Highly Competitive - software industry insights

Content Marketing for Midsized Companies: Who to Target, What to Create

 

An integral part of creating a strategy for content marketing initiatives is to identify which of your customers are the targets of your content: what are their roles in their companies, what part do they play in the buying process, what are their preferred channels for different kinds of content. Then decisions must be made for the types of content that will be created, based on the preferences of target customers and different phases of the customer or buying journey. Just as companies should be segmenting target markets and target customer roles to better connect their products to customer needs, the same segmentation should be used for content.

 

Software solutions are important tools for learning more about customers and their buying behaviors, to provide the continuous intelligence needed for effective content marketing. Advanced analytics can process data from many disparate sources, such as social media, master data and CRM systems, and provide customer insight that helps with customer segmentation, mapping customer journeys, and relating customer content preferences to specific channels for publication. Content management and marketing automation solutions enable dynamic management of the customer / content matrix as it relates to buying processes and customer desires. Various software solutions also nurture consistent customer experiences across channels, to enhance positive perceptions. Most of the above technologies provide capabilities for tracking activities and outcomes, to be able to repeatedly measure effectiveness, and fine tune approaches and processes.

 

 

What Kind of Content Should You Create?

Forcontent to provide superior customer engagement, the focus is no longer on vendor offerings and product features. It's about content that helps prospects and customers solve their problems and improve the performance of their organizations. The kind of content that attracts your customers will change on a regular basis, as media options evolve along with customer interests and needs. Companies must keep on top of these changes through different industry reports, analytics on the effectiveness of current content marketing activities, direct feedback from customers, and continuously tracking changes to buying / customer journeys.

 

Content categories that currently catch the attention of different kinds of customers include:

à Content Optimized for Mobile Consumption

Mobile is rapidly becoming a top channel for connecting to customers. To engage customers, content must be specifically optimized for the device, particularly smartphones where display real estate is at a premium. Content has to make sense for how customers use mobile devices and generally should be simple, very interesting and to the point.

à Video

Customers like video content when it covers topics relevant to their needs. High quality, sophisticated video is greatly preferred over amateurish efforts. Customer expectations for engagement look for entertainment combined with information.

à White papers and Product Information Sheets

These types of content are primarily of interest for B2B customers. White papers will only be useful if they cover topics and issues that matter to customers. Customers are strongly turned off by marketing "brochureware" masquerading as a white paper, and may well reject the vendor that created it.

à Customer Stories and Case Studies

Customers still find great value in customer stories with useful details around the customer problem and how it was solved. Include the value and benefits that were gained by the customer after solving the problem – and keep the focus on the customer, not your company.

à Interactive Elements

Engaging customers with interactive elements, such as embedded video or hyperlinks, frequently builds customer interest in your content, and can take customers further into the buying process. Be sure to overtly identify what each interactive element will do. For example, you may be losing customer follow-through on links if it's not clear what will happen when the link is clicked.

 

Content Marketing Doesn't Stop at Purchases

The bonus value of content marketing is to nurture and build positive customer experiences beyond the purchase, throughout the lifecycle of a customer. Customers and markets can change very quickly; agile and sophisticated software technologies, processes and creative practices are needed to grow and sustain positive customer relationships. Content marketing is an integral part of what it takes to positively engage customers on any channel at any time.

 

 

Image source: ironpaper.com

 

This post was brought to you by IBM for Midsize Business and opinions are my own. To read more on this topic, visit  IBM's Midsize Insider. Dedicated to providing businesses with expertise, solutions and tools that are specific to small and midsized companies, the Midsize Business program provides businesses with the materials and knowledge they need to become engines of a smarter planet.

 

 

About the author: Julie Hunt understands the overlap and convergence of business processes and software solutions that once were thought of as "separate" – and how this impacts software Vendors and Buyers, as well as the strategies that enterprises implement for how technology supports the business and its customers. Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitiveand on Twitter: @juliebhunt For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Strategies for B2B Software Solutions: Working from the Customer Perspective

 

Shaping the Future of Customer-Responsive Marketing Automation

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Marketing automation has shown that it can be a smart tool (when done right) for shepherding and converting leads, and automating marketing processes. The near future role for marketing automation has begun evolving as MA technologies have become more sophisticated to deliver customer-responsive interactions on any channel. If this evolution continues, the name 'marketing automation' will become inadequate to describe what can be accomplished with these technologies when combined with customer-focused processes, practices and strategies.

Within the marketing realm, marketing automation capabilities are becoming an important component of integrated marketing and communications, for seamless interaction management on any channel and support for omnichannel customer experiences. Marketing automation is also converging with cross-enterprise customer-adaptive processes and 'sense and respond' models, both of which have been in practice for quite some time for various enterprise functions, with customer needs as a strong focus.

Marketing automation has growing relationships with 'anything customer', such as customer service and customer master data. Content marketing strategies and initiatives are essential partners for effective MA. To deliver better buying experiences, marketing automation integrated with other customer-focused systems can reveal a great deal about customer behavior, motivation, and needs. Organizations can interact more authentically with customers anywhere using such intelligence.

 

Speeding Past 'Sense and Respond' to "Predict and Act"

Retail and eCommerce take advantage of customer-adaptive processes to personalize and propel buying journeys. And supply chain management and retail have successfully utilized 'sense and respond', aka agile/lean or just-in-time management, to optimize supply chain functions while speedily fulfilling end customer requirements. For these models, important common denominators aren't just responding to customers more quickly and accurately, but also delivering more value to customers - on customer terms.

The increase in real-time multichannel communications and interaction touchpoints has brought 'sense and respond' processes to marketing. Mobile is a particular focal point for sense and respond, particularly with the increasing use of 'in the moment' marketing and buying opportunities. Touchpoints become more effective with sense and respond and customer-adaptive processes behind them. The customer intelligence attained through integrating data and analytics from marketing automation, customer service and other customer-focused functions will power smarter touchpoints that include faster, more customer-accurate responses. The implications for competitive advantage are clear.

The strategic combining of marketing automation with cross-functional integrations results in continuous highly personalized communications delivered to customers. Adaptive processes based on context continuously respond more accurately to every customer action on any channel. Marketing and other customer functions are now in the world of real-time, location-aware customer experiences, moving past the basic mechanics of interaction.

Predictive analytics behind both customer-adaptive processes and 'sense and respond' are moving organizations from analysis of past and in-process interactions to anticipation of near future activities in order to better understand and fulfill customer desires. The continuing transformation of marketing automation is rapidly changing to "predict and act".

But all of this takes strategic commitment, the right experts, much preparation and testing, improved processes, and a lot of hard work. Done right, there is much to be gained for nurturing and growing ongoing customer relationships. To achieve more valuable use of marketing automation, you have to start with thoroughly understanding customers, buyer journeys, trigger events and key touchpoints. This means a great deal of research, analysis and segmentation at sophisticated levels – all of which will have to be constantly refreshed.

    

Technologies as Evolutionary Tools

When marketing automation is first introduced into an organization it's easy to get caught up in the tunnel vision of how to use new technologies and the tactical tasks that can be accomplished. It's easy to fail to see the big picture of how all the pieces fit together to achieve higher level objectives and corporate strategies. Many are still struggling to connect these technologies to overall marketing functions, and larger objectives – and to add all of the right people: designers, marketing technologists, analytics experts, data managers, content professionals, and strategists of all kinds.

As marketing automation technologies have progressed to better manage multichannel interactions and an omnichannel customer experience, they're addressing the complexities of understanding interactions during buying journeys, accurate customer segmentation and better personalized communications. A comprehensive view of the customer requires more than what the marketing automation platform covers. Extensive integrations are essential with other systems and processes, such as CRM, content management, content marketing, and social media tools. Marketing automation works best when it includes bi-directional integrations with other customer and product focused systems to deliver the most accurate intelligence in real-time - to any function.

Business process design, automation and event processing must be done at sophisticated levels to respond to circumstances and participants that can change at any time. All of this comes into play to both manage and maintain response-ready processes for today's more complicated customer experience lifecycles.

 

Overcoming Organizational Obstacles

Like much in the enterprise, cross-functional collaboration and integration of business processes are key elements for successful outcomes. The entire organization must be empowered to make a strategic commitment to the customer and to nurturing improved experiences. Upper level management must ensure that the entire organization can focus on the customer first, with top notch execution of practices and processes.

Organizations that continue to see marketing as an add-on function will not achieve improved customer experiences. Organizations that allow functional silos to persist are equally destined for failure. Because of these organizational flaws, most obstacles to successful marketing automation and customer-adaptive processes are not directly related to marketing automation itself:

• Inadequate budget for all aspects of marketing automation and multichannel interactions
• Reluctance to invest in quality content creation for all customer interactions (which also impacts the content marketing strategy)
• Lack of the right staffing and skillsets -- and no budget to invest in them
• Poor cross-team integration and collaboration
• Lagging systems integration across the organization
• Deficient data quality and analytics processes
• Badly designed business processes across the organization

 

The Future is Now

The idea of the customer-focused organization has been around for a while, but there's still a lot to be done to do it well – and to earn value in the eyes of customers. Continuously positive customer interactions obviously create immeasurable return for an organization. Such experiences result in more resilient customer loyalty – but to achieve them requires sophisticated actions and orchestration of practices and processes across the organization. Non-integrated silos for communications, marketing, customer service, and product development cannot ever achieve a holistic customer experience that matters to customers.

