Decision points on the path to unified customer engagement
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The document discusses the contrasting approaches of two marketing leaders, John and Mark, in addressing unsuccessful marketing outcomes. While John adopted a customer-led strategy that emphasized unified customer engagement and personalized content across channels, Mark focused on producing more content without understanding customer context, leading to poorer results. Ultimately, John's strategy resulted in significant improvements in lead quality and sales, while Mark's approach demonstrated the pitfalls of a solely content-driven strategy.
Decision points on the path to unified customer engagement
- 1. Email: contact@edynamic.net North America: 1-877-339-6264 India: +91-124-4951900-50 Decision Points on the Path to Unified Customer Engagement NEW YORK | TORONTO | LOS ANGELES | DUBAI | GURGAON
- 2. Table of content A Tale of Two Marketing Leaders ------------------------------------------------------------- 3 Confronting the Growth Challenge ------------------------------------------------------------ 3 The Customer Journey ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 5 The Customer Context ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 7 The Customer Interaction ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 8 Digital Marketing Roadmap: The Power of the Trifecta -------------------------------- 10 Conclusions Over Coffee ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 10 About eDynamic ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 12 Abstract Marketing leaders are now challenged to effectively guide their customers through difficult and demanding decisions. They are providing content and engaging in conversations in an effort to support these decisions. However, some marketing organizations can be expected to achieve greater success than others in this endeavor. Some marketers will focus on fully addressing "the customer context," while others will fall short of this challenge. In this story, we meet two marketing leaders who are challenged to address disappointing marketing results and rethink their approaches. They will grapple with the implications of embracing content-led and customer-led strategies in their efforts to transform marketing. What they'll discover is that truly synchronized and personalized interactions with customers -- the key to top marketing results -- are not possible without Unified Customer Engagement.
- 3. A Tale of Two Marketing Leaders John and Mark both held top marketing roles in promising companies. But they'd experienced significantly different outcomes in the prior year in their respective jobs. Both men had struggled initially in the year past. Both had seen marketing performance drop. They'd seen lead production, conversion rates, and sales numbers decline as the economy tightened and competition intensified. Marketing approaches that once generated plentiful leads and kept sales pipelines fully loaded were no longer delivering the same results. Meeting over coffee, the two men discussed the steps they had taken over the past year and how their decisions had played out. Each had faced a series of decision points. Yet different decisions led to different outcomes. Only one would make the decisions and take the actions necessary to fully engage customers, produce valuable leads, and drive sales growth to new levels. Confronting the Growth Challenge As the two men talked, they reflected on what steps they had taken in the prior year and what they had experienced. Both John and Mark had been diligent in their outreach to fellow executives and team members. What both heard was a great deal of concern and disappointment about leads, opportunities, and closed deals. Clearly, success would depend on producing more qualified leads to meet the needs and expectations of their sales organizations. At the same time, they knew competition was intensifying. This was putting extreme pressure on margins. It was also undermining their ability to cut through market noise and differentiate their messages and offerings in the marketplace. And as they dug deeper into these challenges, they both discovered problems in terms of how they communicated with their prospects and customers. Not only did they lack insight into buyer needs and behaviors, they were unable to produce messages that would resonate with them in a personal way. Customers were simply not buying. “ Only 41% of respondents indicate their content marketing efforts are effective. Source: Junta42 and MarketingProfs “ But this is where the two marketers began to respond differently. When confronted with the challenge of weak marketing performance, John formulated a customer-led strategy. As he saw it, the key to his organization's turnaround would lie in Unified Customer Engagement -- engaging prospective customers across multiple channels including email, the web site, and the sales force. 3
- 4. Unified Customer Engagement is a strategy that leverages digital technologies to acquire new customers and strengthen relationships with existing ones. It draws on the integrated capabilities of core marketing systems -- such as customer relationship management, marketing automation, and content management -- to engage buyers across channels with relevant and valuable content that reflects the context of their individual decisions. John wanted to ensure that messages were both personalized and synchronized to reflect past interactions, current conversations, and even predictive insights. He would engage buyers in a personalized fashion across channels and in relation to stages of a buying cycle. His strategy was to understand the customer's decision making context, define the customer's decision-making cycle, and communicate with customers in ways that would effectively guide them through these decisions. What are your top three challenges when it comes to online marketing? Obtaining an integrated view of customers across online marketing touch points 45% Understanding the influence of a marketing campaign beyond acquisition and conversion to include the influence of each interaction 45% Interpreting data to make business decisions 41% Data accuracy 35% Determining which metrics are important 31% Reconciling multiple online marketing applications 25% Meeting different reporting requirements for different stakeholders 20% Too much data 14% Source: Coremetrics and Bloomberg Business Week Mark began crafting a new marketing strategy as well. However, his approach could best be described as content-driven. His team would focus on creating a lot of new content -- white papers, case studies, eBooks, videos and more -- to support various channels. However, his website remained static, his customer profiling capabilities minimal, and his ability to serve up content based on personal needs and interests was severely limited. The decision to focus on content -- as opposed to customers -- would prove to have significant implications. 4
