Marketing: Crash Course

Marketing is not the same as advertising. You could debate endlessly the definitions of marketing and advertising, but that is a fruitless effort and life is too short. Here is a definition of marketing that works for me: Marketing is the process and set of activities for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offers that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large. By offers, I don't just mean “Half price through the weekend.” Offer refers to any attribute of any thing that the marketer enhances and chooses to emphasize as a way of representing value.

At the risk of revealing my age, marketers have long talked about the marketing mix, which represents a collection of product attributes. Classic marketing focuses on the four Ps of the marketing mix: product, price, promotion, and place (distribution). As a marketer, these are the four classic levers you can work to drive your marketing strategy. Different strategies may emphasize one lever or another. In more recent years the four Ps have been expanded to as many as seven and the P has been replaced by a C. And the variations don't stop there. For the purposes of this book, though, the four Ps work well.

One other distinction I want to make is between traditional and digital marketing. Here the distinction mostly reflects the media represented. Digital implies electronic or computerized. The primary digital channels include: social, website, mobile and mobile apps, search engine optimization (SEO), and e-mail. The list of digital channels continues to grow with the inclusion of virtual reality, augmented reality, and more, including some not fully envisioned yet.

By way of comparison, the traditional channels include radio, television, mail, billboards, and face-to-face (which usually takes the form of a human sales rep, but it can also include an encounter at a trade show, convention, or conference).

One of the advantages of digital channels is that the product and the message are, by definition, digitized. That means they can be read by computers and, under various circumstances, enhanced by them, too.

Importance of Brand

You can't talk about marketing without talking about brand. A brand is more than just a logo. A brand is typically associated with a specific organization or company and connotes certain attributes, qualities, and capabilities. Marketers can invest enormous amounts of money to create, design, define, establish, promote, and then protect their brand. The best-marketed brands are those that establish an emotional connection with people.

This emotional connection with your brand directly impacts the customer experience. There is a reason people prefer brand name products over the cheaper generic versions. It's this sense of relationship and reputation between the brand and customers that makes it so enormously valuable to the company. Think about the first time you had to buy paper towels for your own apartment. You'd just moved out of your parents' house, you were completely broke, and felt torn between Bounty, the trusted, quicker picker-upper regularly stocked above your childhood home's kitchen sink, and the generic brand that was a few dollars cheaper. Chances are, you pitched the pack of Bounty into your cart and justified it by telling yourself you'd make one less coffee run at work the next week. That's the power of a great brand.

Brands are everywhere and have been for over a century. The Sears catalog was a household brand back in America's pioneer days. Ford was established as a leading auto brand early in the twentieth century. The company that became IBM was founded in 1911 as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company. Later it became International Business Machines. And today we know it as IBM. Brand identities can morph into something else, but it is a hard trick to pull off. (Full disclosure: In the spring of 2016 IBM purchased Bluewolf. We're not expecting to change the Bluewolf brand except to the extent it evolves naturally as we tap into IBM's other capabilities as we continue to serve our customers.)

Brand-based marketing predates the digital era by decades. However, digital has fundamentally changed the nature of how people buy. In short, people research the products they are considering to buy extensively before they make their decision. They have read the reviews online. They have seen the product sheets and technical details. They have reviewed competitive analyses. They have seen and heard about the best, most viral products via social media. Your customers are doing so much research prior to a sale that it's imperative to make sure your brand is well known and well represented in the digital marketplace. People don't even have to break a sweat to shop or compare prices on the go. They just type your name and product into Google, and find more than you probably imagine is out there—the good, the bad, and the ugly. It's your job to maximize the good and minimize the bad and ugly. The primary vehicle for this is content related to your brand. Your brand speaks through all content, whether it's produced by your company or someone else. All of that content—company blogs, white papers, reviews, social tags, sentiments of others—has an inordinate impact on brand perceptions.