The strategic potential of marketing automation isn't about a single campaign or even the marketing function, and it isn't about the technology platform. It's about customer experiences throughout the lifecycle of a customer with a particular organization. Customers and markets can change very quickly; agile and sophisticated technologies, processes and creative practices are needed to grow and sustain positive customer relationships. Marketing automation can evolve into a customer-focused platform that offers new possibilities as an orchestration hub for a significant portion of customer interactions and for nurturing improved customer experiences with a vendor.

Marketing automation has the potential to become an important catalyst for the multi-dimensional intelligence that is critical for digital marketing processes and many other corporate functions . To achieve this, not only is a change in the marketing mindset essential, but the overall corporate mindset where marketing objectives become an integral part of corporate strategies.

 

Image Sources   business2community.com      clarkstonconsulting.com

 

 

About the author: Julie is an independent consultant and industry analyst for B2B software solutions, providing services to vendors to improve strategies for customers and target markets, products and solutions, and future direction. Julie has expertise in several solution spaces including: data integration and data quality; analytics and BI; business process, workflow and collaboration; digital marketing, WCM and social media; and the pivotal importance of user and customer experiences. Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitiveand on Twitter: @juliebhunt For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Strategies for B2B Software Solutions: Working from the Customer Perspective

 

 

Mobility – Driver for the ‘New’ Enterprise?

 

VDC recently published research for The Global Market For Enterprise Mobile Devices, 2013, forecasting that the market for mobile devices deployed by business and government users will grow to $138.6 billion and 306.9 million units in 2017 – compared to the 2012 market of $116.2 billion and 220.4 million units. I suspect that the 2017 forecast figures may be achieved in a much shorter time.

The VDC report goes on to state that the efforts to mobilize workers everywhere is likely to be "chaotic and disruptive to the technology vendor community". As with most technology 'disruptions', the effects can be both positive and negative. But for enterprises of all sizes mobility is a disruption that not only should not be ignored but embraced and exploited on many fronts including business model innovation.

For a single enterprise, mobile software technology can run the gamut of: websites and digital marketing, employee productivity apps, collaboration with partners and employees, mobile sales access for buyers, customer service, and management access to real-time insight. For enterprises pursuing a "mobile first" approach to all or most of the software used by the enterprise, a significant evolution will be set into motion where "traditional" enterprise software will change to complement mobile apps and vice versa.

In a mobile first world organizations should get to work now to handle the big changes for how customers will do business with them. Internal business processes and functions in the enterprise must change to become part of the mobility evolution. Mobility goes beyond cool technology – it brings enterprises to new ways of doing business both internally and externally, and for connecting to customers.

In his blog post,Yankee Group's Chris Marsh discusses the many opportunities and obstacles facing decision-making for taking the evolutionary steps for effective mobility:

The enterprise mobility industry is at a pivotal time as companies look to gain greater mobile maturity. In doing this they need to pass through three phases:  

• Opportunistic mobility: Where the majority of companies still reside, characterized by the deployment of point solutions to siloed groups of workers, with limited extendibility of the architecture supporting those deployments, and with decisions heavily user as opposed to business influenced.
• Strategic mobility: Where more forward-looking companies have migrated to, as they address larger subsets of workers based on the beginning of a common architecture and a more policy-driven approach; where sophisticated administration tools are used to scale policy, security and compliance across mobile assets.
• Mobile first: Few, if any, companies are at this stage, where mobility is integrated into and being used to re-envision business processes, where it heavily influences work behaviors, and where both internal and customer-facing activities have been broadly mobilized.

Further fueling changes to how enterprises operate in a mobile first world is the fact that the Cloud and Mobile are rapidly becoming one and the same. There are still technology issues to be ironed out – but there is no doubt these two disruptive forces are changing enterprises and how they do business. The businesses that find the most success are those that are proactively tackling how to best implement and exploit what mobility has to offer. Those organizations that choose to remain laggards will be very large losers in a very short time – both cloud and mobile are on fast tracks for the foreseeable future.

 

 

Source: ImagerySpeaks

 

 

This post was written as part of the IBM for Midsize Business program, which provides midsize businesses with the tools, expertise and solutions they need to become engines of a smarter planet. I've been compensated to contribute to this program, but the opinions expressed in this post are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies or opinions.

 

 

About the author: Julie Hunt understands the overlap and convergence of many business processes and software solutions that once were thought of as "separate" – and how this impacts software Vendors and Buyers, as well as the strategies that enterprises implement for how technology supports the business and its customers. Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitiveand on Twitter: @juliebhunt For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Strategies for B2B Software Solutions: Working from the Customer Perspective

 

That Pesky Qualitative Side of Digital Customer Engagement

 

With the growth of digital and interactive marketing efforts, a great deal of focus is on customer experience and engagement – and how to measure customer engagement on digital properties. Some marketing practitioners seem to think that understanding more about "customer engagement" means that they can control the customer experience. Always remember: only the customer owns the customer experience, which is the customer's personal takeaway from interactions with your company, whether digital or in person. It is this fact that brings in the qualitative side when trying to assess customer engagement on digital properties.

Engagement - like influence - is at heart an abstract.

For purposes of customer engagement on the web, engagement can be thought of as the measurement of attention to something -- which takes us to another ambiguity: what constitutes customer attention to a company's web presence? For each company, what comprises indicators of engagement can be fairly unique, generally derived from a matrix of attributes, in turn leading to a matrix of metrics. As web presence becomes more far-flung and sophisticated, the metrics, tools, data, and analyses become more complex – and in some ways, more subjective.

Not only is the level of engagement unique to each customer, it can be unique to each web property. Selection of the right metrics for each digital property becomes fluid, not easy or black-and-white. For the quantitative side, it's best to think in terms of customer interaction categories and what it takes to understand customer behavior. The overall picture comes from quantitative analytics results that are tempered by the understanding that customer engagement has a distinct and elusive qualitative side.

The qualitative side of digital engagement takes us into the messier world of sentiment analysis, which is still a work-in-process, as well as semantic/content analysis. Demarcations are likely to start blurring between what matters for customer engagement on the corporate website and what matters on social sites, also along qualitative lines.

In the category of not everything that counts can be measured: listening, understanding, acting on what customers/buyers have to say are among the most important corporate 'to-dos' regarding real engagement. Responding to actual customer behavior and interactions is a much better route, than trying to "control" customers.

If you really want to touch the customer in a positive way, keep authenticity in your marketing efforts. It's not a matter of trying to make customers do what you want (which won't ever really succeed) – it's about digitally providing worthwhile content, offers, and interactions that merit customer attention.

 

Source: performanceconnections.com

 

 

This post was written as part of the IBM for Midsize Business program, which provides midsize businesses with the tools, expertise and solutions they need to become engines of a smarter planet. I've been compensated to contribute to this program, but the opinions expressed in this post are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies or opinions.

 

 

About the author: Julie Hunt understands the overlap and convergence of many business processes and software solutions that once were thought of as "separate" – and how this impacts software Vendors and Buyers, as well as the strategies that enterprises implement for how technology supports the business and its customers. Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitive and on Twitter: @juliebhunt For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Strategies for B2B Software Solutions: Working from the Customer Perspective

 

Customer Journeys: Miles to Go

                   Originally published on CMSWire, May 2013

 

Analyzing customer behaviors and journeys takes a lot of work. Customer interactions are part of a complex of experiences that can occur in many channels and with many functions in the enterprise. Customer experiences are occurring as events, related to cross-functional and cross-channel processes that need to be integrated into a sense of a "single experience" from the customer perspective, as well as integrated in terms of data, process, people, and practices within the enterprise. Further hard work must be done to orchestrate customer touchpoints, which can include multiple teams within the enterprise. Truly putting the best foot forward for customer interactions can be tricky and complicated, even when the best of intentions are in play.

But from the customer's perspective, it's simple: did I get what I wanted or needed -- or not?

And the customer perspective is what counts. What looks complex to vendors probably makes perfect sense to customers – it's their journeys after all. Many organizations are embarking on complicated approaches to working with the customer journey because it has complexity. But I think the real issue is that engaging customers now requires more work from all teams in the enterprise, and many organizations aren't prepared to handle the transition. Dictating step 1, step 2, step 3 with the notion that everyone behaves the same does not work anymore, if it ever did. Social media sites encourage the individual to step out – and companies now have to deal with it.

 

Understanding Your Customers

I've written quite a bit about the "customer as buyer" both here in CMSWire and in my blog. I've talked about connecting the customer journey for B2B software purchases to content marketing and to marketing automation. I've explored the complex interrelationships of three journeys for buying and using enterprise software. Any way you slice it, work has to be done, assessed and fine-tuned to learn more and more about current and potential customers, and how to apply knowledge and insights to developing products that customers will want to buy, and then how to market and sell them.

