Innovation Reactor

Go to and communicate where customers live

When I develop integrated marketing communications I frequently dream of a world where millions of customers flock to my site, sign-up for my product, and keep on coming back for more. But then the Silicon Valley Tech Fairy (think Tinkerbell with iPads for wings) slaps me and I wake up. 

In reality the vast majority of customers will not come to your site. Why? Because they discover products when connecting with friends on Facebook, reading a blog, checking their newsfeed, cleaning up their inbox, going to and from work, watching a favorite TV show, viewing a video clip, flipping through a magazine, or doing a product search. But many marketers still place the bulk of their investment and emphasis on their own site. 

If customers are visiting other places already how can you use these to your advantage?

Good integrated marketing communications target major touch points or influence opportunities with customers. In other words you need to go and communicate where your customers are. 

To do this I suggest a multi-pronged approach to your marketing strategy, using three major channels, with each channel having a specific purpose to either (1) scale, (2) expand, or (3) penetrate, the market. 

1. Scale: Choose a high visibility channel that will allow you to scale and attract new customers rapidly from your core target segment.
2. Expand: Find a channel that enables you to reach an adjacent pool of new users.
3. Penetrate: Segment your existing customers and promote features, functionality or special offers to increase product usage.

When developing integrated marketing communications remember to design a plan that is focused on engaging customers at the places where they frequent most.

 

What makes a great brand?

There are five reasons why Apple, Coca Cola, Google, Nike, Cisco, and Mercedes Benz consistently rank amongst the Best Global Brands.

• They anticipate customer requirements and fulfill them 
• They have products that are simple and easy to understand
• They are supportive and treat people fairly, ethically, honestly and have transparent policies and terms 
• They are easily available to people when needed
• They help people achieve their dreams

And yet a poor experience with customer service or bad communications can leave people with negative feelings about a brand. So it's astonishing that many companies haven't figured this out yet.

Great brands have customer service policies to make life easy and provide help for customers when things go wrong. These brands are trustworthy and supportive because they make customers feel good and offer peace of mind after every interaction. Brands like Amazon and Disney know this and have instilled in their people a way of interacting that goes beyond advocacy. By crafting a culture around "helping others" and being "on the customers side" these brands have become synonymous with delivering a great experience.

The problem with marketing is it's all too easy for companies to slip back into blasting out emails and post packs – burning black holes in consumer mailboxes. But great brands develop more meaningful and contextual communications because they listen to customer needs. These communications are relevant, flexible, helpful, and there when customers most need them. Brands like Zappos have created values like “Build Open and Honest Relationships With Communication” to help guide their marketing strategy and ultimately build deeper connections with their customers.

The really good news is that if you focus on providing helpful customer service and meaningful communications your brand can be great too.

 

The Essentials of Customer Marketing

 

The essentials of customer marketing are basic tools that every marketer today should use when developing integrated marketing communications. I have outlined these 8 essential toolbox items below.

1. Authenticity. Customer marketing must be authentic and direct to the point. Though for many businesses, personalized communications tailored to an individual are cost prohibitive. But marketing can engage segments of 200 customers rather than 200,000 using an authentic voice that is not presumptive and does not ingratiate itself with the audience.

2. Transparency. Customer marketing communications are transparent, straightforward and honest to deliver on promises. They're not disingenuous, with hidden conditions or caveats that are buried in the small print. So avoid complex language, excessive marketing ‘buzz’ words and tech-speak. If your product is technical then put the top 5 points in a call-out box using short bullets and avoid a laundry list of product features.

3. Simplicity. Customer marketing production should be simple and unvarnished rather than slick or glossy. Online, each page loads fast and is functional with informative-engaging content, practical customer information and tools. The website doesn’t need a ‘skip the intro’ button because it’s not flashy or pretentious plus it has an intuitive site-map and page layout designed for - and tested by - actual customers.

4. Insightful. Content reflects real personal or small business issues with an empathetic tone of voice. David Meerman Scott suggests that when you understand your customers’ unique problems you can then create buyer personas and tailor the communication content. This content should be straight-forward, non-complicated and does not over or under inflate the importance of issues. If content is not meaningful, informative, helpful or entertaining, or have genuine value, it’s just forgettable and a waste of your clients or company’s money.