The trick to succeeding in digital marketing is to establish your voice, have a clear point of view, and then maintain it and protect it. Bluewolf made a point to do that early on, and one of our biggest moves to support that goal has been our annual The State of Salesforce report. When we first published the report, Salesforce wasn't enthusiastic. Rather than providing a shining endorsement, we provided an accurate, unflinching analysis of the software-as-a-service (SaaS) market and Salesforce's position within it. We weren't afraid to take control of messaging around cloud and SaaS, despite competing with consulting giants like Deloitte. Call it chutzpah mixed with fearlessness, but the result of this ambition has been huge market influence as our findings are used again and again by industry leaders all over the world. Our efforts with The State of Salesforce have inspired numerous spinoffs. Salesforce itself released its first “State of Marketing” report in 2016. What can your company do to differentiate its voice from the competition?

When it comes to brand content, too often marketing departments focus on the final stages of the sales funnel before closing, to the detriment of landing potential clients still in the early inquiry phase. At Bluewolf, our CMO, Corinne Sklar, urges her team to focus not only on the opportunities close to conversion but also the lead time required to turn inquiries into genuine interest. Bluewolf's demand funnel integrates sales and marketing with a pronounced focus on handoff points between the two departments. The funnel attempts to leverage all of the native functionality in the system, which reduces the work the inside sales team would have to do to reinvent content we already had. Finally, our marketing team fine-tunes Bluewolf's return-on-investment strategy since sales for the solution provider are typically complex and involve multiple influencers and points of contact at the end-user company. Bluewolf's model, however, tracks which marketing tactics are touching end users at different points in the sales process and assesses their effectiveness. This allows us to tweak our process to ensure money is being allocated to the activities most likely to generate a return.

Most organizations think the goal of marketing is to convert prospects into customers. That's a good start, but it's not enough. Your goal should be to convert customers into advocates for your brand. Are people tweeting about you, blogging about you, tagging you on Instagram, and Snapchatting themselves using your product or service? That means extending what you are doing to not just cultivating customers but actively cultivating advocates. This is not difficult to do when you have learned the trick. At Bluewolf we've broken it down into three simple steps:

1. Find out how your customers want to be engaged.

   When someone becomes a new customer, be sure to thank and welcome them. With all of the marketing noise out there, it's essential to show your appreciation for their business. But don't stop there. Develop a cadence of personalized messaging based on their experience with your brand. Consider even asking customers how they want to engage with you. This can be achieved through a subscription-management strategy. Discover what they want to gain from being your customer.

2. Develop personalized engagement plans.

   As your relationships with your customers grow, track their activity patterns. Monitor how they choose to interact with your brand by taking into account both their demographic and engagement data. Not all customers should be treated the same or want to be treated the same. Identify different customer types and develop a personalized engagement plan to increase customer satisfaction. These engagement plans can morph into instances of customer advocacy, but definitely take your cue from the customer.

3. Deliver what your customers want from you.

   Discover what they are hoping to gain as customers of your brand, and then identify how you can help them get the most out of their experience. As you get to know your customers in a more personalized and intimate way, make it a goal to proactively engage them. It's not enough just to keep up with customers' demands in today's hyperconnected global marketplace. You have to know what your customers want before they do to ensure long-term engagement. This way, you'll be well equipped to align your brand with your customers' success by demonstrating your investment in their future goals or aspirations.

A few more suggestions for encouraging customer advocacy: Know what they might like to do and tie ideas for advocacy to the customer's measurable business objectives. Help your clients answer the question, “How can I help our brand most?” Notice I wrote our brand because they, indeed, have a stake in the success of the brand, too. Of course, start small and then scale up. For most companies, advocacy programs are the focus of a single department—and that's a great start. As programs grow, integrate them into every initiative and campaign, then implement them across the organization so sales, service, and marketing all have a role in building a community of customer advocates.

The Customer Journey

As with much of what I preach, let's start with data. As I noted previously, digital is king, and the customer experience is the crown jewel. Marketing leaders today already are embracing these two truths as evidenced in the latest The State of Salesforce study. For instance: successful marketers are connecting with customers in new ways across mobile, e-mail, social, and the web. In the study, 73 percent say a customer journey strategy has positively impacted overall customer engagement, making it the second biggest priority for marketers this year.

