Category Archives: digital marketing

When was the Customer Experience ever NOT a Priority?

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I have a hard time processing statements like this:
“Meeting the expectations of today’s consumer is tricky business.” These are really common types of statements in today’s digital centric, retail world and I’ve been seeing them a lot over the last couple of years. It’s as if the retail customer experience has changed. I mean like really changed. Since the dawn of retail time, A product is sold and a product is bought. If the retailer was nice to you, it was a plus. If the retailer knew your name, even better. If the product was good, that’s great. If the product was great, even better. If the product is inferior, then all bets are off. If the retailer, could care less, then consumers spoke with their dollars and their feet.

That has not changed. Even today.

What has changed is the ability to learn more about the customer. What hasn’t changed is the way you’re supposed to treat the customer. What hasn’t changed is giving the customer a great product or service. Why is this any different today than it was a hundred years ago? Has technology caused a greater divide in the customer experience? Maybe. I thought it was to close the chasm that was brought on by competition and choices. The thinking was that because marketers were now armed with lots of data there would now be a more harmonious relationship. A better customer experience.

Marketers have become so obsessed with tools and resources that drive sales, that they have forgotten about, wait for it, the customer and the experience. This is not a difficult thing. Sometimes I think that marketing stacks get so high that marketers and retailers can’t see the customer that’s standing behind them. To hear companies state that they are now, more than ever, going to start focusing on the customer, just baffles me. When did this change and why did it ever? Why are we making it so difficult?

 

Why Snapchat Content and the Longevity of Social Media Content are so Similar

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Follow me here. The principal concept of Snapchat is that pictures and messages are only available for a short time before they become inaccessible. They become obsolete if you will.

When a brand pushes out a “piece” of social media content, they’re hoping that content will move the needle in the form of a standard KPI, i.e. mentions, likes, favorites or followers. How long are brands hoping that content will last? Certainly 24 hours. Then they rinse and repeat, right?

Recently in a MIT Sloan Management post, I read the following in regards to business value in creating social media content:

How can businesses and others reverse this trend and reap more enduring benefits from social media? For starters, it will take a fundamental change in focus.

What most people/brands don’t understand is that users and consumers have been conditioned to consume content in snackable bits now. Their attention spans have been reduced to anywhere from 12 seconds to 24 hours and they move on. Brands have to act accordingly.

Particularly when a brand has about 15 seconds to get someone’s attention when they land on their website, the words and images become that much more important and impactful when trying to derive an action.

The need to have an over-arching strategy to every social media platform is not only a key to success but it should be a mandate. Does that mean a brand should use them? No. But marketers need to understand how each platform relates to not only what they want to do but also in how it might relate to its current customers but future prospects. What do the people want? Give it to them.

It’s not so much the what as it is the how. That means twitter content will not necessarily play well on Facebook and or Facebook content will not necessarily work on Linkedin-particularly after LinkedIn’s latest site changes*

What we’re experiencing right now thanks to the Snapchat generation* is that brands are being forced to create content, messages, and strategies that become antiquated in less than six months. If it’s about branding and creating awareness and thought leadership, then there is indeed an intense pressure to be interesting every day.

I used to say that digital obsolescence only applied to products and platforms but now it appears that it now applies to content itself.

Clearly, marketers and brands have got to elevate their game of being interesting and compelling every day at midnight.

 

 

The Secret to Digital Innovation in an App Centric World

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I was recently speaking to an entrepreneurship/marketing class in Naples Florida about what it takes to get something from cradle to grave. The main idea hit me like a ton of bricks, so I’m going to share it with you. It’s quick, so relax.

It’s as simple as this. It starts with one person. It’s born from one idea. You take that one idea and you make it better. You take one thing about that original idea and you tweak it. You find one person who can see your vision and you become one. Then you find another.

You find that one competitor and you beat them or you take that one thing missing from their idea and it becomes yours.

If it’s about the “one” customer experience that can make the difference. How do you create an amazing customer experience? One experience at a time. You find that one product champion and you build a comunity from that.

Whether it’s your company, your product, your family or your life…Do one thing everyday that moves the needle in a positive direction.. You don’t have to boil the ocean and it’s not about lots of little wins or victories. Focus on one.

One person

One idea

One product

One goal

One win

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Ashley Madison and the Case for In the Moment Marketing

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Sh*t is getting ready to hit the fan again. Just now on Twitter I was curious about the Ashley Madison scandal. So I did a trending hashtag search on the topic. I found it fascinating how it kind of exposed sunlight to the other side of or the ugly side of the web where people like to play, preferrably in the dark. Pun intended.

