Why is a content-first approach your best ally in meeting the demands of evolving customer expectations? How can it help you turn digital and business disruption into digital transformation and exceptional customer experiences? Kevin will explore why a content-first approach is more necessary than ever to help businesses deliver on the promise of exceptional customer experience.
24. • A content-first approach means we look to the
customer's needs, and connect the dots between
those needs and our business objectives
• We provide the most relevant content, when the
customer needs
• Our tech stack and operations are built around the
customer and her requirements
• Our content delivery mechanisms reflect that reality
• We use analytics and customer research to inform
all of our content decisions
Content-First because it creates a fully-realized customer experience
And for too long, content-last or confused content priorities create chaos.
41% of US consumers said
they ditched a company
because of “poor
personalization” and lack of
trust.
— Accenture Strategy, Pulse
Check, 2018
40. THANK YOU!
Kevin P Nichols
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knichols@avenuecx.com
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@KPNichols
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Editor's Notes
You will find much of my thinking on my personal website at kevinpnichols.com and you will find very detailed information on how to create an enterprise content strategy in my book, Enterprise Content Strategy: A Project Guide.
You can find us at AvenueCX.com. For more information on our work with ComBlu, see the Big Content Alliance, at: https://bigcontentalliance.com/
AvenueCX developed this content strategy framework to illustrate the various inputs for, and aspects of, a robust content strategy. Why? Because successful personalization requires a strong content strategy framework to define it, maintain and evolve it.
The number one thing that gets in the way of successful content is not the content itself. It is the operational readiness and willingness to do what needs to be done for content to be successful.
Image Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/nesster/9443764481
This goes along with organizational silos; as generally silo’d perspectives create the dynamic of singular channel focus within a multichannel ecosystem. Often businesses are set up to incentivize a singular channel lens—budgets are granted by how much someone sells online versus instore—and not by the holistic picture of customer experience. Cross channel challenges are further impeded by the inability to track the customer experience across channels or the willingness to do so. No customer experience when channels are isolated, is going to benefit your brand.
Image Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/24oranges/8345190921
This ties into other two issues. But biggest challenges here are: 1. Analytics are either incomplete due to silos 2. Lack of investment 3. Analytics teams not bought into necessary conversations and content and content planning 4. If you are a content strategist or content design or even work in content, and analytics folks are not your best friends, your content is going to have problems 5. Finally, where is also an issue is that teams are afraid of what analytics will tell them, so objectives aren’t tied any real valuable measurement of performance.
Image Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/nicocaramella/14837343727
Content lives within an ecosystem, customers engage with your brand throughout that ecosystem. When it is messy internally, it most certainly is worse when experienced externally.
Image Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/allyaubryphotography/3184992611
Vendors emphasize their solutions can fix broken customer experiences. Take Customer Data Platforms or experience marketing platforms for example. These can help with cross channel content. But without a strong cross-channel strategy already in place and the mechanisms to create the content to support it, these will only get you so far. And layering another system over already poor systems with unstructured content or disconnected channels, will offer you little solace. Content Marketing also promised to address content challenges. Organizations invested heavily into it, but the problem here is that content marketing is often mostly focused on brand amplification and building brand awareness. This is great for the first stages of the customer journey. But what happens when the customer moves into later stages?
Image Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/wfryer/9991965226
Ironically, I came up the definition of content strategy being: getting the right content to the right use at the right time. I was the first to define content strategy this way. Now everyone and their mother has adopted, adapted and repurposed this concept. And although in and of itself, it’s a fine concept—still relevant—many businesses still face the same challenges they did with content when I came up with it, in 2007. It comes down to content is either viewed as too complicated to sort out, an afterthought, a lack of real understanding of the customer, or my favorite- content is everything, and everyone owns (hence, no one really does.)