Although I generally try to downplay technology, sometimes you just can't avoid it. Among The State of Salesforce respondents, the top teams are more likely to extensively use marketing analytics and predictive intelligence among other tools as they seek to bridge the gaps between marketing, sales, and service. Of the top performers 64 percent say they are excellent at creating a single view of the customer, versus only 4 percent of underperformers. Along the same lines, leading marketers also understand the value of a cross-channel approach. In fact, top teams are 3.2 times more likely than underperformers to strongly agree they've integrated their social media activity into their overall marketing strategy; 3.4 times more likely to integrate e-mail marketing; and 5 times more likely for mobile marketing. Among high performers who have integrated their digital marketing channels with their overall marketing, at least 95 percent rate the integrations as very effective or effective.

Did you think mobile was a passing fad? Not The State of Salesforce leaders. From 2015 to 2016, every aspect of mobile covered in this research rose significantly in usage. This growth encompasses both mobile as a marketing platform (such as mobile apps) and mobile as a marketing channel (such as SMS). This amounts to 98 percent growth in mobile app usage and 111 percent growth in SMS usage; a majority of marketers are now using these mainstream mobile tactics to engage customers. To make a great one-two punch, marketers are combining e-mail personalization capabilities even as they grow more sophisticated and the channel becomes ever more integral for marketers to deliver a holistic customer journey. Top teams are 4.2 times more likely than underperformers to leverage predictive intelligence or data science to create personalized e-mails, while 49 percent of marketers say e-mail is directly linked to their business's primary revenue source—a notable jump from the 20 percent of marketers who said the same in 2015 (Figure 11.1).

In 2015, three of the top five areas where marketers planned to increase their spending involved social outlets. Those investments appear to be paying off; 75 percent of marketing leaders report that social is generating return on investment (ROI). Top teams are also 1.7 times more likely than underperformers to align their social media marketing strategy with other social activities, such as customer service, in pursuit of a more unified customer view. So it should be no surprise that nearly two-thirds of marketers are boosting budgets for advertising on social platforms in 2016, making it the third largest area for increased investment. Among high performers, 80 percent will increase spending on advertising on social platforms. In order to create a unique experience based on real customer identity, 83 percent of top teams use customer data (such as e-mail or phone data) to segment or target ads.

By now you're pretty deep into this book. (Thank you for sticking with me.) How many times have I harped on customer obsession and the customer journey? I hope you're not sick of it yet, because it's important. Let me reiterate that message in yet another way: Customers expect a personalized and consistent experience with brands, across all channels and departments. As enterprises race to deliver those seamless digital customer experiences, they're realizing that technology only takes them part of the way to those customer moments, while every touch point drives deeper engagement and repeat business. In fact, 82 percent of marketers say customer engagement is a key success metric for their role; maybe the only metric ahead of that would be customer satisfaction or repeat business.

So how do you stimulate customer engagement? It starts with something I've said numerous times in this book: Dig into your data; not just superficial data, the easy demographic and company data. No, dig into all of the data you have collected from every customer touch point to create a meaningful persona profile. If data is still locked in corporate silos, break them down right now, even if you have to tap a C-level champion to get access to it. You need to get not only marketing's data, but data from accounting, sales, tech support, and training—everywhere the organization and customer intersect. And much of this data is unstructured. The end result is more than a single view of the customer—that's only the foundation, and honestly, no one ever looks at the proverbial 360-degree view of a customer anyhow. Rather, the end result is a prescriptive action that guides an end user, and employee, toward what we call “an extraordinary customer moment.”

Marketing Campaigns (or, How You Structure and Measure Your Marketing Initiatives)

Now that I have beaten you up about the customer experience and customer obsession, are you ready to adjust your marketing campaigns? In the recent past, marketers would almost automatically focus their campaign on building brand or product awareness among their target customers. Others might direct their campaigns to generate inquiries or even direct sales. These are perfectly valid marketing goals. A few more leading-edge marketers might aim their campaigns to support their digital brand image online or directly engage their customers and prospects in online interactive activities and gamification. The goal is to begin building the personal relationship from the start in a way that can be directed toward your desired business outcomes.