5. Actionable. The communications have actionable content and any offers are relevant and tailored to the needs of the consumer or small business owner. It’s now time to ditch those highly promotional brochures filled with marketing fluff and sales hyperbole.

6. Organic. Any content is realistic and relevant to the customers visiting your website today. Your copy uses actual customer quotes or customer language and not something staged, highly polished and dreamed up by an office copywriter with no knowledge of the customer.

7. Personal. With the choice of channel from direct mail, email, online, radio, press, TV, direct sales and mobile, delivering unique content through the correct channel, at the best time is vital for effective customer marketing. Since the delivery channel is the first contact in the customer experience, personalize it by using registered mail, live stamps, clean outer envelopes, opt-in email addresses and phone numbers. Massed produced, non-personalized mail and promotional outer envelopes are cheap but ultimately drive low response rates, generate a poor brand experience and wasteful. Seth Godin talks about permission marketing and treating people with respect as the best way to earn their attention. If the customer has not ‘opted-in’ then any contact is just spam or cold-calling.

8. Intelligent. Of course selectively use humor in your communications but avoid child-like fun, slapstick comedy and puns. Humor should use an intelligent wit, with deep truths rooted in the customer experience. Try getting your best customers to share their experiences to inform and educate others. Gather relevant industry experts in panels or forums to discuss the latest trends and post relevant topics or white-papers on your website to provide inside information to help your audience.

Creating Integrated Marketing Communications

     

From my experience the best integrated marketing campaigns are driven by a process of discovery, problem solving and collaboration between the client-agency team. Because this process unlocks consumer insights and uses a detailed diagnosis of the marketing problem it invites the team to look at problems from different angles, challenge the status quo and inspires them to come up with breakthrough communications.

1. Consumer Data & Insights

The first step is to understand your target audience by using data and insights to develop pen-portraits of your best customers.

To create these pen-portraits review customer demographics, product usage rates, media consumption and research. Also, analyze your competitors and get Internet usage statistics for your products. These channel metrics should include – online click-through rates, keyword searches, direct mail response rates, email open rates, and phone conversion metrics – to assess how your best customers respond to various media formats.

This will assist the team answer these critical questions.

• Who are our best customers?
• How do we best communicate with them and attract more? 
• What are their attitudes towards the brand, product benefits, customer service, and content?
• What is driving their willingness to apply?
• What are their passions and motivations?
• What are the common characteristics that our top customers share?

2. Marketing Positioning & Customer Experience Mapping

Successful marketers understand how their product or brand is currently positioned in the market, because it allows them to reposition and differentiate their communications. To determine the dimensions supporting your product or brand positioning you may need to conduct focus groups with your target audience, and test different messages to uncover what resonates best.

If you are repositioning your communications it makes sense to also refresh your website and improve the online customer experience. By mapping the end-to-end online customer journey on your website, plus analyzing page traffic, links, online forms, content and functional design, you can start to streamline the customer experience. Use an expert like an agency Digital Planner or Information Architect to help you optimize your online content and media strategy.

How do your customers reach your website? This answer is to map the entire pre-purchase journey and buying process. For instance, a Hotel may find their customers view holiday photos from friends/family on Flickr, read the Sunday paper travel section for inspiration, then search on Tripadvisor or travel blogs to get recommendations, and finally compare prices on Priceline.com or Expedia before making a reservation. By understanding the purchase process you can now insert your media into the user experience, such as banners on Travel specific sites or cross-sell links on travel booking conformation pages.

3. Agency Brief

I believe the agency brief is a dynamic process and not just one-way communication from the client to the agency. Therefore I recommend using a workshop create the brief using the steps below.

• Create a vision for repositioning/refreshing the communications platform, put the strategy into context for the team plus outline targets and key milestones. Ask the team to present the latest consumer research and market trends

• You can task several members of the team with presenting best practice and a review of competitors and any previous communications. Collaborate with team and get them to contribute their ideas, share expertise, and learning’s to create the outline of the brief.

• Ensure you have the best talent and diversity in the workshop so include from the Agency – Account Manager, Planner, Art Director, Digital Planner, Media team, and from the client –  Marketing, Finance (yes the bean counters…and if you include them they’re more likely to approve your budget) and PR.

