Chapter 6
Stage 1—Initiate, and Stage 2—Radiate
Don't treat your customers like a bunch of purses and wallets.
—Chris Brogan
In the Initiate stage, organizations use a “brochure site” presence on the web with email campaign capabilities and web analytics (see Figure 6.1).
Figure 6.1 Sitecore® Customer Experience Maturity Model™—Initiate and Radiate Stages
In the Radiate stage, organizations focus on distributing content across channels starting with the customer's most used channels. Examples include establishing a mobile site and sharing content on social networks (see Figure 6.1).
The Initiate and Radiate Stages
The Initiate stage is almost a rite of passage for any organization. As you learned in Chapter 4, 85.4 percent of organizations surveyed with the Customer Experience Maturity Assessment are still in Stage 1 or Stage 2. The vast majority are here because they aren't sure how to progress and they have trouble building a business case for the resources to improve.
The initial website in Stage 1, Initiate, is almost always oriented around the organization's products and services rather than having a customer-centric or problem/solution orientation. That happens because the website is usually created by a marketing department or agency that has little experience with the digital customer experience so they pour printed marketing material into a new online format. The first attempt at connecting with customers is usually an email newsletter with a wide range of topics that is broadcast to all website registrants. The broadcast is usually informational and doesn't have specific calls to action.
At this stage, even in some midsize organizations, web analytics are limited to the volume of visitors and the number of conversions. There is no A/B testing or content evaluation, so content strategy and landing page optimization are often left to opinion. The lack of testing combined with a lack of content strategy around customer segments and stages usually result in random acts of marketing that include a lot of wasted effort.
At some point the organization becomes aware that it needs to reach out and meet its customers. An oft-heard cry is: “We need a social media presence” or “We need mobile.” At this point there may still be no content strategy, analytics, or segment targeting.
In Stage 2, Radiate, marketing organizations are more concerned with reaching their customers through the appropriate channels. They begin to develop strategies for each channel, but they may not have effective ways to measure cross-channel performance. Analytics still focuses on the number of visitors and conversions, but the data is segmented by channel.
Content begins to change in Stage 2 as it becomes more relevant to the customer through channels and devices such as mobile and social. With marketing's increased awareness of the possibilities, the marketers begin to create campaigns tailored to specific segments by channel, device, and customer segment. The marketing organization tries to leverage word of mouth through social channels to spread its message.
Objectives of Initiate and Radiate
The main objectives of Initiate stage are:
- Creating a web presence with general information about the organization.
- Focusing on search engine optimization to drive more visitors.
- Communicating to customers using email.
The main objectives of Radiate stage are:
- Widening the organization's digital presence across multiple channels.
- Reaching customers through mobile and social channels with context-appropriate content.
- Increasing the organization's marketing presence across paid, owned, and earned media.
Case Story: Chester Zoo
Chester Zoo, in the United Kingdom, has the customer at the heart of its mobile strategy, focusing on the connected experience during visits to the zoo.
Together with its digital agency, the zoo's managers found that using mobile could enhance the experience for their customers. They focused on reducing time in queues and giving directions in the zoo.
Their mobile experience effectively reuses content that is also used on their website and enhances it using the native features in the mobile phone. Visitors now have a better experience because they can skip the queues by purchasing their admission tickets through a mobile shop created by the zoo's own development team. In return, visitor flow into the zoo has improved significantly during peak hours. While in the zoo, visitors can use their mobile devices to get advice on what to see and activities during the day.
Simon Hacking, online marketing manager at Chester Zoo, said: “Providing an excellent experience for visitors to our website before, during, and after their visit is very important to us and that makes mobile a crucial aspect of our strategy. Using our experience platform as a foundation for this approach means that we can publish our content once and have it instantly available to our visitors on desktop, tablet, mobile, and our iPhone and Android apps.”