Part of the hard work depends on robust customer segmentations and predictive analytics. These "tools" require time to set up, refine, and measure against outcomes; then more time to continue improving and changing. Just as the customer journey is frequently ongoing, with no "final destination", the work to engage and support the customer during the buying journey also has no final destination, particularly if companies want the customer to continue to purchase, successfully use and recommend their products.

Analytics can be very important to understanding customers as related to company strategies. But while data and insights help organizations make better decisions, it's the "people" part that often makes or breaks the purchase. Purchase decisions can be based on emotions, hidden agendas, influence from friends, family and colleagues – or even whim.

Customer behaviors constantly change, markets change, business environments change – sometimes for good, sometimes for bad. So efforts for understanding and supporting customer segments and their myriad journeys must be continuously updated. The constants: create products customers want and need; put high quality into all efforts; focus on the customer first, then align company goals to what the company is going to do for customers.

There's no one-size-fits-all. B2B customer journeys are really different from B2C; within those two mega-categories more differences emerge. Multi-channel customer experiences are often fragmented and hard to assemble into a "singular" experience. For one company and its products, there can be multiple customer / buyer journeys. There can be multiple customer categories, and within those categories multiple customer segments. It all depends on the products, how they are sold, who is the target, and how well a company wants to interact with customers.

Customer journeys may mutate, stall, meander – and this simply may be standard operating procedure from the customer perspective. So organizations need to get comfortable with the changeable, quirky nature of buying journeys, and apply "responsive design" to customer service and support, marketing and sales, and corporate goals and strategies. Not only do companies need to deliver what customers want and need over multiple channels and multiple devices, but companies themselves may do well to adopt the persona of a mega-channel with an agile customer focus. Internally a great deal of integration has to happen for teams, functions, processes, and data before an enterprise becomes an interoperating and responsive organization. Successful outcomes can be aligned with customer behaviors and requirements after the organization admits that only the customer owns the experience with the company.

 

 

 

Source: Brian Solis

 

 

Detours Along the Way

Because life is not linear, and neither are most customer journeys, organizations have clear challenges to following and understanding the personalized travels of their buyers. Organizations need to get busy with meeting such challenges to gain real understanding of customer segments and buying proclivities. Organizations create marketing plans to provide support, content, promotions and offers that will stick to the customer wherever the journey is. But these plans often harken back to linear thinking rather than working with the loops and veerings that really happen.

Loops, veers, stalls and detours in buying journeys frequently have nothing to do with the value of products and services or with what other vendors are offering. Customers are people who have work, distractions, other buying journeys (personal and work-related), family matters, and all the other messy stuff of day-to-day life. And surprise! -- most customers simply do not dedicate a full time focus to a particular buying journey. It doesn't matter if it's a B2B or B2C journey.

Detours can include new channels that demand new ways of engaging customers. Mobile devices are increasingly more important to buyers for investigating products and vendors, looking at peer recommendations, asking questions, and in many cases making purchases. Mobile requires new approaches to apps and content – and requires greater agility in organizations to deliver mobile-smart experiences for customers. But many companies lag here and are missing great opportunities. This detour then becomes a dead end for the customer journey.

  

It's Not Your Journey

The customer takes the journey – companies don't lead them or manage them. Companies can provide what is potentially needed at each touchpoint, made more effective when handled using the customer perspective. Companies shouldn't get in the way of the customer taking the journey, but should make it easier for customers to find what they're looking for and to make purchases. Of course "easier" is a relative term. Organizations are striving to provide the right information and support at the right time on the right device and the right channel. Many times this works pretty well or even great; sometimes not. Relevance changes constantly.

Not only do customers have no interest in being "managed" by a company, it's really not possible. But solutions and practices for customer-focused touchpoints such as websites, social media, CRM, CEM, and product fulfillment can and should make it easier for customers to acquire products and services in ways that can also map to company goals. If discarding the notion of customer "command and control" in favor of recognizing that considerable power belongs to the customer proves to be more effective for gaining and retaining customers, then solutions for the different touchpoints should facilitate customer-enabling functions.

The best outcome of any customer interaction or experience should be the value that is derived by the customer – the assessment of that value also belongs to the customer. Organizations don't always know what value was received – or if it was received – even when asking customers directly. It may well be that continuously improved behavioral and predictive analytics processes will reveal far more in this area, far better than a multitude of customer interviews and surveys. Customer actions speak louder than customer words.

  

Related Links

Symbiosis: Customer Experience and Business Process

Perception: The Customer Journey and Business Success

Three Journeys: Lifecycles of Enterprise Software Buyers & End Users

In Pursuit of Customer Experience Excellence

Strategies from Top to Bottom - Content Marketing for B2B Software Vendors

The Customer Journey: Content Marketing for B2B Software Buyers

Goals and Metrics – Measuring Customer Engagement on the Web

SMB / Mid-Market B2B Software vendors - Findability + web presence + social: attracting the "customer as buyer"

 

 

About the author: Julie Hunt understands and sees the overlap and convergence of many business processes and software solutions that once were thought of as "separate" – and how this impacts both software Vendors and Buyers, as well as the strategies that enterprises implement for how technology supports the business and its customers. Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitive and on Twitter: @juliebhunt For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Strategies for B2B Software Solutions: Working from the Customer Perspective

 

Customer-focused Marketing Automation: ‘Automation’ is the Easy Part

                    Cross-posted on CMSWire

 

Marketing automation (MA) is a hot topic right now – it's also in the early stages of potentially becoming an integral component of engendering positive customer interactions. Quite a bit has been written about what comprises current marketing automation capabilities. Most use cases center on email drip marketing and lead management / nurturing – done well, they can make a big difference for many companies. Enterprises are beginning to understand how to use MA for more on-target 'shepherding' of prospects during the buying cycle. And for enterprises with sophisticated buyer needs, marketing automation tools can provide a good means for building sustainable processes for continuous high quality leads and revenue growth.

There are stumbling blocks for marketing automation:

• Multi-channel customer experiences are fragmented and don't always map well into MA
• Marketing automation is doomed if it retracts into a robotic email-blasting machine
• A customer focus aligned with marketing automation requires several interconnected strategies for customer, marketing, content, lead gen - plus sales and marketing collaboration

A further complication is this advice from Forrester: frequently the customer has completed 75% of the buyer journey before engaging with sales. Of course, not all buyer journeys are the same -- often marketing automation is the most useful for complex journeys. But there's still a lot to do to be successful with marketing automation.

 

The Customer Perspective Always Matters

From the company perspective, enabling excellent (or even good) customer experiences can seem complicated, even ephemeral. Some marketing programs are trying to make the "customer experience" quite intricate, perhaps overly convoluted. Software solutions are being developed around marketing processes for "customer experience management", where too much emphasis may be on the "management" part, and too little on what constitute positive or desirable experiences from the customer perspective.

The customer perspective should also drive the use of marketing automation. There's a lot of activity for the development and adoption of MA technologies – there's also a lot of room for improvement regarding processes, practices and objectives. All of this should swirl around what the customer needs and wants from the enterprise's products and services. And that will take deep intelligence, constant measurement and improvement, and continuous analysis to achieve tangible results that benefit the customer and the enterprise.

 

A Forrester report from 2011 conveys some of what it takes for success with marketing automation:

 

 

        

 

'Customer' and the Buyer Journey

To achieve more valuable use of marketing automation, you have to start with thoroughly understanding customers, buyer journeys, trigger events and key touchpoints. This means a lot of research, analysis and segmentation at sophisticated levels – all of which will have to be constantly refreshed. Behavioral and predictive analytics can provide useful insights, but these types of analytical modeling are not simple tasks. Collaboration with domain experts must be included to validate research, analysis and recommended steps to take.

Buyer journey mapping is a significant undertaking for engendering better customer buying experiences and for adding intelligence to marketing automation plans. Customer segmentation may yield multiple buyer journeys and maps, and possibly different customer experiences – this will serve to take marketing automation further away from an undesirable one-size-fits-all. Buyer journey mapping helps better decision-making for aligning the interconnected strategies and processes needed to constantly refresh relevance for customers, particularly when marketing automation is in play.

    
 

Source: Forrester

 

 

Buyer journeys are not always linear progressions. Instead steps or phases in the journey can circle back on themselves. Different phases may be revisited until the buyer is ready to move to subsequent phases. Circle-back cycles can occur multiple times. All of which adds complexity to constructing effective marketing automation processes.

 

 

Forrester's customer experience touchpoints flow captures the iterative nature of many buyer journeys:

 
                                          Forrester: Emergence of Customer Experience Management Solutions

 

 

 

Customer Intelligence: Data, Integration, Analytics

For almost all aspects of Marketing, data really matters for achieving sustained effectiveness. Data is needed from many different internal systems and also must be collected from external venues such as social sites. Data sources and business processes must be integrated to manage the constant need for up-to-date information on customers. Useful customer segmentation can only be achieved through such integration efforts.

Constant interaction between marketing automation and CRM systems is another must-have. Beyond these two systems, the understanding of customer needs and desires also requires data from customer experience systems, social media owned by the enterprise, and campaign management. For marketing automation to support engaging and personalized customer interactions, detailed analysis of communications over time can reveal what buyers are likely interested in now and for the near future.