The workshop brings everyone up to speed quickly, generates new ideas and different perspectives, to develop solutions for your key marketing communications problems. You’ll find the agency-client team will work better, smarter and faster since people understand the strategy, customers, objectives and who to turn to for information.

The final brief should include the customer pen-portraits, a map of the online customer experience and buying process, competitor products, an overview of the marketing strategy, the communications problem to solve, product or brand positioning research, targets and metrics.

4. Creative Development & Testing

At this stage the agency has developed several different creative platform concepts and positioning statements. But many new communications fail to deliver results because marketers second-guess consumer reactions, or go with their gut instinct, rather than using a more robust process to evaluate the creative work.

An inexpensive and fast method of testing creative is online panels or forums. These show the creative concepts to your target segment – testing the appeal, excitement, consideration and intent to apply. For your website, customer labs can be a great way to test new navigation and the online customer experience.

5. Delivery

Your new integrated communications platform will contain online media and content – including banners, email newsletters, blogs, podcasts, whitepapers, e-books, webinars, and refreshed product pages – that will appeal to your targets audience and align with your marketing objectives.

Throughout the process, work with your media agency to enhance your prospect targeting strategy. It's also important to create search engine terms that integrate with your communications to drive awareness. Finally, ensure consistency across your communications by integrating the new creative in your offline channels like direct mail, press, radio and TV.

You're now ready to launch your successful new integrated marketing communications, website and media plan.

How to develop an integrated marketing communications strategy

Implementing an integrated marketing communications strategy can provide a competitive advantage for your business. However, many companies still employ a linear direct marketing process in which products are developed, messages created and incentives are added to the mix. The products are then pushed through various media or a salesforce to consumers. This methodology relies on behaviour assumptions that all consumers follow the same decision process: Awareness – Knowledge – Evaluation – Purchase.

This strategy worked well a few years ago because targeting and smart advertising gave companies the edge over consumers with limited product knowledge. However, buying behaviour has become more sophisticated since consumers acquired access to technology such as the Internet, mobile phones, iPods, search engines and on-demand TV. This technology has made the traditional linear marketing and communications process (product/brand – channel – media – customer) redundant. Because consumers can now block out marketing messages using spam filters, pop-up blockers, remote controls, “do not mail” lists or the regular trash can.

• Why do consumers need to learn about your product/service now when they can just Google it?
• What are you going to tell consumers that they don’t already know or cannot find out for themselves via an online product comparison site?

A consumer-controlled communication landscape has emerged with a faster dynamic consumer learning process. The outcome is declining efficiency rates and increased costs from traditional direct marketing activity. Thus companies now need an integrated marketing communications approach that combines traditional media, online channels, PR, affiliate partnerships, products, people and social networks to be successful.

How can your organization develop an integrated marketing communications model?

Don Schultz, Professor of Integrated Marketing Communications at Northwestern University suggests companies can coordinate their marketing resources and supply customers value-added information to create engagement and build long-term relationships. Start by using what I call ABCD resources -Audience, Brand (Product/Service), Content, Delivery. You then need to find the optimal mix based on your industry and competitive position.

Audience – a key ingredient is to use extensive data and analytics to understand your target segment. Creating pen-portraits of your core customers including demographic and lifestyle information will help optimize your media targeting strategy.

Brand – your product or service must have a unique selling proposition to provide a competitive advantage. It must deliver superior value for the audience and be clearly differentiated on features, service or price.

Content – with most competitors using the same linear marketing strategies targeting the same consumer segments, content can now become a point of competitive differentiation. When you supply value-added content you provide consumers a reason to engage with your brand and connect your products or services.

Delivery - You then need to connect new digital media channels with traditional channels to create a push-pull system. Consumers must become engaged with the media employed or your content delivery will be unsuccessful. To achieve this ensure the content is linked to your brand positioning to make the emotional connection with your product or services.

Traditional measurements systems do not work well with integrated marketing, but most companies have all the data and just need to align it. Problematic areas can include breaking down internal silos and defining measures of success –site traffic, new sales, revenue per customer, return on capital, NPS (Net Promoter Score) etc. 

The customer experience now occurs during the interaction with your products, online channels, customer service and content. If companies can optimize the synergy between the ABCD resources and employ an integrated marketing communications strategy they can drive improved returns from their marketing investment.