The results of this strategy, focusing on the customer experience, was breathtaking. Mobile phone traffic has increased by 37 percent, conversion rate has increased by 105 percent, transactions have increased by 181 percent, and revenue coming from mobile has increased by 129 percent.
If they had not had a strategy that focused on the mobile customer they would have missed big opportunities.
The next step for Chester Zoo is enabling additional mobile capability as part of the zoo experience.
Marketing Is under Attack on Two Fronts
It used to be so easy to be a marketer, but that's no longer true! Now marketers face a revolution on two fronts—the very fronts that should be marketing allies. One battlefront is the consumers, the audience a marketer wants to learn from, engage with, and influence. On the other battlefront are the executives in the marketer's own organization. Multiple research reports show that 50 percent to 80 percent of executives don't trust their own marketers. This chapter shows you how marketing can ally itself with its audience. Chapter 7, Stage 3—Align, shows you how marketers can align with executives and business objectives.
As mentioned at the beginning of the book, the days of only a few channels has passed. There are more than 40 online and offline channels, and each channel is full of marketing messages.1 People are overwhelmed with marketing messages.
In all of this, people have taken control of their own buyer's journey. They can choose which channels they travel on in their journey, they can choose the time that's best for them, and they can search for the specific information they need. Whether your organization is B2B, B2C, government, or nonprofit, it doesn't matter. Your customers are in control. Marketers no longer control the gates to information. As the research by CEB stated in Chapter 1, B2B buyers are 57 percent of their way through the purchase decision before engaging with sales.2
In the past, most websites and digital marketing were built with two motivations. Content was written from the organization's view of its products, and writing was slanted to rank high in search engines. Context was rarely considered.
Although these two motivators make it easy for an organization to create content, content alone typically fails to satisfy or influence the buyer. Content architecture is oriented to match the organization's structure, not the buyer's needs. Product or service terms are technical rather than solution-oriented. All buyers are considered to be at the same stage in the decision journey, and the channels that messages go through are the ones the organization is comfortable with, not the channels the buyer prefers. With all that, it's amazing that buyers put up with it.
In fact, informed buyers don't put up with it. What informed buyers do is either stick with what they have or switch to an organization that connects and engages with them.
To engage and be relevant to our customers, we as marketers must engage them in both content and context. The content must be relevant to their specific needs and at the correct point in the buyer's journey. The context must be relevant to their physical location and the type of device they use. If your content and context aren't relevant to your audience, you will lose them to a competitor who can do that.
Most marketers are aware that content must match the visitor segment and the visitor's stage in the Customer Life Cycle. However, not all marketers have thought about the more recent addition of “context.” Context is the “how and where” of the marketing message.
Organizations in Stage 1, Initiate, have websites that show static content and are perhaps using a mass email newsletter to an undifferentiated audience. These marketers use static content with formatting designed for standard desktop screens. Their email newsletter is primarily organization-centric, sending the same message to all audiences with information that is more important to the organization than to the individual needs of customers. In effect, marketers published with a take-it or leave-it attitude. In this chapter we see how to make sure that the content in even a Stage 1 website fits the needs of the audience.
This chapter also helps you move to Stage 2, Radiate. In Radiate marketers adapt to the “how and where” of the visitor's context. If the marketers want their message to “radiate” outward they must use the channels customers prefer, create content that adapts to the visitor's buying situation and physical location, and content that adapts to the technical capabilities of the customer's device. These requirements make moving up to Stage 2, Radiate, sound like a complex task, but the processes in this chapter show you how to keep it in control.
As you think about moving into Stage 2, Radiate, it may be easiest to consider the four primary ways of radiating to customers. Remember that not all of these ways are worth doing for all organizations. The four primary ways of radiating to consider are,
- Web
- Responsive web design that adapts to small screens in portrait or landscape orientation
- Touch responsive screens rather than keyboard and mouse
- Optimized images that adapt to small screens and lower bandwidth
- Concise content that doesn't have a high word count
- Email
- Email lists segmented and contextualized to the needs of visitor segments
- Responsive email design that adapts to the visitor's device
- Social media
- Messaging that fits the social community it targets
- Messaging that fits within small screen and message limits
- Social marketing programs that use the social network to spread the organization's message
- Apps and device capabilities
- Downloadable apps that take advantage of capabilities built-in to mobile devices such as coupons that appear when GeoIP detects you are near a store.