Marketing automation processes don't have to end with converted leads. Significant opportunities remain for targeted customer communications to nurture a more developed long term customer relationship, to open the door for new interactions, and eventually grow new purchases and customer brand advocacy. Effective personalized interactions that evolve with the customer relationship can derive from the use of analytics. Customers can change very quickly – marketing automation has to keep up.

The data and intelligence attained in support of MA objectives must be shared with many other systems to enrich the continuous improvement of enterprise-wide customer focus and service. Not only are integrated systems and processes needed to accomplish this, but healthy cross-team collaboration, as well as the right strategies from top to bottom.

 

Marketing Automation + Customer Intelligence = Lots of Quality Content

A key aspect of marketing automation is matching the right content or message to the right customer at the right phase of the buying journey. In some ways, this is easier said than done, keeping in mind what it takes to really understand the customer. A great deal of very creative content will need to be developed along with savvy rules and decision processes. This is Personalization on Steroids.

Web content / experience management platforms and practices have a complementary relationship with marketing automation, and a critical need for interoperability to benefit each of them. Marketing automation is first focused on prospects who are purposefully interacting with enterprise web assets. WEM and content marketing are often attuned to engaging prospects who are less familiar with the brand and what it has to offer. Integration of MA and WEM for comprehensive interactions with prospects and customers has great potential:

HubSpot conducted a study last year on website redesign. What we found was that marketers redesign their websites with a surprising frequency. 68% of marketers underwent a website redesign in the last 12 months….Most marketers who redesigned their website did so for branding reasons or because "the previous website was old," and the company "just needed to modernize." When you think about it, none of these reasons are particularly focused on the customer.

After hearing from marketers, the survey also asked website visitors what they thought. The results were significant. 76% of respondents said the most important factor in the design of a website is that it "makes it easy for me to find what I want." So why are so many homepages driven by company-needs rather than those of prospective-customers?

The short answer is data. Emails sent through marketing automation are triggered by lead intelligence data. But most marketing automation systems are set up separately from a website's content tools so the same data can't trigger website content in a similar way.

 

For marketing automation content to provide superior customer engagement it must follow the same 'rules' that exist for effective content marketing: it's no longer about the vendor and product features, it's about content that helps prospects and customers solve their problems and improve the performance of their enterprises. Content marketing strategies map content to buyer journeys – since the same applies to marketing automation, integration opportunities should be explored.

 

  

Silos or Ecosystem?

The more strategic aspects of marketing automation are in their infancy and are going to take time and a lot of hard work to deliver useful results. Customer-responsive email marketing and better management of lead generation are important steps in the right direction. But marketing automation has to go beyond email programs and lead nurturing to bring more value to improved customer interactions not only for buyer journey phases, but for ongoing relationships with customers.

Marketing automation can take on greater significance particularly when integrated with WEM and content marketing processes for intelligent content delivery that reflects real understanding of each customer segment. Anytime we are talking about content, we're talking Customer – so the needs and desires of customers must be at the strategic heart of integrated processes for MA, WEM and the other components of an integrated digital marketing ecosystem.

Marketing automation has the potential to evolve into a key piece for building dynamic intelligence that feeds many digital marketing processes. But marketing automation will not meet that potential if it focuses only on responses to the actions taken by buyers in one-off interactions.

 

 

Related Links

The New Data-Savvy Adaptive Marketing

Symbiosis: Customer Experience and Business Process

Perception: The Customer Journey and Business Success

In Pursuit of Customer Experience Excellence

Strategies from Top to Bottom - Content Marketing for B2B Software Vendors

The Customer Journey: Content Marketing for B2B Software Buyers

Goals and Metrics – Measuring Customer Engagement on the Web

Goodbye Corporate Website – Hello Web Presence Management Framework?

Moving beyond WCM - Web Experience Management software solutions and markets

 

 

About the author: Julie Hunt understands and sees the overlap and convergence of many business processes and software solutions that once were thought of as "separate" – and how this impacts both software Vendors and Buyers, as well as the strategies that enterprises implement for how technology supports the business and its customers. Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitive and on Twitter: @juliebhunt For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Strategies for B2B Software Solutions: Working from the Customer Perspective

The Irrelevance of Porter’s Five Forces for the B2B Software Industry

 

For the software industry the use of strategic market and competitive intelligence has not been particularly well executed by many vendors. MI and CI for software vendors differs greatly from the more established practices for CPG, Pharma or manufacturing – often what works well for these other industries has little relevance for software vendors. The main difference: the intensely fast pace of constant change for most of the software industry. "Time" is measured in nanoseconds. As such the software industry requires a greater focus on MI and CI, but often actual practice does not include the most beneficial aspects.

Market Intelligence is essential for creating strong product strategy and for fine-tuning that strategy as industries, markets, customers, the product space, and competitors evolve over time – again usually very small windows of time. Core decisions for businesses must be based on reasonable understanding of significant and likely future events – what the potential impact could be, good and bad. Market intelligence is the dynamic means for uncovering the right future-pointing intelligence as early as possible, averting "nasty surprises" and discovering new opportunities.

Strategic market Intelligence differs from business research (and traditional business intelligence) through context -- a certain mindset held while the research and analysis phases are done. The market intelligence professional always has in mind the organization, its business and product space, the industry, customers and target markets, and the drivers behind the need for intelligence. It's an ongoing sense of the impact of what could be uncovered -- the ramifications of what seemingly unconnected items of intelligence could mean for the company. It ensures that business decisions and product direction are customer-focused, market-driven, and reality-based.

Where software companies go wrong with MI and CI efforts is limiting activities to directly supporting sales in tactical ways, focusing only on pointless programs for "killing the competition", and endless feature/function battles that are meaningless in today's commoditized markets for software solutions. Another wrong turn has been the adherence to Porter's Five Forces as a model for product strategy and for market and competitive intelligence, undoubtedly influenced by MBA school curricula in the eighties and nineties, much of which has now proven useless to many enterprises.

 

 

                                                PORTER'S FIVE FORCES 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Porter's Five Forces: The Magic Model that Doesn't Work

I recently read Steve Denning's article on the demise of Michael Porter's Monitor Group consulting firm. Porter invented a model for corporate "strategy" based on 'Five Forces' that has been treated almost as a reverential artifact for many years. Denning's article brought me back to my own thinking years ago on why Porter doesn't work for software companies. I never have really used Porter for strategic market intelligence for the software industry – instead I developed a matrix that holds more relevance to the needs of software companies.

I refer to Porter's model as an "artifact" because it is no longer relevant to today's markets, if it ever really was. It's linked to a business context set in the Eighties, when corporate strategy focused on inside-out objectives such as beating competitors and sustaining profitability with no connection to value delivered to customers – chest-thumping instead of serving customers. There was a great deal more market predictability and regularity. Today's markets obviously have become volatile and not so predictable; businesses are now challenged to create new business models multiple times during the life of the enterprise to survive and thrive.

 

Five Forces Model Fails the Software Industry

Because Porter's Five Forces model is based on non-changing market conditions, it is limited or even harmful for dealing with dynamic, ever-changing industries and markets. Well, the software industry never sits still, and this has intensified in recent years. And the customers of software vendors are also facing uncertain and fluctuating markets, which adds further complexity when seeking insight for future trends regarding customer needs and wants.

Professionally, Porter was not experienced in any industry, in any hands on sense, when he created the Five Forces model, so he didn't have practical experience to fully explore or prove out his model. If you don't understand the software industry, how people interact with software and rely on software to improve their own enterprises, then any indirect models will likely have little relevance.

Under Porter, competitive intelligence is not about going to market competitively to meet customer needs and desires - it's about "beating" everyone including the customer. The customer is not a partner but a conquered spoil of war. Not exactly the best path to engendering customer experience excellence – perhaps Porter's model is one of the reasons that many enterprises have done such a bad job of focusing on the customer. MI and CI better serve a software company when its purpose is to understand the competitive landscape well enough to seek out paths that diverge from the "herd" so that the company carves out underserved markets and better understands customer needs. Porter's aggressive modeling around "competition" has misguided organizations into becoming obsessed with destroying the competition.

Other areas where Porter's model comes up short:

• The value of partner ecosystems including supply chain
• Predicting future trends
• Identifying new customer segments
• Understanding that software solution spaces are commoditized
• When it's time to sunset solutions and markets

These are all essential to growth and evolution for sustaining success.

 

Defining and Sizing Markets – Another Porter Failure

For software offerings, market sizing used to be a fairly straightforward task, when technology problems and solutions were seemingly distinct and silo'd from other technology areas. Market sizing is important but many software vendors don't consider all of the parameters that actually define the markets and the customers that are the best fit for software offerings.

An example of market sizing that has become more complex – and that certainly would be poorly served by using Porter's model – is the software market for what used to be called Web Content Management and is now frequently called Web Experience Management. The use of websites and web presence by organizations to promote and sell their products has evolved to sophisticated levels where multi-channel customer experiences have greater importance and often involve Internet venues that are not controlled by the organization.

