Chapter 2
The New Marketing Mandate
To go far you must begin near, and the nearest step is the most important one.
—Jiddu Krishnamurti
Welcome to the age of mass personalized service.
The new frontier in marketing is not just for the Amazon.coms of the world; it's for all marketers. With today's technology, all marketers can connect with their customers. Investing in technology that helps you focus on optimizing the customer experience should be top of mind. It's affordable and it has a proven effect on improving business results. To get started most effectively, you need to focus on certain initiatives.
Key Initiatives
With the New Marketing Mandate comes change. There are specific initiatives that must happen to transform your organization from a traditional marketing organization to a leading-edge one where the marketing organization is a key business driver and has an important stake in strategic decisions.
Metrics
Yesterday's technology made it difficult for marketers to access the numbers they needed to optimize their marketing. Marketers for too long relied on metrics like website visits, time on site, and page views for reporting success. Advertising was limited to metrics like impressions, frequency, and click-through rates when reporting and trying to justify its spend. There simply was no other way to get metrics and numbers that were more relevant to business objectives.
The biggest challenge with these metrics is that they don't have a direct relationship to business objectives. Because of that, they don't engage executive decision makers. Marketers have heard a patronizing, “That's nice, Joe—50,000 more visits this month; keep up the good work,” when they should have instead heard, “A $1,094,342 increase in revenue this month. That's great! How can we optimize that further? What do you need to do to hit the next target, Joe?”
A key initiative that needs to happen is changing the metrics of yesterday to what really matters. We need to have a timely, relevant metric that closely correlates to our strategic objectives so the impact on business is easy to understand and recommendations are easy to make. When we work with organizations, we help them establish this metric by first identifying the most important strategic and marketing objectives. Then we identify the digital goals that drive those objectives, and create the metric that correlates with success. In Chapter 7, we dive into the metric of the future, Engagement Value, and walk through what this can do for your organization.
Customer Life Cycle Engagement
The key to building customer advocates is understanding them, their intent, what motivates them, and stages in their Customer Life Cycle (CLC). To effectively do this, you need to establish an understanding of your customer's life cycle across all your organization's business units and stakeholders. Too much focus has been only on getting to the end of the sales funnel. There should be focus on all the stages and beyond. Buying the product or service is when the real experience starts for the customer. If you don't focus on educating customers to get the most value from your brand, how can you expect them to return for repeat business and become vocal advocates?
Typical phases in the Customer Life Cycle are:
- Decision journey
- Educate
- Use
- Share
Each phase has different stages and objectives. These should be customized so they map as closely as possible to the actual stages your customers travel. What follows is a generic description of each phase of the Customer Life Cycle.
Decision Journey
The key objective in the decision journey is to get the customer to purchase your products or services. As part of the decision journey, the customers typically go through stages like need, awareness, research, compare, decide, and purchase. Along these stages, you would have micro objectives, like getting their email details or having the customers consume certain content or getting them to provide needed details, which will help the customers move forward in the decision journey. When considering these stages, it's also worth looking at the different touch points, so you can plan how you can connect different channels during the decision journey. As customers move forward in the decision journey, their intent and motivation to share data change, and the better your marketing can adapt to those changes, the more relevant the customer's experience will be.
Educate
The key objective of the educate phase is building knowledge, so customers are more aware of how to better use your products and services. For example, if they have booked a vacation, the education phase could be preparing them with tour tips or teaching them how to get the best experience at the airport or in the plane. Another example might be if they have just bought new premium headphones; then the education phase gives them the best advice for becoming familiar with the product. It's true even for services. For example, if someone is going to a doctor appointment, the doctor's staff should want to make sure the patient understands the entire process, where to park, what papers need to be signed, what will happen, what the follow-up will be, and so forth. For every type of customer and product/service relationship, there is an education phase.
The educate phase can be divided into smaller stages, like onboarding, advice, and training. Each of these small stages will have objectives related to making sure that the customers engage and share knowledge internally with their stakeholders.
Use
The key objective of the use phase is to help your customers get the most value out of your products or services. Unlike the educate phase, which focuses on the first period after the purchase, the use phase helps the customer discover how to best use the product or services after initially onboarding.
The use phase is where customers experience your brand, via your product and services. Great experiences come from a mix of excellent support and perceived value through using the product or service. Typical increments in the use phase are discover, support, experience, and value. The primary objective is to obtain increased value from the experience with your product or service.
Share
The key objective of the share phase is getting your customers to be vocal both in terms of feeding insights back to your organization as well as advocating about your brand (giving you increased reach).
If customers perceive your product or service as valuable and a great experience, then they are more likely to share the experience with their peers. In the share stage it's important that you both encourage and facilitate what is needed to collect the feedback and allow customers to be vocal. Stages within the share phase are typically feedback, share, and advocate.
Customer Lifetime Value
Moving customers all the way through the life cycle will not only increase their Customer Lifetime Value (CLV), but it will also increase the CLVs of new customers, as the increase in brand advocates lowers the acquisition costs for new customers.
Once you map the Customer Life Cycle (CLC), your next task is to look at your different customer segments and for each segment map their journey throughout the CLC. You must understand their different needs and motives.
In Chapter 6 we give examples on how to work with Customer Life Cycles and map different customer segments to the CLC. The tool we use to map the CLC and customer groups is called the Digital Relevancy Map.
Contextualization
The third initiative is owning the experience. Customer experience is key to engaging customers and moving them forward in the decision journey and their life cycles. Customers are going to have experiences with or without your help. The question is whether those experiences will be intentional or unintentional. As a marketer, if you want intentional customer experiences, you need to own the experience. To do that, you need contextualization—the ability to change the customer's experience to meet the customer's context of need, stage, access device, and more. As the customer moves across different channels, it's important that the experience remains connected and you continue a relevant conversation across all channels.