How you choose to radiate out and the priorities you set depend on your business model and customer needs. In general, email has the highest impact. For most organizations one of the most impactful first steps they can take in radiating is to find the needs of their customers and begin with consistent email focused on solving the problems of specific customer segments. This does not take a heavy time and resource involvement and can lead into more automated programs, as described in Chapter 9, Stage 5, Nurture. However, when you create your marketing and customer experience plan consider the cost of buying a system that has email segmentation and automation built-in compared to the cost of having to convert data and possibly lose subscribers if you move from a basic system to a connected one you will need next year.
After establishing email campaign capabilities most organizations add basic social capabilities using LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, or one of the other myriad of social networks that are most used by customers. The social marketing is needed to support your brand and to monitor your customer's thoughts and opinions.
The high growth of smartphone usage has created equivalent high growth in mobile Internet use and smartphone apps. What we see in our consulting with organizations worldwide is organizations moving up from their Stage 1 or Stage 2 “one size fits all” designs to designs that are mobile responsive so they can take immediate advantage of the growth in mobile internet access.
Benefits to Your Customer
The term customer-centric marketing should be a redundancy, but too often we see websites and digital marketing that are not customer-centric. Instead the website is oriented around the organization's products and delivery, and the digital marketing outreach is oriented to meet the organization's marketing silos. This should be sacrilege to marketers who care about their customers and about meeting objectives.
Using the processes described later in this chapter, you will be able to create experiences that are customer-centric. Your customers will benefit in multiple ways. Following the processes described in this chapter will ensure that your customers find content with topics that fit their personas or their customer segments and the stage they are at in their decision journey. Customers will move faster through the decision journey if they not only have the right content at the right time and in the preferred channel, but also if you have used calls to action and psychological triggers that help them identify their needs and make a decision.
When customers find what they are looking for and the message is relevant to their needs and stage, then they are much more likely to trust the message. It makes them aware that you understand them.
With customers using so many digital channels, it is important that you connect with your customers through the context that is most relevant to them. You want to connect through the right device, at the right time, and in the right format. Marketing messages should be in the primary channel used by a customer segment or persona.
You can see that a development strategy for Stage 2, Radiate, is not just about sending messages out through multiple channels. Rather, a more integrated strategy is to use all the channels together to build trust and commitment with your audience. With a family entertainment park, for example, managers can use their website to attract visitors and build interest. They can then use email to nurture visitors and inform them of coming events related to their interests. Social channels can be used to give testimonials and endorsements for how good it is and to show pictures of people having fun. And finally, when a visitor arrives smartphone users can find current events, performance information, and reserve tickets. It all works together to create a better customer experience.
Benefits to Your Organization
Organizations that use the processes described in this chapter benefit in two primary ways. They know what to focus their limited resources on, and they build marketing processes with more conversions, faster velocity, and higher advocacy.
Almost every marketing organization we've spoken with in the past three years has complained about its limited resources. When you have limited resources, you have to focus your work on those areas where you get the greatest leverage and impact. Following the process in this chapter helps you do that. We have found that Pareto's rule, 80/20, applies here as well. About 20 percent of the content and 20 percent of your marketing produce 80 percent of the results. This process identifies the 20 percent you need to focus on.
When you present your customers with the content they need at the time they need it and you prep their minds with a psychological trigger so they are ready for a specific call to action, then you have created great marketing. Your marketing is more engaging and more relevant.