WEM is actually a composite of a solution ecosystem – understanding this leads to a better calculation of the overall market size. Although some market forecasts from analyst firms are stretching to include more of this ecosystem, often multiple market forecasts must be considered and added into the final market potential for WEM solutions. The overall solution ecosystem becomes compellingly relevant when taking the customer's point-of-view for the desired end-to-end solution.

Porter's model is ill-equipped to handle such converging markets or ecosystems. Often Porter's model is used in business school in simplistic calculations of market size where the 'profit potential' is the real goal, unfortunately without considering the many variables that go into real market potential. And of course such simplistic calculations also lead to the allocation of 'market share' – once again focusing on competitors rather than customers.

The complex variables for real market potential primarily center on the customer: meeting customer needs and desires, improving customer experiences with the organization, understanding who the customer is through useful segmentations mapped to solution scenarios, addressing usability and problem-solving effectiveness for the software offering, from the customer perspective. But these are harder variables to try to quantify and often are left out of the 'equation'.

Another aspect of WEM markets is the fact that there are two sets of customers to be considered: the customer who buys the WEM software, and the target customer for the web properties that will be built with the WEM software. Since WEM solutions impact two levels of buyers, the technology exists as a means to an end – it is the "end" that really matters and must be foremost in the minds of vendors and solution buyers. Porter's model has little to account for the complexities of 'customer' in this scenario.

 

So Why Am I Concerned about Porter

As many have pointed out, Porter's Five Forces seemingly didn't save Michael Porter's own high-dollar consultancy, so how can it have relevance to the needs of other organizations. Even Porter's consultancy wasn't part of the simple market construct that is the best fit for gaining benefit from the Five Forces model.

Steve Denning asks in his article:  

Had Monitor tried to implement Porter’s strategy and executed it poorly? Or had Monitor implemented Porter’s strategy well but the strategy didn’t work? If not, why not?

Denning further explains what was greatly lacking from Porter's model:   

There was just one snag. What was the intellectual basis of this now vast enterprise of locating sustainable competitive advantage? As Stewart notes, it was “lacking any foundation in fact or logic.” Except where generated by government regulation, sustainable competitive advantage simply doesn’t exist.

What’s gone wrong here was Porter’s initial thought. The purpose of strategy—or business or business education—is not about coping with competition–i.e. a contest in which a winner is selected from among rivals. The purpose of business is to add value for customers and ultimately society. There is a straight line from this conceptual error at the outset of Porter’s writing to the debacle of Monitor’s bankruptcy. Monitor failed to add value to customers.

 

For strategic purposes alone, a lot of time has been wasted on trying to align an organization's management with Porter's model when it just plain wasn't useful for most software companies. Many industries have spent way too much time and resources on building complicated and non-scaling frameworks that never really help the organization with strategic decision-making and don't provide real-time responsiveness to market changes. And if the model is applied only to particular segments of a complex corporation, important aspects will be missed by working without the context of interrelations across product groups and segments, as well as across organizational functions.

 

                                                                                                        Source: Julie Hunt Consulting

 

 

Customer-Focused Strategic Market & Competitive Intelligence

Many software companies continue to think of market and competitive intelligence as tactical methods to attack competitors, to convince a customer not to buy from a competitor, instead of: developing their own strategic solution offerings, building strategic relationships with customers, and understanding how to help customers really solve their problems and support their business initiatives with reliable solutions.

Focusing on Customers should be the starting point for MI and CI initiatives for software vendors. It is essential for software vendors to attract customers, and eventually sales, through true ROI and through differentiation other than feature/function minutiae. Market Intelligence programs, in collaboration with product marketing, are important sources of comprehensive research, analysis and recommendations for providing the elements of a software solution that can set it apart, from the customer perspective.

Strategic MI makes a significant difference for the competitiveness of software companies:  

• New opportunities – identify new trends that will matter to target markets and customers; how to get there before the competition (whenever possible)
• Enhanced customer interaction – understand customer POV, goals, needs, strategic direction
• Stronger target market selection & positioning – research, validate go-to-market and positioning; locate under-served markets for target customers and solution space; guide how to articulate positioning well for customers, analysts, industry
• Strategic view of competitive landscape – figure out true differentiation, figure out where competitors are not operating; understand the issues that matter to customers and the solutions they seek from competitors
• Early warning of industry and/or competitor changes – take advantage of opportunities and leverage/deal with threats and risk

 

Related links:

Software companies still fail to tap into top benefits from market and competitive intelligence programs

Market Intelligence – Making Better Business Decisions at the Core of the Company

Shallow Thinking Ensures Bad Business Decisions

Provocation-based Market Intelligence in a Market-Driven world

Moving beyond WCM - Web Experience Management software solutions and markets

Internal Disruption–No Longer Business As Usual

Customer Buying Criteria - Applying customer & competitive intelligence to selling tools leads to strategic internal benefits

In Pursuit of Customer Experience Excellence

Achieving the Social Business, Inside and Out

 

About the author: Julie Hunt understands the overlap and convergence of many business processes and software solutions that once were thought of as "separate" – and how this impacts both software Vendors and Buyers, as well as the strategies that enterprises implement for how technology supports the business and its customers. Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitive and on Twitter: @juliebhunt For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Strategies for B2B Software Solutions: Working from the Customer Perspective

 

 

The Customer Journey: Content Marketing for B2B Software Buyers

     Originally published in CMSWire July 2, 2012

 

The customer journey consists of multiple touchpoints, which are the interactions with any and all enterprise functions, employees, and marketing / digital channels. They all matter – they are the milestones of the customer journey. Touchpoints are also components of multi-channel marketing, which has the challenge of nurturing and sustaining a unified customer experience across all channels, and for the customer journey.

The buying process or customer decision journey – where customers go through various stages to reach a decision about purchase – is a significant piece of the B2B customer journey. Content marketing can bring value to all aspects of the customer journey – all customer engagement opportunities. But particular attention to the buying process is an essential aspect of successful content marketing strategies.

  

Content and the Customer Journey

The buying process for B2B software can be complex and involve multiple steps for the customer, both for arriving at a decision and for making the purchase itself. The "customer" frequently consists of multiple roles: techies (IT), line-of-business decision-makers, financial and budget managers, executives, and sometimes the actual users of the technology. (One of the flaws on the buyer side of the equation is too often the "end" user of the software solution is left out of the decision-making process.) Content marketing has a fantastic opportunity to help potential buyer roles with the decision steps and foster positive experiences as part of the customer journey.

  

"What do Suspects want? What you Know, not what you Sell"

 

                                 Source: Eloqua

 

 Eloqua's Joe Chernov has produced a lot of solid work advising B2B companies on how best to implement content marketing. Chernov and Elle Woulfe recently released a slide deck on Mapping Content to the Buyer's Journey:

 Key takeaways:

• Content has minimal value in absolute, but tremendous value when mapped to the right stage in the funnel
• When it comes to distribution, think of suspect-stage content as "many to many," prospect-stage as "one to many," lead-stage as "one to few," and opportunity-stage as "one to one"
• When it comes to prospects, content that assuages professional fears tends to be most effective
• Mismatching content to stage can backfire … mitigate by asking yourself, "Is this piece of content, delivered at this time, advancing the buyer's journey?"

  

Customer Segmentation for the Journey

Work done for target customer segmentation and for mapping the customer journey is very useful for organizing types of content, and how and when content is made available to various customer roles and needs. Some content will be tagged to certain steps in the buying process: key customer roles for each step, what topics matter to them, what kind of content, where do they prefer to consume it. Some content will help existing customers use technology solutions for greater benefit and find out more that the vendor can do to help with business success. Some content is meant to pique interest for anyone unfamiliar with the vendor.

  

                             Source: Inflexion Point

  

The key milestones in the B2B buying decision process happen when:

• Something changes, and your prospect recognises they have a potential need
• They conclude that solutions are available, and that there is an economic case for change
• They define their requirements and decision criteria
• They identify and shortlist technically and financially feasible options
• They identify a single preferred solution
• That solution successfully navigates the investment approval process

 

Many resources are available for understanding how to match content to steps or phases in the customer journey, including Spark Inbound Marketing's B2B Buying Cycle and Eloqua's Content Grid:

 

  Eloqua's Content Grid v2 (excerpt)  

 

  

Content for the Customer-as-Buyer

è Content Value is Strictly from the Customer Point-of-View

Just as the customer alone owns the customer experience, the perceived value of content solely rests with the customer. Learning customer desires for content is where a lot of time should be spent. Just like software solutions must be right-fit for customers needs, the same goes for content. Just as vendors should be segmenting target markets and target customer roles for being able to connect their solutions to customer needs, the same segmentation should be used for content.

è Insights, Critical Thinking and Expert Knowledge-sharing

Software vendors need to provide content about current problems and future directions for topics that matter to customers. With so much content available on the internet, writing about yesterday's issues is not engaging to most customers, unless yesterday's issues address problems still plaguing customers. Then the content should look at what might be done to solve those problems. Customers realize that technology is in constant flux, in good and bad ways. Helping customers to see into future trends that could benefit their businesses, and the potential gotchas of new technology, is likely to provide valuable content from the customer POV.