Think Bitcoins and Silk Road but in the name of cheating…

For those in the know, this is just another notch in the belt of just how “nonprivate” your privacy is and how your data is, for wont of a better analogy, nothing more than sargassum seaweed. It’s there, there’s a lot of it and it can be found by anyone virtually anywhere at any time.

Except this time, the hack is different because it involves sex and outing some people who might have preferred to have had their dark digital selves kept just that, in the dark. For the uninitiated, you’re thinking might be, Ashley Madison is a website for what? People who want to cheat? Seriously?

At which point, your initial reaction might be:

  • You mean there’s a website for something like that?
  • It’s user base is how many?
  • These people actually thought their data would be safe?

Yea, I’m with you on all accounts. That’s today’s web. There’s a tribe and a site for everyone. Those that play on this side of the tracks and yes those that prefer to play on the other side of the tracks. The digital underbelly.

Meanwhile, what struck me as interesting about all of this, was the usage of in the moment marketing. Particularly, it was a paid search placement on Twitter on behalf of crisis management.

See Below:

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So what was it? Smart marketing PR? Or a troll like activity? A good usage of social media monitoring your key words? Or is it digital ambulance chasing? I haven’t decided yet what it was. Maybe all of the above.

The One Mistake Every Marketer Makes with Social Media Every Day

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I promise you that what I’m about to say is worth reading. Before I elaborate though, let me stress that I am qualified to post something so link-baitish as this. I’ve been knee deep in social for the better part of 8 years. So much so, that it seems that not a year goes by now where I either hear or read about how social media doesn’t work or is useless or is dying. Let me put that notion to bed quickly. It does work, it is not useless and it is not dying any time soon. If anything, social media might be the Benjamin Button of digital these days.

But I digress. You’re not here to read about my justifications of all things social, you’re here to learn one thing, so let’s do it.

If you work in social media for either a small org or the largest of the large, chances are, your work life revolves primarily around content. You have tools to discover it and you have platforms to schedule it within and you have ways you can automate it. It’s tailored to your company and it speaks to your audience. You may set it and forget it and then move on to the next task on your social media to-do list.

Additionally, part of your social media manager duties may include looking at the data, i.e. looking at the numbers. What was the reach? How many impressions? How many likes or shares? How many retweets and how many mentions? Yes they are soft metrics, but they still do matter. It’s how you measure the effectiveness of your content, right? They may even be part of your KPI’s. If you are seriously managing a social media campaign, then you may be looking at CTR’s to a specifically tailored page to grab data, to allow downloads, signups and registrations; stuff that actually moves the needle. Or as a lot of CMO’s are looking for these days: Business Outcomes.

The key being that all of your social media activity above, is just that,  it’s ACTIVITY.

But is that enough? Let me ask you a simple question. If I asked you to engage with the people, the followers, the brand champions of your product or your brand, could you do it? If I asked you to be the subject matter expert for your company, product and industry for the social media handles that you manage, could you do it? Can you represent your brand via social without sounding like a novice? Can you hold your own, representing the company, in a space that YOUR company is supposed to own? Do you see what I’m getting at?

The biggest mistake that I see a lot of brands and companies making is discounting the notion that social media activity is not a front-line activity for the brand. Forgetting that sometimes for potential customers, buyers, partners and vendors, their first encounter or engagement with a brand, might be… wait for it… via social.

If you manage a social media team or if you’re the director of marketing or even the CDO or CMO, let’s make sure that some of your most knowledgable people of the brand are doing social; instead of the person who has platform experience but no real world brand experience. Don’t make the mistake of undervaluing the power of educated engagement in social media. It’s tough to influence the influencers if you don’t know what you’re talking about. 🙂

How Digital is Changing the Consumer Experience

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Let me give you a few real world examples that happen every day.  You’re at a stop light for all of 30 seconds and you start to get antsy because the light hasn’t changed.  You are going to make a right on red and there is someone in front of you who does not turn right away, and you lay on the horn.  You’re in line at the store waiting to check out and it’s taking forever.  Forever being about 3-4 minutes.

Why are we so impatient?

Maybe these examples will help. You’re surfing the web and a page doesn’t load quick enough so you try another website.  You want to buy a product online so you do a search and you click on the first result and it doesn’t load quick enough, so you go to the second result.   You load an app and it takes forever (10 minutes) and you immediately start thinking of your next computer purchase with more memory and more processor speed (whatever that means).

What’s happening here?

The web has conditioned us to want everything quicker and faster.  We are become a bi-product of always on.  Meaning that when we are on the web, we expect the delivery of the experience to match the level of our expectation.  The result?  That expectation starts to bleed into our offline universe.  Our consumer experience is on hyper please

The result?