So what happens to organizations that engage their customers and that become obsessed with being relevant? Research shows that engaged customers become advocates. As advocates, customers trust your organization and commit to a longer relationship. They gain by making better purchases because they trust the information about your products and services. They don't waste time or expense. It becomes a virtuous cycle that benefits both customer and organization.
As an organization, you win when your customers become advocates. Research shows that advocates are two to three times more effective than nonadvocates in persuading others to purchase.3 Other research shows that advocates give you immediate payback by spending twice as much as the average customer as well as sharing their recommendations two to four times more than an average customer.4
Process for Identifying Critical Content
The process described below is an excellent process to follow if you are developing a new site. For a new site the process will keep you focused on what is critical to success and help you use your limited resources wisely. If you have an existing site and are either moving it to a new technology or improving it using the same technology, the work you do in the following process will give you and your customers all the benefits described in the previous section.
The process described here builds the foundation for all customer-centric sites and digital marketing. This foundation requires:
- Customer segmentation or personas
- Decision journey
- Digital Relevancy Map (DRM)
- Content audit
If you aren't sure your marketing organization has a customer-centric orientation, you can be sure that working through this process will change marketing's frame of reference. In the following process you will:
- Identify your most important types of customers using either visitor segmentation or personas.
- Map your customer's journey discovering key junctions and decision points.
- Identify the content, needs, customer intent, and call to action for each customer and stage in the customer's journey.
- Identify the channel that is best for each customer and stage.
Identifying Your Customers and Visitors
You can't sell to everyone. That's a basic truism that every salesperson and marketer should know in his or her heart.
Most organizations have three or four principal types of people who are their target customers. Understanding these types is essential to connecting and engaging with them. You must know what are their needs and drivers, their psychological triggers, their intent at each stage in marketing, and how you can identify them. Two ways of identifying your customers are personas and customer segmentation.
You will be using customer segments (or personas, which are different) to identify the unique intent and need of each, the types of content that generate the most engagement, the types of messaging that build trust, and the paths each segment (or persona) takes.
Personas
Personas are miniature personality sketches that help marketers understand and know their customer types. Many large marketing organizations have already created personas to help marketers understand to whom they are marketing.
Personas are meant to convey real awareness of customers' behavior, not just explicit details that help identify them. Personas often include photos and describe personal attributes about their lifestyles, needs, and aspirations.
Personas and the behaviors they imply are very important to personalization in marketing. For more in-depth descriptions about mapping personas to content, see Chapter 8, Stage 4—Optimize.
Two very simple personas for the purpose of this chapter could be:
Eric
Eric is a “Family Adventurer.” He likes to travel with his wife Kathy and their two small children to exciting and educational locations. They are always looking for “good deals” in their travels and will wait for the right price. Both of them are full-time teachers. That means they have a large block of time available during school vacations.
Eric often searches the web together with Kathy for good travel deals using a few bookmarked websites and a lot of online searching. Many of the “good deals” they buy are through a few referral sites, which can be identified. They are especially interested in European travel to historic locations that are part of “family saver packages.”
Dean
Dean is the “Backpacker Traveler.” He is budget conscious, but young and adventurous, and could have a little risk taker in him. He is willing to stay in a wide range of accommodations ranging from tent camping, to hostels, to entry-level hotels. Although he carries everything in his backpack, he likes to get to an area and then stay for a few weeks as he explores all the local adventures.
Dean finds his next adventure by searching travel forums and looking through online adventure magazines. He works a lot by word of mouth, and it is difficult to market to him through normal marketing channels. However, once he trusts you as a source you're golden.
Customer Segmentation
Visitor segmentation groups potential prospects who have similar characteristics. These characteristics are identified more by explicit data. (Personas may use behavioral data for identification.) Customer segmentation is often done with explicit identifiers that can be found using traditional web analytics. For some web content management systems it is easy to create personalized content or marketing based on these explicit identifiers.