- 5. The Challenge with Content 3% Producing Engaging Content-------------------36% 9% Producing Enough Content----------------------21% 11% 36% Budget to Produce Content----------------------20% Lack of C Level Buy In----------------------------11% 20% Producing a Variety of Content-------------------9% 21% No Answer---------------------------------------------3% Source: Marketing Profs / Junta 42 “ Content marketing counts for more than 26% of total marketing budgets annually. Source: Junta42 and Marketing Profs “ Both John and Mark also decided that new marketing technology investments would be critical to their endeavors. Having developed a Digital Marketing Roadmap, John purchased a next-generation content management system to accompany his firm's marketing automation and customer relationship management systems. Meanwhile, Mark's new technology investments were limited to email marketing automation and social media technologies that seemed to be the "next wave." The Customer Journey The facts about the customer's world were beyond dispute. Both John and Mark realized that today's customer is barraged by marketing messages -- most of which are irrelevant and annoying. One 1978 Yankelovich study found the average American was confronted with more than 2,000 advertising messages per day. When the study was revisited in 2008, Yankelovich found the number had soared to more than 5,000 messages per day. Neither executive wanted to further contribute to the problem. But how would they generate the leads that would clearly be necessary to produce new business? “ Enhancing lead generation is the top sales effectiveness initiative in 2011 – chosen by 46% of respondents. Source: CSO Insights “ Mark brought his marketing staff together to begin brainstorming new content. To entice buyers and grab their interest, his team would take a shock and awe approach and unleash a volley of white papers, webinars, videos, Twitter posts, and other forms of content on his target prospects. Having heard a great deal about the power of "content marketing," he decided the more content he could produce, the more prospects he could attract. John, however, took a more measured approach and decided that the first issue to address was something he called "the customer's journey." He wanted his organization to have a thorough grasp of the steps that a buyer went through on the way to doing business with his company. He wanted to understand what decisions must be made and how they would be made. He wanted to know what guidance potential buyers were seeking and how to address their concerns. 5
- 6. To better understand this journey, John conducted a series of structured interviews with current customers and ideal prospects. He consulted with industry analysts and experts. He then brought together his staff from marketing as well as customer-facing staff members from the sales and service teams. He held a series of meetings, facilitated by a digital marketing agency, to clarify and visualize the customer's experience. Need Information Evaluate Purchase Engagement Recognition Search Options Decision Prospect Prospect Registers Engages Prospect Converted Unknown Known Lead Customer John wanted to illuminate -- from his customer's perspective -- what issues would arise throughout the buying cycle. Whether the customer's challenge was needs recognition, solution consideration, or options evaluation, he wanted to know what would be the appropriate guidance to support the customer's decision process. As a result of this exercise, John's marketing team had a powerful and insightful perspective on the company's buyers. The marketing group was now able to identify audience segments, industry verticals, buying stages, pain points, motivations and conversion triggers. Working with his digital agency, John was also able to: Set a baseline and measurements of success Identify and set goals for traffic, conversion, engagement Identify gaps/challenges associated with the current state Identify areas of opportunities for customer acquisition and engagement John's team was not just committed to creating content to support marketing campaigns. It was committed to creating relevant content to support customer buying decisions. With the assistance of his digital agency, John and his team began developing "content maps" -- tools that would link the content they produced to the appropriate stage in the buyer's journey. 6
- 7. The Customer Context It's one thing to produce compelling and actionable content. But it's only truly relevant if it is presented to the right person at the right time. Here, differences in perspective between John and Mark emerged once again. Mark's marketing team was thrilled to have the opportunity to produce lots of creative content. This team, however, had put very little effort into understanding customers any better. Of course, they purchased new lists and built up their marketing database. But the emphasis seemed to be on the mere acquisition and compilation of data. John had a very different perspective. He considered the customer profiles he was developing to be essential to his team's performance. He believed that patterns in these profiles would provide key indicators and signals to trigger the delivery of personally relevant content at the right moment. His team became committed to the concept of addressing the "customer context." This is the idea that each prospective buyer has his or her own preferences and priorities. Their context reflects who they are, what they are seeking to accomplish, what actions they've taken in the past, and where they are in a decision process. By understanding as much about this context as possible, you are able to address the customer in the most appropriate way -- even anticipating what might be valued next. Understand your Segment your Map the Implement the Buying Cycle Audience Messages Platforms Need Information Evaluate Purchase Engagement Recognition Search Options Decision Criteria Criteria Criteria Criteria Segment A Criteria Objection Objection Objection Criteria Criteria Criteria Criteria Segment B Criteria Objection Objection Objection John’s digital consulting firm built integrated and intelligent customer profiles that would recognize an individual's role, preferences, priorities, prior behavior, and buying stage. These insights could then be used to serve up messages or resources that would support the buyer's decision appropriately. Rather 7