Another option is to revise your approach to the conventional marketing funnel. Too often, marketing departments are focused on the final stages before closing. We've talked about this earlier, but we can be more specific here. Successful businesses focus on the early stages of the sales cycle. After all, not all prospects are ready for your message when they first encounter it. Some need to let ideas percolate for a while. In the meantime, which may be weeks or even months, you can use digital marketing and social media to engage their interest in various ways with appropriate content. This is called a nurturing strategy. The idea is to focus not only on the opportunities close to conversion but also on the lead time required to turn inquiries into genuine interest. For this you may send selected pieces of content along with ideas that might be of interest periodically over months or even two or three years. The length of the nurture campaign doesn't matter since all you are sending are well-targeted, personalized e-mail messages, not spam. As you learn more about this prospect, you will be able to nudge him or her closer toward becoming an active prospect able to move to a conversion track. This type of demand funnel entails close collaboration between sales and marketing as they work hot and not-so-hot prospects (see Figure 11.2). This is yet another reason to eliminate silos.

As it turns out, we're really talking about a new marketing process. There are so many points of contact between prospects and your marketing efforts that this model, the nurture approach, focuses on the time between the first touch point and genuine interest, which could be a few years. To make this work, constant monitoring of sentiment is essential. This is how you pick up the evolving mind-set of the prospect you are nurturing. Watson, for example, takes a daily dump of all Twitter feeds, which can then be targeted to analyze specific products, features, or interests that can be used to score leads and enrich data for nurturing or outreach.

Leveraging Technology

The technology I'm talking about here is data and marketing automation. Current digital marketing methodology, much as it is practiced at Bluewolf, dictates the need for a strategy that does four things: finds the right audience, uses the right channel, delivers the right content, and does all of that at the right time. To determine a strategy for your organization that encompasses all four things, you need data. Data determines the channel, audience, content, and timing. Top-performing marketing organizations recognize that a data strategy is required in order to bring a sophisticated and disruptive digital campaign to life, and to achieve maximum engagement and lift. If that's not enough, here are four reasons you want to do this:

1. Mitigate risk by understanding what's working and what isn't by testing campaigns and monitoring performance prior to scaling. This will allow you to achieve your goals through a phased approach and exploit tactics that have proven to work.
2. Increase one-to-one personalized content that connects with target personas by leveraging customer data.
3. Gain an exhaustively thorough view of the customer by monitoring campaign performance and capturing customer data in a centralized system of record.
4. Understand the consumer on a deeper level in order to anticipate their needs in the future and improve brand loyalty.

As much as I have tried to downplay the role of technology, it's absolutely necessary for marketing automation and cannot be ignored. So, start by partnering with IT. Digital marketing teams cannot be effective without the support of their peers in IT. Collaboration and partnership are key to successful campaign execution and data governance.

Also, think of marketing as a science, not an art, and apply the scientific method by determining a hypothesis, testing it, and validating it through performance monitoring before making significant investments and scaling your strategy. This approach results in a higher probability of campaign ROI and helps you avoid costly mistakes. Finally, build a system-of-record. Be sure to build it for your consumers in your customer relationship management (CRM) platform and integrate it into your marketing technology. This is the best way to gain a complete profile of your consumers and to more effectively market to them in the future.

Marketing automation is not just a source of leads, although leads can result from it. It's a platform/set of tools used to nurture prospects with highly personalized, useful content that helps convert prospects to customers and turn customers into delighted ones. The data is the raw material that enables you to design and automate effective, personalized e-mails, social content, ads, everything else that brings the customer closer to you. You can also use the social sentiment data captured from LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and the others to send targeted ads directly to your customers on their preferred social media platforms. The same applies to e-mail marketing by creating customized e-mail message content based on your customer data. Williams-Sonoma, for example, uses e-mail templates to populate messages based on a customer's interests and purchasing and browsing history. In this way, your automation can directly feed your funnel. For example, create a set of messages to respond to those common situations that frustrate the conversion process, like items left in a shopping cart or requested information that hasn't been clicked on. The personalized message can prod the customer along toward the next step and get these fence sitters off the damn fence.

This building products company provides a good object lesson, but there are many more. Here are three that recognized the value of personalized communication at the right time and in the right place and are using a suite of Salesforce tools to better connect with customers and prospects:

In an effort to increase sales, McDonald's is shifting its customer engagement strategy from large-scale mass media to personalized communication via mobile, e-mail, and social. This alone may not strike you as innovative—who doesn't use those three channels for sales and customer outreach? However, by using Social.com and Active Audiences, McDonald's is leveraging its CRM data to coordinate personalized messaging across all devices and platforms.