Some examples of explicit identifiers that could be used to segment customers are:
| GeoIP | Keywords | Internal search keywords |
| Traffic source | Referrer source | Campaigns |
| Landing page | Visit number | New visitor |
| Registration details |
Examples of visitor segments that use explicit identifiers are:
| Persona or Segment | Brief Description | Explicit Data |
| Newbie | New visitor | First visit PPC landing page Search engine |
| Returning visitor | Has visited the site at least one time in the past 30 days | Days since first visit PPC landing page Search engine |
| Interested visitor | Registered and downloaded special offer from campaign | Registration details Deep page views Email landing page |
| Purchaser | Has made a purchase on the site | Registration details Landing page Completed purchase |
To Do: Create Visitor Segments
Identify the characteristics of your three or four primary customer segments and write them in the following table. If you already have personas created, use them but complete the additional columns. This information will be essential for completing the Digital Relevancy Map, which is the culmination of this chapter. The companion website to this book has templates of many tables from the book. Please refer to www.ConnectTheExperience.com/templates.
| Segment Name | Characteristics | Identifiers | Primary Channel | Customer Intent | Content Example |
| Newbie (Example) | New to our experience No knowledge May need help and a special offer to register |
New visitor Days since first visit PPC landing page |
Search engine | Learn basics about what we have to offer compared to competitors | Home page experience that drives guest to learn pages |
| Visitor Segment 2 | |||||
| Visitor Segment 3 | |||||
| Visitor Segment 4 |
Planning Your Customer's Journey
All customers take paths through the experiences you provide. The customer journey may involve wandering through your website, absorbing newsletter content, participating in a social media event, or many other paths. This wandering creates a customer journey that if done correctly ends with you achieving your marketing objective and the customer engaging with you as a lifetime customer. It's important to understand each stage of this journey, so you can evaluate whether you have the right channel, right message, and right content for each stage. If you are missing one of these touch points or it is wrong, then it is time to create new marketing and new content to assist your customer in making a favorable decision.
Most customer journeys look something like Figure 6.2.
Figure 6.2 Customer Journey Map
Importantly, the customer journey map highlights what we need to deliver to meet visitors' needs or to shorten, accelerate, or reinforce their journey. There may be different journeys for each of your important visitor segments. Some segments may enter at a different point on the journey; for example, a business analyst might enter at the beginning to do research, whereas a manager might enter at the decision stage after having read a report from the analyst.
The customer journey map can also show us the failure points, the places where marketing fails. While marketers might like to think of visitors moving through a marketing funnel from first contact to becoming a qualified lead, few marketing funnels move the visitor on a straight path. Many paths involve longer-term involvement with repeating cycles of nurture, test, modify, and repeat. Each time through this cycle, the visitor is given the opportunity and motivation to move closer to completing the commitment. This repeating cycle enables customers to enter with a low level of risk and engagement and take baby steps, gradually increasing their engagement and commitment at a comfortable rate.
These nurture/test/reward cycles should be built so that visitors are nurtured to a point where the marketer can give them a test of commitment—for example, a discount coupon in exchange for a registration with a detailed personal profile. If the visitors complete that profile, they pass the test and get their reward of a discount coupon. If they don't complete the profile, they fall back into the previous nurture path. This gradually increasing cycle builds with more commitment needed and greater rewards until the visitor is fully committed.
To Do: Map Your Customer Journey
Work with your marketing team to identify the typical journey for your customers. A good way to do this is to gather six or eight experienced channel marketers, marketing strategists, salespeople, and customer services people in a conference room with stacks of large Post-it Notes. Use the Post-it Notes to brainstorm and rearrange customer journey maps until you come to one that works for your major visitor segments.
Do not make a customer journey that is too complex. You will be creating content for each stage in the journey and each visitor segment. If you have four visitor segments and five stages in the journey, then there will be 20 distinct content-context cells. It quickly multiplies into an overwhelming amount of work. So make it real, but keep it simple.