è Diversity of Content

Content can be expressed in many forms, multiplied by many channels – which means companies really must understand for each target customer role what are the preferred content types and preferred channel for each content type. Mobile platforms present good but difficult channels that must be understood and handled well. Opportunities are increasing for more interactive components related to content. Creative, sophisticated approaches to most content should be considered – simplicity and clarity are other constructs to consider. Developing several related pieces of content for a particular topic can enrich how content marketing aligns with the customer journey. People come back for the next installments, and the vendor can develop more in-depth coverage via different media and different channels.

   

 Source: InboundWriter

   

è Quality over Quantity – and reliable continuity of quality content is vital

Customers and prospects don't want to waste their time on junk content or thinly disguised brochure-ware. Imperatives for effective content marketing artifacts are quality, creativity, hot topics, deep insights – essentially respecting the target audience by producing excellent work. Constant and reliable content creation is important, but what this means will vary by content type and channel.

 

There are a lot of reasons why content marketing doesn't work for some companies…But the biggest culprit (and it's not even close) is a lack of consistency, and, in some cases, a content stoppage. Research from IBM in 2010 stated that about 80 percent of corporate blogs never post more than five entries (hat tip to Rebecca Lieb). That is a truly unbelievable stat…

 

è People, Money, Time

Content marketing is sustained only by realistic allocations of resources: people, money and time in particular. B2B software companies should be tapping internal subject matter experts (SMEs), as well as external ones, to deliver the kind of content that customers want. Internal tech experts are also needed as reviewers and editors to ensure that content is accurate. Strategic-thinking enterprises cannot expect their employees to participate in content marketing on their own time or to work it into already busy work schedules, as a "sideline". Upper management has to make sure that content marketing participation for an employee is a recognized part of regular compensated responsibilities.

The responsibilities of creating relevant content must come from company staff:

Content marketing is brand marketing, cubed, and as such requires the full attention and supervision of your team. Prospects and customers now expect to engage with you— and by engage with you we mean get to know your brand—through your content. Creating content assets to support content marketing is a centralized strategy that relies on a consistent brand voice and vision to work. It's a bad habit left over from legacy thinking to allow your marketing organization to create content as one-off campaign or program assets without thinking of the broader implications.

 

Strategies to Deliver What Customers Need

The work to be done to understand how to deliver the right content to customers and prospects is the same work that B2B software vendors should be doing to deliver the products and services that customers and prospects want and need. The work being done to identify optimal target markets and customer roles for products should be extended to segmentation for content marketing purposes. In all of these cases the ultimate "product" for the customer should be high quality, reliable, useful, easy to put to work.

There are a lot of great ideas for the tactics of content marketing, but it's not likely that sustained success will result without multiple strategy levels in a given enterprise. Even if Marketing and other teams develop a good content marketing strategy, it cannot be effective if Marketing does not have a strategic position in the overall enterprise, backed by upper management. And before we can make the journey to a well-crafted content marketing strategy, upper management must make the commitment to be an inter-operative enterprise that is customer-focused, market-driven, and process and data savvy. Enterprises must ensure the creation of integrated systems and processes for internal and external customer interactions. Content marketing is not a short term campaign or project; it is a strategic commitment that impacts most of the enterprise – for the entire customer lifecycle.

 

  

Related Links

Strategies from Top to Bottom - Content Marketing for B2B Software Vendors  

Content Marketing Strategy for B2B Software Vendors: Starring the 'New' White Paper

Perception: The Customer Journey and Business Success

Symbiosis: Customer Experience and Business Process

In Pursuit of Customer Experience Excellence

Goals and Metrics – Measuring Customer Engagement on the Web

Customer Buying Criteria - Applying customer & competitive intelligence to selling tools leads to strategic internal benefits

SMB / Mid-Market B2B Software vendors - Findability + web presence + social: attracting the "customer as buyer"

 

About the author: Julie Hunt is an accomplished software industry analyst, providing strategic market and competitive insights. Her 25+ years as a software professional range from the very technical side, to customer-centric work in solutions strategy, competitive selling and go-to-market strategies. Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitive and on Twitter: @juliebhunt For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Strategic Product & Market Intelligence Services

 

 

Perception: The Customer Journey and Business Success

 

The customer life cycle consists of every experience with an organization – taking place as interactions with staff, systems and sites, inside and outside the firewall. It would make a big difference if enterprises would understand that each customer experience is actually a customer service opportunity. The customer experience should always be about customer service, no matter what it is or where it takes place in the customer journey. High quality customer experiences, like high quality and reliable customer service, are competitive differentiators – and they are becoming competitive imperatives. And yet, many companies still fail to provide top-notch customer experiences and excellent customer service.

 

From the company perspective enabling excellent (or even good) customer experiences can seem complicated, even ephemeral. Some marketing programs are trying to make the “customer experience” quite intricate, perhaps overly convoluted. Software solutions are being developed around marketing processes for “customer experience management”, where too much emphasis may be on the “management” part, and too little on what are positive or desirable experiences from the customer perspective.

 

Further complications can come from the hard work of orchestrating all customer touchpoints. Customer experiences are occurring as events, related to cross-functional and cross-channel processes that need to be merged into a “single experience” for the customer, as well as integrated in terms of data, process, people, and practices within the enterprise. And this is tricky and complicated, even when the best of intentions are in play.

 

But from the customer’s perspective, it’s simple: did I get what I wanted or needed -- or not? Guess which perspective matters more to company success.

 

Source: Customer Experience Marketing for Real People 

 

Wrong Turns?

If you google customer experience management (CEM), a flood of marketing plans, tips, guidelines, and technology solutions comes pouring out. Many have overtones of manipulation and control, reminiscent of the “command and control” executive management in many companies. To sell the idea of “customer experience management” to enterprises, some consultants and vendors resort to inside-out thinking, where it’s all about what the company gains, instead of what value accrues to the customer:

 …it’s the grand design to find customers, gain their business, and bring them back...it will help to own the customer and the rewards are building loyalty and increasing profits…

 

There are also many consultants and vendors who are offering on-target assistance and useful software tools. But it’s essential always to keep in mind that the customer experience is outside-in: focus on the customer perception of the experiences and on the value that should be gained by the customer. I sometimes wonder if companies are taking the notion of “customer experience management” to mean literally managing customers into outcomes that the companies want, without really understanding or caring about the experience part. The key phrase is customer experience: the customer’s experience.

 

The reality of customer experiences and customer service at many companies is still not-so-great – but improving customer experiences overall holds great potential for the company side of the story:

 

Satisfaction at all stages across the customer life cycle is low. While conventional wisdom focuses on customer service as the pivot point for customer satisfaction, only 32% of consumers and a paltry 11% of business buyers feel satisfied with the online research process. Similarly, fewer than half of consumers and just 17% of business buyers feel satisfied with the online purchase process. This unhappiness negatively impacts customers’ likelihood to purchase again or recommend the company to friends or colleagues.

 

Fixing the research and purchase process represents a big opportunity for vendors. A basic model for looking at the financial implications of improving online customer experience shows that a company could increase revenues by over $12 million annually in the research and sales process, while the cost savings for improving service could reach $2 million.

 Adobe-Forrester study, 2010 

 

The value that customers would receive from improving customer service and all other interactions with an enterprise is obvious.

 

Perceptions Are Reality

In most cases, companies cannot truly manipulate what customers actually experience, but companies have ownership of providing consistent high quality interactions in many channels, and making sure that the same positive interaction carries over from one channel to another. Companies can engender an internal “culture” where customer service is high priority and employees are enabled and empowered to provide it. Customer is the focus, the starting point, the point-of-view – actually the whole point, so again outside-in should be the over-arching mindset.

 

But it looks like too many organizations and enterprise teams are tripping over themselves with inside-out strategies that define their staffing roles, technology, marketing, and enterprise business processes. This approach will fall short, even fail.

 

 

 Source: IBM

 

The customer perception of interactions with a company is often the guts of the customer experience. For a company to “manage” customer experience at all, it should turn most of the management on itself: well-integrated processes plus excellent products, pricing, engagement – all oriented to serving customers well and meeting their real needs and desires. Companies have the power to very thoroughly own that sort of management and should exploit it to its fullest. Then it’s likely that the customer will have a good experience with the company, which generally leads to companies meeting their goals.

 

Not only do customers have no interest in being “managed” by a company, it’s really not possible. But solutions and practices for customer-focused touchpoints that occur through websites, social media, CRM, CEM, and product fulfillment can and should make it easier for customers to acquire products and services in ways that can also meet company goals. If dropping the notion of customer “command and control” in favor of recognizing that considerable power belongs to the customer proves to be more effective for gaining and retaining customers, then solutions for the above systems should facilitate customer-enabling functions. Customer experience management in particular should be about the ‘power of pull’ – a concept well-known from the work of John Hagel and John Seely Brown.