If you're within range of a McDonald's restaurant, your location will trigger a push notification to your phone, and ads will stream into your Facebook and Instagram feeds. Rather than having to wait until you pass a billboard on the highway or a poster in the subway to catch your attention, McDonald's is reaching out to customers in the moment. Not only does this help increase store traffic, but it's also a lot more relevant to individuals who can now walk into a store a block away and satisfy a craving, instead of salivating on a train platform.

Mattel, meanwhile, focuses on creating and nurturing lifelong customer journeys. From Fisher-Price to adult collectibles, the company wants customer relationships that last for life. Using Salesforce Journey Builder, Mattel is engineering a customer journey that begins the moment you place an order. The confirmation e-mail includes a banner asking you to download Mattel's mobile app. Further communications are sent using date-based triggers (ship date, delivery date, etc.) to encourage further interaction via mobile and social.

Here's how it works: Once you receive your order—say, a Hot Wheels car—you can scan the QR code in the app and race the car you just bought on a digital track. They've leaped beyond the competition by incorporating their physical toys into a digital experience. They have created a unique sense of personal ownership that spans a customer's physical and digital realities, providing a seamless experience that promotes and inspires deeper engagement.

Finally, using Social Studio, Alex and Ani, a boutique jewelry company, responds to every customer who interacts with them online. They know that the most powerful voice is the customer voice and prioritize customer comments, concerns, and ideas accordingly. They have always understood the power of customer advocacy and are using Social Studio to boost its influence.

For instance, Social Studio allows Alex and Ani to track, analyze, and engage with every single social media post from its customers and prospects. Did you tweet about an issue? Not only will the company send your comment to its customer care team, but it will halt all other promotional outreach until your problem is resolved. Did you post a killer photo wearing one of its pieces? The company will give you a shout out and also ask if it can use your image on its website. Alex and Ani defines itself as “an emotion and meaning based company, delivering that through jewelry.” Now it's using Social Studio to deliver more on that promise.

Is there a lesson here? You bet. Regardless of its industry or approach, each of these companies is prioritizing individual connections to improve and sustain customer relationships. Deep, personalized engagement is not only possible even in this age of mass everything, it's now a requirement for long-term success.

Multichannel, Omnichannel, Universal

Some people, usually those associated with technology vendors, insist there is a significant difference between multichannel, omnichannel, and universal marketing, but they all seem to try to reach customers and prospects through multiple channels. Multichannel came first, but it has been superseded in recent years by omnichannel. Universal is coming on strong as the newest contender. All of these terms imply the use of multiple communication channels to reach your audience based on the idea that audience members use different channels throughout the day, and your messages and their timing should be targeted to the right channel at the right time for the particular message.

This isn't anything radically new. Marketers were targeting audiences with different messages in different media long before the rise of digital. A more worthwhile discussion might be had around the idea of a mobile-first strategy based on research that suggests how deeply mobile has penetrated into customer behavior.

For me, it has become a no-brainer that mobile is one of the top disruptors currently affecting enterprise customer–business interaction. Mobile devices and apps are getting smarter, and capabilities like GPS, combined with customer data and analytics, are adding context and intelligence to mobile experiences. Cloud, social, and mobile are immediately available at customers' fingertips, and the result is higher expectations and less patience with unsatisfactory service.

More than just an emerging channel, mobile is believed by 71 percent of salespeople to be crucial to accessing real-time data about their customers on their mobile devices (Figure 11.3). While such mobile-first thinking is top of mind for enterprises, it often ends up being lower on the priority list because many companies lack a collaborative, organization-wide approach and a robust mobile strategy that could truly capitalize on mobile opportunities.

Every effective mobile strategy starts with identifying moments that support business-level goals and can be tied to business impact. While it's easy to head straight down the architecture or device path, evaluating business processes and interactions between employees, partners, and customers is critical to achieving impactful mobile initiatives. In short, it's not just about the mobile devices. It's about putting yourself in your customers' and employees' shoes as one of the most impactful ways to identify the moments of value along with the barriers to and areas for immediate and measurable gains within business processes. This is essential to turning broken interactions into frictionless, extraordinary moments.