What stages in the customer journey do your marketers use to envision customer or visitor movement? This is a sample of one possible customer journey.
| Stage | Description |
| Awareness | Customer becomes aware of us, considers working with us, and wants to learn more. |
| Research | Customer is researching and comparing products, narrowing down the choices. |
| Compare | Customer is planning the purchase and selecting options. |
| Decide | Customer makes the decision to commit. |
| Purchase | Customer commits and returns to website to manage the delivery and ongoing engagements. |
Some other customer journeys might look like the following:
By mapping the customer's start point, intentions at each stage, and end point, we can better understand the customer journey through the site and marketing touch points. Once we know these paths, we can shape the customer's path through the site and ensure that the most relevant content and the most powerful calls to action are more visible. You will have a chance to do this at the end of this chapter in the Digital Relevancy Map.
It's Not Just Content; It's Also Context
In decades past, marketers controlled the context of their message. They knew with 80 percent certainty that their prospective customers would be watching a specific television show or standing at a bus stop and reading a billboard. Often it wasn't just the location context that was assumed. Often marketers assumed everyone was at the top of the funnel, so everyone was served content written for the top of the funnel. It was up to the sales force to bring customers through the rest of the sales journey. Those days are in the past.
Context also implies location and stage in the customer journey. Twenty-seven percent of customers use a mobile device when researching a product or service online.5 Estimates are that by 2015 there will be more people using mobile than desktop Internet access.6
Even with that type of pressure for mobile marketing, most organizations have still not adapted as well as you might think. Our research, outlined in Chapter 4, shows that 52 percent of websites still need to be optimized for mobile users. It is next to impossible for customers in any industry to have a good experience if they are looking at a desktop website through a handheld mobile device.
The mobile context also changes how content is served. Mobile devices have many screen resolutions and capabilities. Putting your content into the wrong format or using videos that are inaccessible could lose many of your customers.
Another context you must be aware of is the customer's context within the decision journey. A customer just entering the journey has completely different needs and intent than a customer ready to make a final commitment. If you serve the wrong content at the wrong stage in the customer journey, you could lose or slow down a customer.
Examples of reaching out to customers to give them the experience and solutions they need abound in both small and large companies. Some of our large B2B customers are using mobile sites so their customers' field engineers can go to the mobile site, look for a solution that fits very specific engineering requirements, and order it online. A more local example is the successful owner of a lawn care business checked a photo sent to his iPhone by one of his crew 40 miles away. The owner then researched the hard-to-find irrigation part on his iPhone, called the supplier, and had the part waiting for his repair crew to pick up. He was beating his competitors with great quality work and timely service, all made possible by adapting to a customer-centric mobile experience. The world is changing for every type of organization. You must adapt.
Creating the Digital Relevancy Map
The Sitecore Digital Relevancy Map (DRM) is a framework that shows the content appropriate for each of your major visitors' segments at each stage in their customer journey. The DRM is useful for all organizations. It is a way to optimize the experience for your customers.
We created the Digital Relevancy Map as a framework for mapping the intent and context of customers as they move through the different stages of their decision journey. The DRM has been invaluable in our consulting.
A few of the advantages of mapping your content with a DRM are that it:
- Focuses marketing's work on the 20 percent of content that does 80 percent of the work.
- Focuses content developers on the customer's intent, need, and call to action for each piece of content.
- Reduces “random acts of content.”
- Identifies missing pieces of information.
- Accelerates customers through their journey.
- Helps identify where and what to test when there are leaks in the customer journey.
The DRM is a large table. Down the left side of the table are names for each of your visitor segments or personas. Across the top of the table are the stages of the customer journey. This produces a matrix of cells, with one cell for each visitor segment and stage in the customer journey.
Your DRM will be unique to your organization. It should use your visitor segments and the stages in your customer journey. Once it is filled in it will contain descriptions that are very specific to your website and marketing.