 

 

The Customer Journey - Orchestrating Touchpoints

In a way, what is being called customer experience management might be designated as “customer interaction touchpoints and business process orchestration” – but it’s highly doubtful that such a name would catch on. Orchestration is about multiple components working together in harmony. Touchpoints are all interactions with any and all enterprise functions, employees, and marketing / digital channels. They all matter – they are the milestones of the customer journey, some more important than others at times. Touchpoints are also components of multi-channel marketing, which has the challenge of nurturing and sustaining a unified customer experience across all channels, during the customer journey. 

The hard work is taking what frequently is a collective of separate touchpoints and harmonizing the collective to enable the potential of excellent customer experiences. Orchestration and integration are key aspects of approaching a seamless experience across touchpoints – again this only works if the customer truly perceives the unified experience.

Forrester: Emergence of Customer Experience Management Solutions

 

Certain significant touchpoints can be overlooked when considering how to engender positive customer experiences:

 

Think the only impressions your company makes are through branding, sales calls, and customer service? Think again. Mishandling interactions like reference management and billing can cause customer defection as quickly as a poor contact center experience

 

In fact, organizations of all sizes and levels of CRM sophistication often overlook six primary customer touch points: Reference management, Field service intelligence, Workflow management, Sales quoting, Customer segmentation, and Billing

 

More Wrong Turns

Bruce Temkin has a thorough series on mistakes companies make in their customer experience management efforts including Mapping Your Internal Touchpoints where “Companies often confuse internally-focused touchpoint mapping with externally-focused customer journey mapping”. Some of the mistakes made include:

 

Rely on internal analysis… examining internal processes (without) the context of how customers view their interactions with the organization.

 Lack emotional design components Touchpoint mapping efforts often lead to redesigning of internal processes. But these changes are based on efficiency goals, not customers’ emotional needs.

 Temkin shares this advice to change the company perspective to the customer POV:

 Assume that customers view their journey differently than you do. This will force you to do the research to understand how customers perceive their entire relationship…reframe the objective in customer terms. For instance, find out how “customers want to buy” not “how we can sell.”

 Uncover differences across customer segments. It’s unusual for all customers to share the identical journeys.

Answer three questions. Push hard to answer these three questions: 1) What are the most important touchpoints; 2) How are we doing in those key touchpoints; 3) What can we do to improve the customers’ perception of those touchpoints.

Source: Global Crossing

 

Effectiveness

One of the biggest opportunities and challenges for enterprises who want to nurture excellent customer interactions is to implement high quality, in-depth customer analytics. In the IBM 2010 Global CEO Study, 88 percent of CEOs said “getting closer to customers” was the top priority for their business over the next five years. Many company leaders see opportunities through the right analytics to understand customer needs, desires and behaviors, to improve customer attraction and retention, and to ultimately drive revenue and growth.

 

Company goals will evolve with customer experience and engagement initiatives, both at tactical and strategic levels. As a result, metrics for successful customer interactions will also evolve. It’s likely that a hybrid of quantitative and qualitative metrics will become more pronounced, to reflect increased focus on high quality customer experiences, communications and outcomes when interacting with the company. Companies also want to measure the effectiveness of different engagement channels, cross-channel activities, touchpoints for the customer journey -- but measurement is now more complex due to the qualitative as well as quantitative aspects of customer engagement.

 

Bruce Temkin discusses the traps of applying metrics to company efforts when building out culture, initiatives and opportunities for positive customer experiences:

 

Companies often get enamored with a metric like Net Promoter Score (NPS) and lose sight of what’s really important: making improvement...the true power comes when (a metric) provides insight into where and how to make improvements.

Can’t answer “why.” Reporting on a metric can highlight strengths and weaknesses of a company’s overall customer experience…But if the company does not understand “why” customers are either happy or unhappy, then they can’t systematically improve customer experience and positively affect the metric.

Overuse a metric. Understanding if a customer is happy overall with an organization is quite different than understanding if her needs were met during a specific service call. But some companies blindly use the same metrics for each of those areas. A metric like NPS, for example, may be appropriate for examining relationship strength, but it’s not necessarily good for evaluating interactions.

 

Here is some of Temkin’s advice for deriving the right value from metrics:

 

Treat relationships and interactions differently. The questions you ask a customer about how they view your company can (and often should) be quite different than those that you ask about an interaction. Think about different questions and methods for five different types of insights: Relationship tracking, interaction monitoring, continuous listening, project infusion, and periodic immersion.

Measure relevant attitudes and behaviors. Businesses aren’t in the business of getting random people to recommend them. They hope to get that type of loyalty from successfully executing their mission. Develop measurements that test the attitudes and behaviors of target customer segments, making sure they line up with your specific business and brand strategy.

Build a robust voice of the customer (VoC) program. Creating isolated metrics will not drive change in an organization; especially when people don’t understand what drives the metric. Companies need to develop a voice of the customer (VoC) program that continuously shares actionable customer insights across the organization.

 

Final Destination

The Customer’s Experience and Customer Experience Management may not always be about the same thing, depending on how an enterprise goes after a customer-focused strategy that is not only tied to corporate goals, but to providing excellent customer service for every interaction on the customer journey.

 My concern is not about turning a cultural construct into a technology solution, with the notion that this is the way to provide and control Customer Experiences. My concern is for the mindset that ‘customer experience’ can be owned and manipulated by companies through an ever-growing proliferation of digital marketing and technology platforms that give companies the illusion that they can “solve the problem of the customer experience”. First, customer experience is not a problem. Second, The customer experience is owned by the customer where the experience with a company is totally dependent on the customer’s perception regarding company interactions, both individually and as a harmonized collective.

 People, processes, and practices, supported by the right technologies and a customer-focused strategy, all have a part in orchestrating the channels, the touchpoints, the interactions that comprise the customer journey. Excellent customer experiences really come from enterprise commitment, from top to bottom, to make sure customers are successful in every interaction and every experience with company products and services. 

 

 

Related Links

Symbiosis: Customer Experience and Business Process

In Pursuit of Customer Experience Excellence

Goals and Metrics – Measuring Customer Engagement on the Web

Achieving the Social Business, Inside and Out

Internal Disruption–No Longer Business As Usual

Customer Buying Criteria - Applying customer & competitive intelligence to selling tools leads to strategic internal benefits

SMB / Mid-Market B2B Software vendors - Findability + web presence + social: attracting the “customer as buyer”

  

 

About the author: Julie Hunt is an accomplished software industry analyst, providing strategic market and competitive insights. Her 25+ years as a software professional range from the very technical side to customer-centric work in solutions consulting, sales and marketing.  Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitive and on Twitter: @juliebhunt   For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Strategic Product & Market Intelligence Services

 

 

 

Goals and Metrics – Measuring Customer Engagement on the Web

 

The notions of web presence and customer engagement aren’t new -- but are gaining in interest as web presence expands beyond the corporate website and as companies must know more about effective means of connecting to customers. Many questions swirl around understanding what engagement is, what defining characteristics should be measured and why, how to align metrics to goals, and which metrics matter the most. Context – or even hierarchies of context – plays a major role for selecting metrics, analyzing the data returned by metrics, and understanding what to do with the data. 

Engagement - like influence - is at heart an abstract. For purposes of customer engagement on the web, engagement can be thought of as the measurement of attention to something, which takes us to the ‘can of worms’ of what constitutes customer attention to a company’s web presence. For each company, what comprises engagement can be fairly unique, generally derived from a matrix of attributes, in turn leading to a matrix of metrics. As web presence becomes more far-flung and sophisticated, the metrics, tools, data, and analyses become more complex.

Which are the right attributes and metrics? For each company, they are the ones that measure actions and events that relate to key business context and goals. Many different domain experts offer many different kinds of metrics from which to choose, any of which could be relevant to individual companies. Once a matrix of metrics has been selected, it’s likely that each organization will need to constantly assess that set of metrics for validity and effectiveness – and that the change of metrics selection will be continuous, hopefully to reflect: actions taken in response to analysis, new markets explored and company innovations.

Jumping into an assessment of customer engagement is not a simple undertaking and will take a lot of work. Monitoring web presence on sites other than the corporate website is still a new undertaking, with the tech tools still evolving. Also in continuing evolution is the understanding of how to interpret data collected and how to use that data to make decisions for solution offerings, customer connections and communication, and business strategy. A company will need to define both the current status and the desired status for what constitutes an ‘engaged customer’, yet another definition set that should continuously evolve.

 

Why Understanding Engagement Matters

Most organizations have moved well beyond clocking the number of hits on a web page. Not only do these organizations have a tall order to provide personalized experiences as well as high quality content on the corporate website, but visitors to the site must be sufficiently engaged to take action. What sort of action is taken depends on the company’s strategy for web presence and customer engagement, further in support of overall business strategies and goals.

Forrester analyst Stephen Powers covers web content management solutions, and to a certain extent, web engagement.  In The Online Customer Engagement Software Ecosystem, 2010 Powers discusses engagement:

Customer Engagement Remains Top Of Mind For Companies

The uncertain economy has increased pressure on companies to engage customers more efficiently, especially via online channels that offer lower-cost ways to interact with customers, enable better lead generation, and increase customer retention rates. This is likely why investments in software to manage customer experiences has held up relatively well in the current economy. 