Spoiler alert: I'm going to harp on data again. Great mobile initiatives are only as good as the data behind them. Data is a shared responsibility across all departments, and providing all employees, partners, and customers with accurate and relevant data that enables their goals should be the backbone of a company's mobile strategy. Still, while accurate data is important, don't put your vision on hold. Rather, use it as a means to justify a data project and then adopt an ongoing iterative process to rolling out mobile. By achieving a single and accurate view of customers, coupled with the ability to deliver relevant and actionable data from many systems to employees via mobile, you can dramatically differentiate your business and the resulting customer experience provided.

In a 2015 survey by The Economist, 54 percent of global executives interviewed confirmed their view that mobile apps are essential. However, only 26 percent actually have apps deployed. This results in an app gap that suggests delivering mobile initiatives, or at least the apps that drive those initiatives, is not so easy. To counter this app gap, companies need to establish organization-wide guidelines around the primary components of mobile IT strategy (devices, apps, data, resources). These guidelines for mobile delivery will then serve as the decision-making framework for every mobile initiative. The result will produce a consistent implementation methodology that can deliver engaging mobile experiences and increase the quality of apps across an organization.

Remember how I started the previous chapter talking about design? Here's why. Poor design choices are never more swiftly punished than in the mobile context. Mobile users tend to be time poor and task oriented, and great mobile design makes information clearer to understand, data easier to consume, and adoption simple. None of these can be achieved without doing the heavy-lifting data analysis up front. That's why a smart user experience is as much about data as it is about design. The focus of the UI/UX design team working on mobile apps should be to gather analytics and user research to better determine design focus and usability decisions.

It also doesn't end with the app deployment. A mobile application launch is just the beginning of a company's mobile journey. User acceptance and relevant metrics are the key to ensuring that all mobile initiatives bring value to customers and the business. Quantitative metrics (sales figures, productivity numbers, etc.) and qualitative results (customer and employee reviews) will continually need to be tracked to focus further releases, plan future apps, and identify the ROI.

Assume future apps are a given. User expectations are always changing. This constant change combined with new mobile technology and increasing market pressures means businesses need a strategic plan for managing existing apps and bringing continued innovation to mobile experiences. This includes frequent updates and new functionality of the mobile tools used to engage customers, as well as regular feedback from stakeholders, partners, and customers to ensure mobile apps stay ahead of customers' and employees' needs. Meanwhile, your competitors will be quite aware of whatever you're doing and will be trying to out-innovate you if they can. To ensure you stay ahead of the curve, mobile-engagement initiatives require the involvement of the entire organization. Both cloud and mobile technologies require a new business-consulting approach to innovate business processes, get an edge on the competition, and exceed bottom-line results.

Content Marketing

Every effective digital strategy is driven by content marketing. Content is what keeps your visitors coming to your website and, hopefully, returning often and telling their friends to come, too. Good content shapes what they think about your business, your product, your brand, and your position as a brand leader. Just a few pieces of content, no matter how good, won't do the trick. Every time visitors comes to your website, they want to find something new, interesting, and exciting. It is what brings them there and gets them to tell others to do likewise. To that end, you need massive volumes of content that must deliver value.

This might seem intimidating and discouraging. I have an associate who put two children through college just by creating fresh content for a variety of businesses. His pitch was that you always need fresh content. Sorry, that's not true. There is a trick to developing good content. The key is not to focus on producing more content, but to maximize the impact of your existing content by using these three Rs of content marketing: repurpose, reuse, and rewrite (Figure 11.4).

With the excessive amount of noise out there, you need to creatively repurpose and reuse your content to optimize its reach. For instance, a webcast can live long past its short shelf life if you gate the recording, turn it into a blog series to recap the content, expand it into a white paper around the key findings from the expert speakers, or even leverage the content in an ongoing e-mail campaign to those who did not attend. Be imaginative and repurpose your content into a series of podcasts or Pinterest walls. The point is to repackage it to extend the life and the reach of its message.