Using Analytics to Assist in Building the DRM
Traditional web analytics can be used to discover and validate explicit metrics and criteria that define customer segments. In most cases an experienced analyst will already have a good idea which criteria will produce customer segments with good results.
If you are already using Experience Analytics, as defined in Chapter 7, Stage 3—Align, and you have identified high-interest visitor segments or personas, then creating the DRM will be easier.
To Do: Create Your Digital Relevancy Map
After you complete the earlier exercises in this chapter, create the following table using your visitor segments down the left side and the stages in your customer journey across the top. The companion website to this book has templates of many tables from the book. Please refer to www.ConnectTheExperience.com/templates.
| Acquire | Research | Purchase | Advocate | |
| Visitor Segment 1 | Intent: Attract attention. Pique interest. | Intent: Browsing solutions. Will I use it? Is it cool? | Intent: Is this the best choice? Compare alternatives. | Intent: Spread the word how great it is! (How cool you are!) |
| How Can Intent Be Revealed?: Nonbranded keywords, PPC general ads, browsing pages on site | How Can Intent Be Revealed?: Branded keywords, PPC deep ads, focus on specific pages, response to email | How Can Intent Be Revealed?: Direct URL, feature and comparison tables, pricing, store locator | How Can Intent Be Revealed?: Social sharing, forward offers | |
| Touch Points: Search, PPC | Touch Points: Search, PPC, email, social | Touch Points: Email nurture, social, nurture, custom direct mail | Touch Points: Social, email share | |
| Their Objective: Discovery | Their Objective: Narrow alternatives | Their Objective: Am I sure? | Their Objective: Help friends, gain status | |
| Our Objective: Create awareness and interest | Our Objective: Imagine themselves in the experience, create desire, unique selling proposition | Our Objective: Reduce friction | Our Objective: Spread the word. You can do it! | |
| Persuasive Content Needed: Increase interest, high-energy adventure videos that trigger experiences, accessible info, everyone can do it | Persuasive Content Needed: Experience video, average guy shots, image shots, event tie-ins | Persuasive Content Needed: Testimonials, “Never thought I would, but I love it!,” images of product with major players | Persuasive Content Needed: Share the experience. Join the fun! | |
| Visitor Segment 2 | Intent: | Intent: | Intent: | Intent: |
| How Can Intent Be Revealed?: | How Can Intent Be Revealed?: | How Can Intent Be Revealed?: | How Can Intent Be Revealed?: | |
| Touch Points: | Touch Points: | Touch Points: | Touch Points: | |
| Their Objective: | Their Objective: | Their Objective: | Their Objective: | |
| Our Objective: | Our Objective: | Our Objective: | Our Objective: | |
| Persuasive Content Needed: | Persuasive Content Needed: | Persuasive Content Needed: | Persuasive Content Needed: |
Here are tips on the items in each cell.
Intent. What is the customer's intent at this point? What do we need to do to help customers reach their goals? Take each customer segment and outline the path they should take through information and goals. The aim is to reinforce the customers' intent with decisions that move them to the next stage in the customer journey. Some examples of intent are:
- Does it fit my price/need?
- Is this the best choice?
- Do I qualify?
- How does this compare?
How Can Intent Be Revealed? What can be used to identify the customer's intent? Are there explicit or implicit behaviors that will reveal the user's intent? Some examples of how the intention can be revealed are:
- Keywords
- Topics or product sections in the site
- Use of an online calculator
- Pages selected
- Campaign entered with
Touch Points. What are the different touch points where the customer is touched by marketing? Can the customer connection be personalized at these touch points?
- Website
- Mobile
- Point of sale
Their Objective. What do customers want to accomplish at the website? What are they looking for?
- Check out of the shopping cart.
- Find a specific product.
- Find ratings.
- Compare to a competitor.
Our Objectives. What do we want customers to do? Where do we want them to move to in their decision journey?
- Compare our product with a competitor and select our product.
- Register for product offers.