Image Source: https://pxhere.com/en/photo/980318
Which get us to this. Have any of you seen the UPS commercial on supply chain management, where consultants come in, deliver a presentation that identifies the problems, and tell the biz what to do? The presentees say: “That’s great, no do it.” The presenters answer: “We don’t actually do it…” If I had a dollar for every time I hear a business say they have spent a lot of money on content strategy consultants and saw nothing of value in return, I’d be quite wealthy. That is not to say that there are good strategy consultants out there, there are. But there is also a lot of navel gazing and stating the obvious…More on that in a bit
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omphaloskepsis#/media/File:Satyres_en_Atlante_Rome_Louvre_2.jpg
No one knows your business better than you, but that does not mean that you know your customers better than anyone else or any other business. If there is one takeaway from this prez, it is that understanding your customers and their behavior is the only way to ensure effective and good content.
Image Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/retrogui_photos/6816367679
This means we look at our customer experience, their journeys, etc., and we wrap our internal operations and technology stack around the needs of the customer to support those needs. This means looking externally to structure how we do business. It requires a melding of business objectives with customer needs.
Image Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/twm_news/6521097201/
Cross channel collaboration is the foundation for strong customer experience. It requires the right analytics to measure the experiences across channels, content to support each channel and equally as important, the points at which a customer moves from one channel to the next, and an operational commitment to support the customer regardless of what they are doing within which customer touchpoint.
Image Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Radio_News_Nov_1928_Cover.jpg
Radio News staff, unknown illustrator. [Public domain]
You cannot have an understanding of your user without analytics. You need hard data – which tells you what they are doing, and soft data such as user research, insights, surveys, etc. this needs a cross channel focus. And a mechanism to report the data in meaningful ways.
Image Source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ed/1952_-_Town_Auto_-_Dankel_Chevrolet_-_18_Dec_MC_-_Allentown_PA.jpg
Having the above items in place starts to get you there. It won’t be perfect, but foundation is
Image Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/harryh1882/27728498549/in/photostream/
All technology solutions should start with strong requirements and a strategy that understands your customers, your business, and your content. It is then, and only then, that you should make a technology solution decision. “Personalization has been the most demo’d but least implemented function of DX (Digital Experience) platforms for over a decade.”
— Tom Wentworth, chief marketing officer for RapidMiner and former CMO of Acquia
Image Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/97453745@N02/9041751579
As noted on Tullio Saba’s Flickr account: (https://www.flickr.com/photos/97453745@N02/):
“Original Caption: APRIL 17, 1959. MECHANICAL MAN. NEW YORK. DECKED OUT IN SOME STRANGE-LOOKING HEADGEAR, THIS LAD IS DEMONSTRATING THE TALENTS OF "ROBERT THE ROBOT," A NEW MECHANICAL TOY. THE ROBOT'S EYES LIGHT UP, HE WALKS, HE TALKS AND MOVES HIS HANDS--ALL VIA REMOTE CONTROL.THE MECHANICAL TOY, MADE BY THE IDEAL TOY CORP., WILL BE DISPLAYED AT THE AMERICAN FAIR IN MOSCOW THIS SUMMER. IT SELLS FOR ABOUT SIX DOLLARS.”
This gets back to the right content, right user, right time. No brainer, right? But without all of the above in place, this gets very difficult to establish and deliver upon.
Photo: Record store. 1950s. Image Source: http://omnichannelcontentstrategy.com/resources/
The bottom line is, you can use content quantify the success of your customer experience. You can also demonstrate costs saved by operational improvements. This all impacts the overall revenue of your business. Demonstrating this through the realization of your strategy means approved budgets.
Image Source: https://www.maxpixel.net/Cash-Register-Play-Register-Toy-Cash-Vintage-1749117
American Customer Satisfaction Index: 1. Chick-Filet 2. Treader Joes 3. Aldi, 4. Amazon, 5. Lexus.Sailthru personalization index 1. Sephora 2. Body Shop 3. Urban Outfitters 4. Walmart 5. Ebay
“Sephora’s obsession with its customer journey continues to differentiate the global beauty brand as once again, it reigns supreme in the Index, now with perfect scores across email, web, and mobile”
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:People_serving_themselves_at_the_Bergs_Supermarket_meat_section,_circa_1950_(6327551210).jpg
Content first is a business principle. It means we understand that if we focus on the customer—next to product and service—content considerations need to be the primary considerations. And we formulate content requirements vis-à-vis our customer experience before we make technology or marketing decisions. From deciding on the content itself, to the design that houses it, content requirements need to be well understood. It also means we work backwards from the customer and her experience to define which content is required at every single touchpoint and how exactly we message that content.