Our most recent data suggests this trend will continue into the next year. Consider that in 2010, 51% of organizations plan content management implementations, more than one-third will implement or upgrade customer relationship management tools, and one in four is planning marketing automation software investments. 

 

An article in Forbes brings up the tough part of measuring engagement – the highly qualitative nature of engagement, no matter the context:

For the past year or so, the conversation around how to "engage" consumers online has spiked among publishers, media companies, advertisers and agencies. As Michael Mendenhall, CMO of Hewlett-Packard said, "Marketers monitor the front end and the back end so they see click-streams and commerce. ... The difficult part is the qualitative part in between, which is the level of engagement."

The qualitative aspect of web engagement takes us into the messier world of sentiment analysis, which is still a work-in-process, and that of semantic/content analysis. Demarcations are likely to start blurring between what matters for customer engagement on the corporate website and what matters on social sites, also along qualitative lines.

Web analytics domain expert Avinash Kaushik wrote a blog post in 2007 entitled “Engagement" Is Not A Metric, It's An Excuse providing this view on qualitative versus quantitative aspects of engagement:

At the heart of it, engagement tries to measure something deeply qualitative.
Yet most efforts to measure it in our world tend to be hard core quantitative (translate that as: "we have clickstream, let's take our interpretations of what could possibly be happening, now find clicks that can carry the burden of our personal impositions, voila! here's engagement").

The reason engagement has not caught on like wild fire (except in white papers and analyst reports and pundit posts) is that it is a "heart" metric we are trying to measure with "head" data, and engagement is such a utterly unique feeling for each website that it will almost always have a unique definition for each and every website.

 

Since 2007, quite a bit more progress has been made in the how and why of web engagement metrics, but some of the problems remain. Distributed web presence outside the corporate website has added another dimension to the qualitative elusiveness of web/customer engagement. User-generated content in forums, blogs, microblogs, communities must be found, assessed for sentiment and key content. Processes for engaging the author of the UGC must be designed to try to open more communication channels for customers. And then we have to figure out how to measure all of this in meaningful ways.

 

 Choosing Effective Metrics

Not everything that counts can be measured. Not everything that can be measured counts.

-- Albert Einstein

 

So…there are an overwhelming number of individual metrics that relate to customer / web engagement, the customer experience on a particular website, both in qualitative and quantitative terms. Web engagement not only pertains to company-owned web assets but to the many social sites that continue to proliferate on the Internet. Companies must decide where and how they wish to monitor engagement, using metrics and the tools to do so. Before choosing metrics, a clear understanding of the company’s hierarchy of strategies, programs and objectives must be in place.

Not only do high level business strategies impact the selection of attributes to monitor and measure, but other levels of strategies and objectives matter too. Individual initiatives designed by product marketing, marketing and sales groups have specific achievable components and objectives. Web engagement metrics will align to levels of program objectives as well as to the company’s ‘big picture’, essentially a hierarchy of metrics building toward overall business strategies, and toward building future direction. Metrics only have meaning if proper analysis is conducted, results examined against objectives, and if processes for taking action are in place, with decisions and next steps activated. (And then repeat….)

I’m not going to provide an overview of the vast array of tech tools available to assist in monitoring and measuring web/customer engagement. The solution space is in early stages, so there is much still to do to ‘master’ the world of engagement metrics. Suffice it to say, that there is a lot of work going on to develop and refine tech offerings.

In the category of ‘not everything that counts can be measured”: Listening, understanding, acting on  what engaged customers/buyers have to say are among the most important corporate ‘to-dos’ regarding real engagement. Companies must also heed the contextual relevance of any customer-generated content, for real understanding; content cannot be yanked from its context and analyzed in a vacuum.

  

Different Strokes for Different Folks – The Many Faces of Engagement Metrics

I’m going to run through a number of metric matrices proposed by several sources to illustrate different approaches and ways of organizing engagement measurement.

  

>> Web Properties Owned by Organizations

In the Forrester report Marketing’s New Key Metric: Engagement, 2007, four main components are identified as attributes for customer engagement:

Involvement – Measurable aspects of an individual connection to an organization or brand

Interaction – Depth/breadth of an individual connection

Intimacy – Sentiment of an individual towards organization / brand

Influence – Indicators that an individual will encourage someone else to visit, consider, buy

 

 
 
Forrester: Marketing’s New Key Metric: Engagement, 2007

 

Eric Peterson, of Web Analytics Demystified and well-known in this field, published a multi-part blog series in 2006 on engagement (I recommend reading the entire series). Here are a couple of his notions regarding the selection of metrics:

Engagement goals:

(Example) - Based on my knowledge of my site visitors and their long-term usage patterns, my engagement goals are as follows:

• I would like that visitors would view and interact with certain content on my site;
• I would like visitors to subscribe to this weblog to stay connected;
• I would like visitors to maintain a low recency with my content, regardless of whether they’re reading blog posts or viewing pages on my site;
• When visitors are on my web site, I would like them to spend a reasonable amount of time interacting with my content;
• When visitors return to my site, I prefer they remember my domain name and return to my site directly, either via a bookmark or by directly entering my URL into their browser.

Key areas for metrics:

…we had been talking about how to measure engagement on their web site. We’d gone round-and-round on ideas about what constitutes an “engaged” visitor and narrowed it down to a few key areas:

• The visitor views “critical” content on the web site
• The visitor has returned to the web site recently
• The visitor returns directly to the web site some of the time
• Some high percentage of the visitor’s sessions are “long” sessions
• If available, the visitor is subscribed to at least one available site feed

  

More recently, Chris Meares, senior data analyst at philly.com, home of the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News, applied his understanding of Eric Peterson’s work in engagement by adapting a white paper called “Measuring the Unmeasurable: Visitor Engagement” by Peterson and Joseph Carrabis.  Meares collaborated with Ryan Davis, the president of Philly.com, and Wendy Warren, the vice president for content, on their formula for measuring visitor engagement. The result so far is:

 

C_i — Click Index: visits must have at least 6 pageviews, not counting photo galleries

D_i — Duration Index: visits must have spend a minimum of 5 minutes on the site

R_i — Recency Index: visits that return daily

L_i — Loyalty Index: visits that either are registered at the site or visit it at least three times a week

B_i — Brand Index: visits that come directly to the site by either bookmark or directly typing www.philly.com or come through search engines with keywords like “philly.com” or “inquirer”

I_i — Interaction Index: visits that interact with the site via commenting, forums, etc.

P_i — Participation Index: visits that participate on the site via sharing, uploading pics, stories, videos, etc.

 

Tracking site visits with this level of specificity is time-consuming - Meares says he devotes about a third of his full-time job to analysis of the engagement equation — but it has produced some interesting information. For instance: “We’re definitely seeing the impact of social media and how it provides engaged visitors.” While Google and Yahoo provide a lot of traffic, the visits that they send to Philly.com don’t tend to be engaged. Only 20.34 percent of visits that come through Google are engaged visits. In comparison, 33.64 percent of visits that come via Facebook are engaged.

 

  

>> Customer Engagement on Other Sites

Over in that other world of web presence and engagement, social media sites, many domain experts and proponents have been working through definitions and metrics for customer/visitor engagement as well. The discussion of attributes and metrics for engagement on social sites has great relevance to those monitoring engagement on corporate websites, since many companies have set up their own social sites for forums, communities, blogging and so on. And of course, these companies pursue monitoring the many sites that do not belong to them.

 

Jeremiah Owyang has written numerous posts in his blog on the topic of what constitutes engagement and what metrics are useful for participants in social media sites. Here’s one version from 2007:

My working definition:

“Engagement indicates the level of authentic involvement, intensity, contribution, and ownership”

 

It’s possible for me to shorten it to:

“Apparent Interest” (and later whittled down to “Interest”)

 

Engagement Formula: 

“Attention + Interaction + Velocity + Authority + Relevant Attributes (variable)”

 

 

  


http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/category/social-media-measurement/

 

 

Social / Customer Engagement – another view

 

 
 
http://emediavitals.com/article/37/emerging-web-metrics-focus-engagement-audience-quality

 

 

 

Related Links

Goodbye Corporate Website – Hello Web Presence Management Framework?

Moving beyond WCM - Web Experience Management software solutions & markets

Time Travel Required: Finding #WEM in the 2010 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Web Content Management

SMB / Mid-Market B2B Software vendors - Findability + web presence + social: attracting the “customer as buyer”

B2B WEM / WCM Software Vendors Targeting Mid-Market customers: stay where you are!  

B2B Social CRM for Software Vendors and the Lifecycle of Customer Experience

Content Marketing Strategy for B2B Software Vendors: Starring the ‘New’ White Paper

The Ever-Expanding Importance of Analytics–True Intelligence for Business

 

About the author: Julie Hunt is an accomplished software industry analyst, providing strategic market and competitive insights. Her 20+ years as a software professional range from the very technical side to customer-centric work in solutions consulting, sales and marketing.  Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitive and on Twitter: @juliebhunt   For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Strategic Product & Market Intelligence Services