Everyone suffers.  Think about it like this. The more it takes to satisfy us, the more we need- and the less it satisfies.  In a sense we’re becoming junkies for a good web experience which again as I said earlier is starting to bleed into our personal offline lives.  Is that a good thing?  In a sense it is but it’s also unrealistic to think that waiting at a light for a whole 1-2 minutes is unacceptable.  Just as it is unreasonable to think that just because it took 15 seconds for a page to load-is a bad user experience.  The web experience, and I’ll include mobile in this, is now as much about the pulleys and levers as it is about the finished product.  So how do people respond to a bad online customer experience?  They click and go somewhere else.

Too bad for the visually appealing site that is hampered by it not possessing what the user wants- Be it access to the proper social channels, free stuff, or the right check out page, or access to a contact page that provides a direct link to customer service.  If you don’t have that, you’ve crashed and burned before you’ve even taken off!  Consumers indeed.

A Need to Redefine Brand Lift

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According to a recent survey published by eMarketer, four in five North American brand marketers considered brand lift to be the most important metric for evaluating the success of their online branding efforts.  But is brand lift the right metric at all?  Vizu which partnered with DIGIDAY on the survey defines brand lift as the following:

Brand Lift is defined as the percentage increase in the primary marketing objective of a brand advertising campaign

But does that definition correlate to digital correctly?  Should it?  Marketers consider it to be the one worthy metric.  Given its pure definition however, brand lift would or could always be loosely defined in the digital age  as a percentage increase in followers on Twitter or Likes on Facebook, if it’s part of the marketing objective.  In digital we can’t construe brand lift as the number of eyeballs, the number of likes or the numbers followers without any type of sales or action or in fact, a long term measurable return on those efforts.

The problem though is that marketers might be still associating a hollow metric (one of many in digital) to brand lift.

Consider this quote from eMarketer analyst Lauren Fisher:

“Digital’s legacy of direct-response metrics has caused many to fall back on measures that drove the first wave of online advertising—clickthrough rate and pageview.”

She’s right.  A pageview and a clickthrough, though they can be construed as a positive, or as “effective” digital branding, can sometimes mean absolutely nothing.  Same with Twitter, Facebook, Youtube and traditional blogs.  Brand lift metrics in the digital age are, in my estimation,”one off’s. ” Indeed, marketers must break old habits of using single measures of success.

On Being Relevant in Digital

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“Social” claims or has been claimed to do everything and it really has become quite the game changer.  In fact, did you know that it can actually boil the ocean? OK, so I’m kidding, but the point is this-One thing that social media does and has done, is that it has spurred or enhanced or magnified relevance in everything that online and offline touch now.

Even if you were not relevant before, now you have a chance to be, thanks to digital and social.

But step back from every situation and I mean every situation, and it’s really less about social and more about an age of relevance. Social is just the lipstick.  Chew on that a bit.  Yes, we definitely live in a digital age now and yes, we definitely live in the age of social media and yes it’s definitely all about the conversation.  But, what digital, social and the conversation have definitely done  is that they have snapped a piece of relevance onto everything that we now come in to contact with. It’s actually a two way street. Relevance shapes our social and digital engagements and our digital and social engagements become more relevant the more hyper focused they are to what we are all about and what we want and demand.

It surprises me that others have not really focused on this. Until Now.

Accenture Interactive has just come out with a couple of pieces of thought leadership on the “Era of Relevance.” (Full disclosure-Accenture is a client of mine) Though Accenture Interactive is talking about relevance at scale for the enterprise, the underlying theme remains unchanged-when you or I are marketing, conversing, buying, shopping, or selling-relevance is the tipping point in the transaction or transformation.

I would highly recommend reading the pieces from AI because they really do focus on one of the larger straws that stirs the drink.

It’s Time For Retailers To Raise Their Games-Five Quick Reminders

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The static website is dead long live the static website

According to a study from Accenture, comScore, and dunnhumbyUSA aimed at helping consumer packaged goods (CPG) marketers, visitors to CPG brand websites buy 37% more in retail stores than non-visitors to the brand site. The study also concluded, that to maximize impact, website content needs to be updated regularly and contain brand value messaging that both engages visitors while also providing compelling reasons for them to purchase the brand at retail. Without sounding too much like Captain Obvious, here’s what retailers need to remember:

  1. Update your content regularly
  2. Give the user a reason to be there
  3. Give the user a reason to come back
  4. Reward their loyalty and visits to the site
  5. Give them an incentive to visit the site and a physical location

The study found that visitors to CPG brand websites are valuable and frequent buyers of the brand in retail stores, completing 41% more transactions than non-visitors. So it goes without saying, incent and enrich the online experience and tie it into the store experience and sales go up and buyers return.