Image Source:
Dancers from American Ballet Theatre Perform at White House. https://www.jfklibrary.org/Asset-Viewer/Archives/JFKWHP-ST-225-27-62.aspx
Deliver consistent and exceptional customer experiences across touchpoints
Operational readiness to align processes, tools, people
Improved Content Experiences
Data that yields results
Budget because – ROI is effectively to CX across channel
Image Sources:
Customer Experience: https://www.pexels.com//best-choice-customer-experience-four-279934/
Grain Silos - https://www.publicdomainpictures.net/en/view-image.php?image=235234&picture=sepia-grain-silo
Typewriter and Scales, property of AvenueCX
I put this at number one, because if you don’t have a cross-functional team that looks to all these things, you are not going to be able to be as successful as you could be. You should put this in place immediately.
You need to build a well-informed strategy that not only looks at business objectives and goals, but equally important, those of the customer, based on the customer needs. And meld those together to frame objectives around your content that will show how content will meet the customer needs and improve customer experience.
You should leverage personas, segmentation models, user research, and then tools such as customer journey maps, which is what we see here. Do the persona questions—how many of you…A customer journey map, which provides the external lens, then can be broken down into specific customer journeys which you can map content to. Remember, empathy is a very important aspect. So tools such as empathy maps, built into you customer journey mapping process can really help you determine how your customer feels and what drives them to different solutions. You can also use findings from machine learning and marketing science efforts.
There are data inputs, as in hard data inputs. They tell who a customer is and what they are doing. But to understand the “why, to really engage the customer, with compelling content, you have to go further. You need to provide messaging to them that really speaks to their drivers and motivations. Today, in content, relevance is everything. This requires an extensible messaging framework that speaks to your different customers considering their unique needs and motivations.
Source:
Ann Handley quote: https://www.sproutcontent.com/blog/12-Inspiring-Content-Marketing-Quotes-From-the-Experts-and-a-Rockstar
This is a closed loop lifecycle to content planning and creation.
If you go through the above, you can make decisions around which content is right per which channel and customer journey stage. This is an omnichannel example, where the singular view of the customer is understood. Even if you cannot delivery on something like this, because of tech / budget constraints, you should go through the process of identifying which content is necessary, as it helps to inform decisions and puts your existing content is a more customer-positive framework.
American Customer Satisfaction Index: 1. Chick-Filet 2. Treader Joes 3. Aldi, 4. Amazon, 5. Lexus.Sailthru personalization index 1. Sephora 2. Body Shop 3. Urban Outfitters 4. Walmart 5. Ebay
“Sephora’s obsession with its customer journey continues to differentiate the global beauty brand as once again, it reigns supreme in the Index, now with perfect scores across email, web, and mobile”
Organizations say their biggest obstacles in achieving success with digital business initiatives include lack of sufficient budget (39%), lack of staff and/or correct skill sets (36%), the need to replace legacy systems (34%), and cultural issues (33%). - Source IDG: https://resources.idg.com/download/white-paper/2018-digital-business
73% of buyers point to customer experience as an important factor in purchasing decisions - https://www.superoffice.com/blog/customer-experience-statistics/
https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2019-01-21-gartner-survey-shows-37-percent-of-organizations-have
Alex Genov of Zappos offers: “If you see people as just a user or just a buyer then you don’t see the whole person and, as a result, you don’t see the whole opportunity.”
Now all of this requires a plan in place to measure ongoing performance of your solution.
Do you think Louis Armstrong went into a performance unprepared? Perhaps he did have some anxiety before performing but this clearly never stopped him from excelling and offering his audiences riveting performances.
Source:
“Are you doing personalization wrong.” Adrian Swinscoe, Forbes (28 July 2018).
https://www.forbes.com/sites/adrianswinscoe/2018/07/28/are-you-doing-personalization-wrong/#53efd3f436b7
Image source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1940s_in_jazz#/media/File:Louis_Armstrong2.jpg