right language
Set the map’s scope, scale and offshoots
Leverage or create personas
Tie personas to specify journeys
Ensure the right resources
Set expectations
Build empathy
Tailor the content of journeys to discrete purposes
Validate hypotheses
Share and socialize your map
Jointly score opportunities based on value and feasibility
Validate quick wins to familiar metrics
Make journey mapping part of business as usual
Digitize journey maps as use them as a dashboard
Assign long-term owners of customer journey maps
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
Customer
journeys
force you to
see yourself
from the
customer’s
perspective
Forrester Research

27. Hypothesis
First
Research
First
Co-creation Quick-fire
Objective
Cross-functional team
Business-imperative
Deep customer
understanding and insights
Customer involvement and
collaboration
Creation of a tangible CX
success story for
socialization
Participants
all the cool kids
(stakeholders, SME,
frontline employees, CX
pros)
Customers are participants,
researchers become
facilitators, stakeholders
are observers
Customers are participants,
researchers become
facilitators, stakeholders
are observers
CX team and small group
of key folks who own
touchpoint, data and
metrics as needed
Format 1-2 day workshop
3-8 weeks field research
and in-house analysis
4 hour workshop with
customers
60-90 minutes in person
session or virtual call
Output
journey map hypothesis,
buy-in, momentum
valid journey map,
personas that can be
included as part of research
validated journey map, co-
designed experience
improvement concepts,
reactions to new concepts/
prototypes
journey map hypothesis,
list of prioritized action
items, success story for
socialization
Pros
good intro to journey
mapping and maps value
valid map challenges
assumptions through
primary customer research
provide ability to
understand, analyze, dead
an prototype new journeys
all at once
builds a success story to get
buy in and rallies
employees around future
UX initiatives
Cons
map isn’t validated, can
lose steam
lengthy project, high costs,
tricky and time consuming
to find customers
need highly skilled
facilitation, time
consuming to recruit
customer in a single
workshop
tight project management
to deliver results, is less
effective at cross culture
change
Forrester Research

28. customer stage + emotional measurement
physical touchpoint is gauged on CUSTOMER’S emotional scale
Use qualitative and quantitative metrics (service calls, customer research, quotes)

29. sometimes you have all the content but in the wrong place and format
each stage is a series of micro-moments
not all micro-moments have a touchpoint but all micro-moments are decision points

30. there will be anomalies in the experience that you can’t solve.
first time + returning customers diverge
see where you fill their bucket (gain) or lose their confidence (pain)

31. Define high level recommendations
Try to agree on the intent of each component

32. Marketing funnels and customer journey are related

33. avoid this
this is a brand’s perspective
of how the customer
SHOULD behave.

34. no matter what.
all fancy journeys start with…
stickie notes and the pledge to stay in the customers’s mind and heart

35. Quick-fire Approach (60 minutes)
1. Review your personas and empathy maps
2. Think of a real customer that matches the persona
3. Pick only one persona (new, returning customers, previous)
4. Look for 1 SMALL business pain relevant to your fleet
5. Establish a hypothesis of what you think the customer is
experiencing
6. Create a map of the touchpoint + customers emotional state
7. Be prepared to identify the gaps in customer experience

36. Sample
by awesome blogger that I can’t remember right now (bad academic)

38. Based on the user persona, empathy
map, and customer journey map…
What is the primary message you
would focus on ?

39. Content and Creative Marketing

40. “Attention is a gift.”
– Figured out by every human within seconds of birth

41. Content works
✤ Content marketing costs 62% less than
traditional marketing and generates 3X as
many leads
✤ B2B companies that blog generate 67% more
lead/month
✤ 37% of companies say blogs are the most
valuable type of content
✤ Average return on an email is $44.25 for
every dollar
✤ 72% of marketers think branded content is
more effective than magazine advertisements
✤ 69% say its superior to direct mail and PR

42. Saturation Point
✤ 2/3 of Americans get their
news on Twitter and Facebook
✤ Past 30 years, produced more
content than the previous 5000
✤ 4.6 billion pieces of content are
produced daily
✤ Attention span is down to 8
seconds and falling

43. Attention means:
✤ Compelling online presence
✤ Steady stream of relevant communications
✤ Building a new audience over time
✤ Strengthening on boarding and creating loyalty
✤ Working with sales as a source of content

44. Future of Content Marketing
✤ It’s telling a story across all the touchpoint
✤ It’s NOT about more, it’s about better quality
✤ More engaging and interactive
✤ Personalized/dynamic ebook
✤ Infographics with external links to detailed content
✤ Virtual reality
✤ AI, machine learning and mixed reality that help marketers get attention
✤ Behavior scientist and technology track mouse clicks, eyeballs, bounce rates, time spent
reading articles, search criteria, saves/clips to reverse engineer the content that drives sales

45. Types of content & where its going
✤ Corporate Blogs/Influencer posts
✤ White papers/ebooks
✤ Slideshares
✤ Audio/video podcasts
✤ Webinars
✤ Email
✤ Social platforms
✤ UGC: ratings/reviews
✤ Landing pages
curated, focused, informed (medium.com)
shorter, focused, with links to details/personal tracks
Slides of ebook, SEO, video inserts, clips = social posts
Customer stories and interviews NOT thought leaders
become increasingly important to be ‘endorsed’ or
counter distractors
hubs that contain multiple links, show progress,
ask for more details
(see podcasts) or slice and dice Slideshares and
Youtube videos
(details in this deck)
social listening & capture social interactions

46. How Personas + Empathy Map + Customer Journey =
Content Marketing Approach
* Graphic from Book, Digital Relevance by Ardath Albee

47. Content Marketing Strategy
1. Review the customer journey you prepared
2. Select a place(s) where the customer is unhappy or not reached
3. Brainstorm a creative content marketing campaign
4. Using a fresh Customer Journey Sheet and stickies, assemble the
component of the campaign
1. How will the user persona receive/encounter content
2. Does the content type you select match the emotional state
3. What data would you hope to gain
4. What metrics would you consider successful

49. Based on the user persona, the empathy map,
journey map, content marketing strategy…
What is the primary message you
would focus on ?

50. Visit www.RedSwan5.com to learn more
About workshops, availability for new projects or our process