- Complete the shopping cart transaction.
- Refer a friend to the site through social connections.
Persuasive Content Needed. What is the information, download asset, video, or page that the customer needs at this point? What is appropriate content for each customer segment? This content can also be used to help identify content used in personalization for this customer segment at this stage. Some examples of content are:
- White papers or articles
- Webinars
- Testimonials or quotes
- Calculators
- Product information pages
Identifying Content to Match the DRM
Once you have completed your Digital Relevancy Map, you need to identify the content that goes into each cell. This is a fun exercise for new websites.
If you have an existing site, the audit of content and positioning of each page or asset in the DRM can work. But here's a tip. The DRM is used to help you identify the content that is most important to your customers and their journey. You can use that concept in reverse to fill in the DRM.
If you have Experience Analytics as described in Chapter 7, Stage 3—Align, then create reports showing the pages and assets that produce the highest value. If you can segment by your customer segments, then do so. Use these high-value lists to identify the content for each cell in your DRM.
If you have not yet created an Engagement Value Scale, as described in Chapter 7, use traditional analytics to identify the pages that have the highest visits or the pages and assets related to the most conversions. If you can segment by customer segments, then do so. Use these high-visit/high-conversion lists to identify the content for your DRM.
There are other ways in which the DRM can help you tailor content to your customers. A good example is the mobile experience. Depending on your type of business, a high percentage of your mobile users are using your content differently from desktop users. Chester Zoo is an excellent example of a customer experience that depends on the context. Customers planning their trips use the desktop website to research and buy travel arrangements and tickets. However, once they are close to Chester Zoo, they are using mobile. While in the mobile context they are looking for schedules and locations that are in the immediate vicinity. The content and context are completely different. How would your customer like to use your products, services, and knowledge if they could access them while they were mobile?
Before you start building your mobile site, begin with a Digital Relevancy Map. The intent, content, and call to action will almost assuredly be different, and that can change your complete mobile site design.
Breaking Barriers
Having done the DRM process, we can tell you that it has elements that are a lot of fun and parts that are a hard slog. The identification of visitor segments and team discussions around intent produces a lot of insightful discussion and deeper understanding. The opposite side is that auditing the content of an existing website to determine the content you have and how it fits in the DRM can be a difficult job. Given how helpful the DRM is once complete, it is a job worth doing well.
Moving to a Higher Level of Marketing
The creation of a DRM will move your marketing team to a higher level of customer-centric marketing. One of the most important things the DRM will help you with is focusing. If you are consistent about checking the DRM before creating or posting new content, you will stop the dreaded “Random Acts of Marketing.” The DRM also helps you with gap analysis, showing you content that is missing for a specific customer segment at a specific stage in their Customer Life Cycle.
Knowing You Have Arrived
Once you have completed the DRM, it will be easier to identify where content is missing and where you need to add new content. The DRM is truly a map for how to get your visitors to your most important conversions.
Part of your internal work flow should be to add to the DRM and new content and assets. There will always be some content, such as Help and About Us, that is not part of the DRM, but that must remain as part of the infrastructure. If you can't identify where on the DRM new content should go, then you should question whether it is important.
You can use the DRM as a map for tracking loss rate and acceleration of visitors through the visitor journey. To do that, have your digital analyst segment data by visitor segments. Then the analyst should track the number of visitors and conversions at each stage. In this case a stage might consist of a specific goal conversion, or goals combined with number of visits, and so on. By comparing the rate of change between stages, you can see where visitors are accelerating, where they are slowing down, and where they are leaking.
At the Radiate stage you may make significant improvements with the addition of a mobile website and content that is tailored to mobile users and context. Moving into social channels may reveal new visitor segments and new channels for marketing. You should monitor the existing conversations and groups in social channels and learn how you can create connections to these groups. Watch for changes in attitude and sentiment through social channels, as these channels will give you more immediate feedback on your customers' feelings.