The more you are able to adapt to the changing customer context and provide a more relevant experience across all channels, the closer connection the customer will have to your brand and offers.
Working with contextualization requires a staged approach. First it's a matter of connecting the channels that the customer uses the most and using simple tactics to maintain the context across these channels. Later it's making sure that marketing has a single view of the customer, a view that crosses all offline and online channels in real time. In Chapter 8, Optimize, we cover how to get started with contextualization.
Organizational Buy-In
The last key to success requires getting key executives on board and having them as motivated sponsors. Creating a connected experience requires buy-in and change from many organizational units because customers have many touch points with your organization. To execute and sustain that cross-organizational change requires motivation, planning, new processes, and new attitudes in business units outside of marketing. That requires buy-in at key executive positions.
Chapter 5 describes approaches to making change happen in marketing and across the entire organization. In Chapter 12, we cover different roles needed for this change, and in Chapter 13 we focus on how you can sell this to the executives and board.
Don't Boil the Ocean
Adapting the New Marketing Mandate and the initiatives needed to make it happen introduce disciplines and processes that may be new to your organization.
Although the opportunities are many with these new disciplines and processes, there are also risks. Too often we have seen projects that became too complex even before being launched. This is especially true when planning for connected experiences. With contextualization there is a risk of over complicating the discussion resulting in paralysis by analysis.
It's important to start with quick wins that are informed by data. Start with contextualization opportunities where there is a big potential, typically looking at a high volume of visitors that were lost opportunities. These can produce high gains at low marginal effort, giving you a quick win and valuable know-how for deeper contextualization. Quick wins are also a great way to gain momentum and boost motivation for your new disciplines and processes.
Agile Approach for Marketing
With inspiration from agile development, marketing organizations should consider how they can adopt similar benefits of using an agile approach. In short, agile development methodology has allowed teams of developers to break their large complex projects into smaller, more manageable chunks, and allows them to be more responsive to changing needs. Similarly an agile approach to marketing would allow teams to respond to constantly shifting market conditions, by making smaller and more rapid iterations instead implementing large, complex programs that take a long time to execute and have a high risk of failure. When building connected and relevant experiences with your customers, it's important to foster an agile culture that will accelerate your speed to market. Marketing should have the mandate to launch new initiatives as trends occur and to test different experiences to see what is most effective. This also means that marketing will launch experiences that will underperform, but that is fine as long as marketing remains agile and can stop those initiatives, use the knowledge, and launch new and better experiences.
Transforming marketing into an agile organization will be incremental and needs to be heavily backed by data-driven decisions.
Investing Where It's Needed
Investments are needed to get these new initiatives launched (typically there won't be a budget), as these are new disciplines. You should start with investments in digital marketing, as this is the enabler of connected experiences, but remember that customer experiences are across your entire organization. As your entire organization focuses on customer experience and return on investment (ROI) increases, so will investments across the organization.
Areas where you probably need to invest more are:
- Processes needed to map the Customer Life Cycle and correlate strategic objectives with marketing and digital objectives
- Contextualization (starting with the most important channels)
- Building the single view of the customer, connecting data from different repositories
- Actionable analytics
To find funds, you may need to reallocate your budgets. Some areas where you may want to reduce investment are:
- Broadcast or mass marketing (advertising and email blasts that are not targeted)
- Digital platforms that can be consolidated to integrate a limited number of channels
- Siloed marketing initiatives
Breaking through the Biggest Barriers to Marketing Success
To take the first step, it's important that you are willing and capable of breaking through some of the typical barriers to getting started. Remember, it's all about aligning people, process, and technology.
People
Changing the status quo from business as usual is not an easy task. Changing the marketing mind-set from launch-and-forget marketing to an agile, customer-centric and data-driven approach is a big change in mind-set. Like the rest of your life, you need great partners helping you along this journey. You need a mix of advocates, internal resources, and external resources that can bring together the know-how and guidance to start correctly. You need partners who are experienced and have done this type of work before.
Invest in people, first to make them realize the new opportunities at hand, and second to help them get started on this journey.
Process
If you want to build connected customer experiences that build lifetime customers, you must focus on using well-established processes that are battle tested. You don't want to blaze a new path and have to relearn best practices that are already proven.
Throughout this book, we provide different sets of processes, designed and presented to take your marketing competency to the next higher level. We provide examples, checklists, and frameworks that can be used as guidance to overcoming the process barrier.
Technology
Even though technology is the enabler of connected experiences, it can also be a barrier—especially with legacy platforms or too many platforms. The best way to start is by focusing on the customer touch points that are controlled through a connected platform. Typically these start with web, mobile, and email.
You should also consider the required speed to market, how the system will scale, how fast you can develop new skills, and your dependence on information technology (IT). While using the cloud for hosting your platform and data allows marketing to scale campaigns and rapidly launch new marketing initiatives, bear in mind they need to be deeply connected and not more silos of customer data.
There are many roads to take and many changes to make, but change is needed to connect with your customers, widen connection across channels, and create a connected experience.
We wrote this book to give you guidance on taking the first step toward the New Marketing Mandate. To help you on this exciting journey, we created a step-by-step Customer Experience Maturity Model that can be used as a road map and can help with the proper process.
Subsequent chapters describe the different stages of a Customer Experience Maturity Model, which highlight the issues you need to consider in each stage, with sections for people, process, technology, and barriers.