Complementary to curating your content, you must also take advantage of the breadth of available channels to drive ongoing demand generation. Bluewolf CMO, Corinne Sklar, frequently speaks on the topic: “I always tell my marketing team that they must ‘pluck the chicken off the bone’ before moving on to developing a new content piece.”¹ Don't spend valuable resources on new content creation without making absolutely sure you're getting the most possible value out of each piece you already have. Consider your newest piece of content and ask yourself, “How much value have I gotten out of it, and how can I identify four more ways to spin it into something new?”

Keep in mind that at the end of the day, you are still communicating with fellow human beings, so connect with them, both personally and through their unique business needs. Your content strategy and nurture paths are meant to build trust and loyalty between your potential customers and your brand, so make sure you drive a personalized conversation through relevant and emotionally engaging content.

Bluewolf's Essential Guide to Customer Obsession found that behavioral economists believe that up to 70 percent of customer decisions are based on emotional factors (Figure 11.5). With that in mind, building trust between your brand and your audience suddenly becomes paramount. So skip those robotic-sounding e-mails and leverage an emotional connect through appropriate content to drive loyalty, increase engagement, and elevate your brand exposure.

Building a strong connection and loyalty to your brand will also result in higher rates of consideration, purchase, and willingness to pay a premium. McKinsey found that in 2012, strong brands outperformed weak brands by 20 percent, which is a significant increase from 13 percent in 2011. Furthermore, invest in your brand by cultivating and building a community of brand advocates through trusted quality services and products while continually refreshing their enthusiasm with exciting and compelling content.

Most important, build the personal connection by listening to your audience. Use social data mining as a way to leverage the trends, conversations, sentiments, and issues surrounding your brand. Pay particular attention to the terminology favored by your audience and use it to communicate based on their interests. For example, if you're in the soft drink business, knowing which parts of your audience in which markets around the world refer to soft drinks as “soda” or “pop” can make a big difference in the effectiveness of your content. Edwin Chen, formerly a data scientist for Twitter and Google, created a map of soft drink terms used across the world to illustrate how powerful and useful social data mining tools can be when analyzing human interactions and behavior (Figure 11.6).²

Using data like Chen's could help soft drink companies create targeted, regional campaigns that reflect local speech patterns. Once you gain insight into whether your intended audience drinks “soda” or “pop,” you can begin a fluid (no pun intended) conversation with them that feels natural and colloquial.

As you revisit your content strategy and nurture programs, make sure that your nurture paths are not only customized by buyer type, but that your content, messaging, and calls to action are all fully customized. Leverage the moments you have in front of your customer, and continue to build your digital relationship with them. Don't be afraid to reshare a piece of content with them. Most likely, they will appreciate the reminder to read a high-quality piece of content that is directly relevant and personalized to their needs and interests.

To make any of this work, you will have to answer a few questions: Who are these visitors? Why should they care? What's the best way to target/reach them? And what's their preferred vernacular around this topic? Want a hint about the answer? These visitors may be your customers, but not necessarily; your customers should have other parts of your website that specifically target them. The others might be prospects or not. Maybe they are potential prospects at the earliest stages of nurturing.

This is not a tool and technology issue. Sure, analytics tools can help parse customer conversations, but you need your entire team on board to implement your content strategy. Your team will include the content strategist, copywriter, graphic designers, social media manager, and anyone else who interacts with customers. Make sure to empower your people now, if you have not already done so, to own these customer touch points and the customer moments that result.

Speaking to CMO during a 2015 visit to Sydney, Corinne Sklar, our CMO, said: “Too many marketers still perceive technology as a panacea and fail to take into account the wider cultural and operational changes needed to operate successfully in a digital-first environment. . . . The big question is: Do you have the right cadence of execution around doing digital marketing? Do you have a content producer? A copywriter? Or if you're not going to do that internally, who are the partners you're going to work with on that? And do they have that technology expertise in-house?”³

Often when she asks these questions, the audience looks at the floor or looks at the ceiling, squirming uncomfortably in their seats. They're uncomfortable because they don't have the answers. That's okay. There is a lot of maturity still evolving around this. The audience should take it as a signal that they have some fast learning to do, and then get started. And while you're at it, don't forget to take into account the wider cultural and operational changes needed to operate successfully in a digital-first environment.