- 8. than merely creating a lot of content, his team could concentrate on creating the right content to be served up at the right time. The consulting firm also took over the technical challenge of mapping the data to the appropriate content. By introducing business rules reflecting which content should be served up under which circumstances, the foundations were put in place for personalized, customer engagement. The Customer Interaction To provide a truly compelling customer experience, it's necessary to be relevant and consistent across channels of interaction. Unfortunately, companies today often struggle to unify their messages across channels and communicate with customers in an effective way. As it turns out, this was clearly the case with Mark's company. While his team had spent a great deal of time creating new content, little effort had been invested to ensure that these capabilities were aligned with the buyer's needs, challenges, and expectations. In the absence of a centralized customer profiling capability for their marketing automation systems, Mark's organization was producing messages that were inconsistent, irrelevant, and ill-timed. There was no way to consistently engage the customer. Email outreach never reflected past interactions and sales people never had appropriate insight to engage prospective buyers with the right message at the right stage of the buying process. This situation, as it turned out, was a consequence of a content-driven strategy. There was no true awareness of customer context. “ Of the 91 percent of consumers who opt out or unsubscribe to emails, 46 percent are driven to brand defection because the messages are simply not relevant – CMO Council. “ By contrast, John's strategy of Unified Customer Engagement was paying off handsomely. His marketing organization was able to successfully synchronize and personalize messages across channels. Having invested in a centralized customer profiling capability, their systems worked in unison and messages were managed in relation to the customer's context. The customer's preferences, past behavior, and buying stage were all taken into account in the production of messages and support of interactions. Prospective buyers received messages and offers -- whether an invitation to a webinar or an offer to download a white paper -- that reflected findings from past interactions. And when sales people called on accounts, they were fully apprised of these interactions and what they indicated. They had the insights they needed to engage in effective conversations. “ Today's consumer wants timely and contextual messages, and clearly values opt-in, personal communications – CMO Council. “ Mark believed he was doing everything right. "We've got all channels covered," he told his team. So he was extremely surprised when he couldn’t move his leads beyond the first stage in the buying cycle. In fact, as the volume and velocity of content increased, he noticed that his opt-out rate was increasing. Sales had no qualified leads and even fewer opportunities. The results were just not there. John had recognized the core issue: to engage the customer across channels. And by recognizing the customer's context, his team was able to provide an experience that was truly personalized. 8
- 9. John's team, as a result, was having enormous success guiding customers through a decision process. They were moving from awareness to consideration to purchase at a rate far outpacing prior experience. With consistently relevant messages presented everywhere from email to the mobile channel to the web site to the sales force, buyers commented favorably on the reliable guidance they received as they sought ways to address their current problems -- in many cases problems that they had long tolerated for want of a better option. With the seamless integration of its marketing automation, CRM, and content management systems, the company now had a Unified Engagement Platform. Technically, the challenge here revolved around implementation and integration -- enabling the unification of customer profile data and synchronized interaction capabilities across channels. With a unified approach in place, the company could now dynamically serve up content. Web CMS Common Customer Context CRM Marketing Automation John's marketing team could now engage prospective buyers in a personalized way, nurture them over time, guide them through a buying decision, and only hand leads over to sales when they had been scored as "sales qualified." Having worked together to mutually define a lead, the sales and marketing teams were clearly aligned. With a steady flow of qualified leads from marketing, the sales team was crushing its quota. “ More than 56% of marketers believe personalized communications out-perform traditional mass market approaches, according to research from the CMO Council. “ Having built its Unified Engagement Platform on "the trifecta" of marketing automation, CRM, and content management, the marketing organization would next explore ways to incorporate new analytical capabilities, social media, and community management into its efforts. Moreover, John’s team could now move further down the customer lifecycle -- committing still more time and attention to the challenge of cultivating customer loyalty and advocacy. New messaging and content development would increasingly focus on strengthening existing relationships and increasing customer lifetime value. As John saw it, the introduction of new community and social media technologies would help enhance these connections by enabling his customers to support each other. 9
- 10. Digital Marketing Roadmap: The Power of the Trifecta Working with a digital agency, John was able to create a Digital Marketing Roadmap that would drive his marketing technology investments in an intelligent and impactful way. The roadmap defined which technologies would be required to enable fully personalized marketing. It outlined how they would be implemented and integrated -- and established a timetable for all actions and investments. The roadmap provided a vision and a path to Point of Arrival. The path to the destination would take time, but the sequence was important. The roadmap incorporated: 1. Content Management (CMS): Implementing a content management system (SiteCore) to support personalized interactions on the company's Web site. 2. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) : Upgrading the existing CRM system (Salesforce.com) to support personalized interactions involving members of the sales team. 3. Marketing Automation (MA) : Upgrading the marketing automation system (Eloqua) to support personalized interactions via email and other digital channels. 4. Integration and Mapping : Integrating the three systems -- customer relationship management, marketing automation, and content management -- to create centralized buyer profiles that could then be mapped to a defined buying process. 5. Measurement and Reporting : Implementing the dashboards and measurement tools necessary to support ongoing performance measurement and management. Unified Customer Engagement, as John came to understand, revolves around "the Power of the Trifecta." This is the ability to integrate the three main digital marketing technologies -- CRM, MA, and CMS -- to personalize and synchronize customer interactions across channels. Conclusions Over Coffee The biggest challenge that marketers face is demonstrating a clear impact on sales performance. One year down the line, John had clearly succeeded in this objective while Mark had clearly fallen short. Under John's leadership, qualified, sales-ready leads had increased by 120%. But, more importantly, sales attributed to marketing had increased by 80%. And marketing expenses relative to sales had dropped 60%. It was quite a year -- enabling John to bring home a sizeable bonus. What's more, the venture capital community had taken notice. John was now getting calls from venture capitalists who were considering him for roles as CEO of promising startups. His stock had obviously risen to new heights in the market for talent. 10
- 11. Mark, who had seen John's success profiled in the city's business journal, had invited him to meet for coffee. What decisions, wondered Mark, had produced such impressive outcomes? He thought his own aggressive efforts would have surely delivered results on par with John's. Over a two-hour conversation, John generously shared his insights on what had contributed to his success. Having failed to deliver expected results many times in the past, these were hard-won insights. He had the battle scars to prove it. He shared his key recommendations: 1. Determine your strategy: Map out your customer’s journey Define the buyer’s context Develop a Digital Marketing Roadmap 2. Define a unified customer profile and wrap the channels around the customer 3. Focus on content strategy – tie it to the buying lifecycle 4. Embrace technology and the Power of the Trifecta: Leverage a CMS that allows you to target the buying lifecycle and personalize customer interactions Implement a CRM that provides deep customer insight Implement a marketing automation platform that generates, manages and nurtures leads 5. Connect the systems to enable data flow, measurement and customer insight The two men talked at length about marketing's increasing power in the enterprise -- power that revolves around its growing ability to deliver predictable results. John's most important bit of wisdom, however, concerned the value of data. Having spent years focused on the creative side of marketing, he was now committed to the value of data and analytics. It was his insight into the customer's challenges and behavior that truly elevated his career. By committing himself to "flying by instruments," he was able to see through the fog of hype surrounding new technology and the fog of war that often put marketing at odds with sales. Fully focused on observing his customers, he had the insights he needed to produce relevant content and a compelling experience. Fully committed to supporting them in their buying processes, he was able to build a platform that would produce predictably impressive results. 11
- 12. About eDynamic Strategy Workshops to Deliver Results In our strategic review, unique in the industry, we work with you to understand and document your customers’ buying cycles, how best to segment your web visitors and then how to target personalized information to them, while providing you with lead scoring capabilities and a strategy to convert prospects to customers Seamless Integration: As Certified partners of both class-leading platforms - Sitecore and Eloqua, eDynamic has enabled a seamless solution that connects Sitecore's Online Marketing Suite (OMS) with Eloqua's Marketing Automation Platform. We provide integration services to marketers looking for greater flexibility and sophistication in executing marketing campaigns that deliver superior value and results. This solution provides marketers with unified engagement platform where both the website and email messages are synchronized. Taking the strategy defined during the strategic review, or your custom requirements, we can configure both OMS and Eloqua to work together to respond to web visitors and drive lead conversions Terms and Definitions: Marketing Automation: Software platforms designed for marketing departments to simplify processes by automating repetitive tasks. Marketing personnel benefit from these systems by specifying criteria and outcomes for tasks and processes which are then interpreted, stored and executed by software, enhancing efficiencies and reducing error. Content Management System (CMS): Software platforms designed to enhance the production, storage, presentation and distribution of enterprise content including white papers, marketing collateral, presentations, web site copy, and other material . Serving as a central repository, the CMS allows for version control of existing content. Customer Relationship Management (CRM): CRM is a strategy for managing a company’s interactions with customers, clients and sales prospects. It involves using technology to organize, automate, and synchronize business processes—principally sales activities, but also those for marketing, customer service, and technical support. Unified Engagement Platform (UEP): UEP is an overarching framework for integrating multiple software platforms in order to enhance interaction and engagement with buyers across channels. The approach, which enables enterprises to synchronize and personalize their customer communications, typically involves a customer relationship management system, content management system, and a marketing automation system. 12