Using customer-centric data

Analytical tools are abundant online, some ranging from free to a monthly subscription. Of course, idio offers analytical tools for multi-channel brands, so data from all different kinds of platforms can be carefully tracked to see if they’re doing their job. However, all analytic tools also need a very key ingredient to work: they need to be customer-centric.

Why customer-centric? Because they are the people clicking through links, viewing your content, and making you money! Analytics need to be both aggregated data from multiple sources and also able to show a marketer individual clicks and views for a customer.

Some of the present day content marketing software is able to do this, including the idio platform. Utilizing that data and pinpointing it to a select group of customers, or even down to one customer, is a lot more beneficial than just randomly guessing what is working.

Companies with a certain brand to sell will have the most benefits from customer-centric data. Let’s break it down:

• Consumer brands who use customer-centric analytics and content marketing software can pinpoint down to very specific click-through rates, views, and other data to see what exactly is attracting customers.
• Customer-centric analyzing is better because it is putting a face to the consumer. These aren’t just numbers and statistics, these are real, live people.
• While using customer-centric analytics, businesses can also use something called cohort analytics. These let you group and highlight which campaigns are working, all the way down to the customers’ own likes and dislikes. This is valuable because it lets a company know if one campaign was better than the other and if they should continue to use them in the future.

Integrating data

HubSpot explains that analyzing by the customer and not by the statistic will become the norm in the near future. They also talk about the importance of customer and cohort analytics, and how they will become seamlessly integrated with one another. Companies who deal in analytics have already started to shift toward customer-centric and cohort data and using that in their content marketing software.

idio is also one of those companies that focuses on the customer and not just the numbers. Our content marketing software will help companies successfully sell their brand and track the data from multiple sources, allowing you to keep track of your customer’s own triggers and incentives.

Wouldn’t you rather know what your customer is thinking, instead of considering them another number on a worksheet?

Where the ‘middleman’ or intermediary used to exist conveniently between client and third party, there is now a new gap-filler that’s changing advertising agency businesses. The internet is the main proponent of this disintermediation, as people become aware of and do go to direct sources for services or products online. When I buy a single from iTunes, or book Marrakech from Flybe, or book my own insurance…that’s what disintermediation looks like.

Disintermediation in Agencies

Image courtesy of sxc.hu user abbyyy

The ad agency response to this shift is translated as increased efforts in marketing campaigns that involve and work closely with media, production and creative talents, to reach customers in new ways. Media companies realize they have to peddle faster to avoid disintermediation, their ad agency-esque services are becoming increasingly subverted as businesses discover going straight to content producers themselves provide deeper content integration. Even creative development itself is finding itself re-identifying itself under the umbrella of internet disintermediation.

Ad agencies – Adapting too slowly?

Ad agencies are facing some serious challenges:

• Being bypassed by a process that’s considered faster, cheaper and more efficient.
• Risking losing client relationships as more and more partners migrate on to online marketing.
• Finding themselves falling behind the digital capacity to keep up with those ‘disintermediating’, with 48% of senior marketers saying they are hiring specialized digital marketing solution to drive new marketing strategies in 2012 that are social, mobile and interactive.
• 47% plan to build internal capabilities, which would eliminate entirely any need to retain ad agency support.

What’s resounding here is that from a senior marketer’s viewpoint, ad agencies are fast becoming irrelevant as they struggle to be current, innovative and transitional with this new ‘business model’, with 29% saying they don’t see agencies as fully integrating their digital marketing capabilities.

Solutions?

Solutions? It’s not that there aren’t any, far from it. In fact, ad agencies are being disintermediated currently by technology used directly by brands. But, according to this Adexchanger article, agencies haven’t seemed to fully caught on to how technology can affect their futures, while networks such as Advertising.com and SpecificMedia become the new middlemen trafficking large shares of online content and media. SpecificMedia, for example, are reported to provide clients with the same things that were previously provided by different contacts: data, analysis and delivery.

The impression is that marketing consultancies, brand consultancies and research firms are floating ‘upstream’, while media firms and production houses, frankly, are not, and the area between soft marketing (brand awareness activities) and hard marketing (pricing, distribution) is where digital tech providers have the capacity to measure metrics and action insight on customers’ experience, at all points of contact with the brand.

While we’ve said some will start looking into developing in-house managers to make up for the creative ad agency, many are doing well in connecting themselves straight to technology that does the job. In this respect, agencies could partner with tech providers, or launch them themselves if possible, as is the case with WPP Group, who acquired 24/7 Real Media’s search engine technology for campaigns across 50 countries, and even launched its own mobile application with a fully searchable directory.

Still, it’s not yet curtain call for ad agencies. While disintermediation is brought about by the internet, agencies still possess the know-how when it comes to actioning big ideas around television, radio and even print, formats that are still alive and kicking. Agencies ‘must learn to embrace their new role as curater every bit as much as creator’, and with partnering up with tech companies that can facilitate content curation, the solution becomes a lot clearer.

With marketing, content distribution, and customer experience rapidly all going online, content managers and marketing teams need a streamlined service which lets them do everything all in one space, instead of tabbing through different pieces of software which won’t talk to one another, or integrate with one another. Most departments have some sort of content marketing software in place, but, they are still relatively new and aren’t quite up to par to what everyone needs. Alternatively, most people don’t understand the need to have everything integrated and work seamlessly. Any content marketing software should have at least four different levels of seamless integration: web content, analytics, customer relationship, and automation. All of these play a big role in today’s content marketing and must work together in order to have a successful marketing campaign. While it is good to know that all these play an integral role to your marketing, how exactly do they work?

Web Content

The bread and butter for any campaign, this is the stuff that will help you gain and keep customers. Content comes in all shapes and forms, and must be distributed on multiple channels for a highly effective campaign. Managing content means understanding what your customers like and don’t like, then, publishing the right content. However, distributing dozens of content at once can be a bit overwhelming, which is where the management suite comes in.

Analytics

When your content is out in the wild, you should keep tabs on it and make sure that it is actually doing what it is supposed to do. Analytics include how many click-throughs a link might have, how many views a piece of content is attracting, and which keywords are working (or trending). Having a station that is an “all-in-one” place for this helps immensely.

Customer Relationship

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) lets a company understand transaction trends and archives from customers, but a content marketing software should be able to dig deeper and make content personalized for each customer. CRM should be about creating a positive relationship, and in today’s marketing that means a highly customized customer experience.

Automation

When content, analytics, and CRM are all set in place, the last part is automation. Everything should (and will eventually) be automatic and the content software must reflect that. Most management suites already offer automated posts, whether on a small scale or enterprise level, but the content, how it works, and who it appeals to is very important for this part. Another way to look at these four factors is the what, how, who, and why of content marketing respectfully. Each piece answers each question, and together they create a bigger picture of your content marketing strategy.

James Griffin (Idio, CTO)

Idio’s platform analyses the behavioural, social  and CRM data of millions of consumers on a daily basis to enable companies to deliver personalised content experiences across all of their digital channels – so we like to think we know a little bit about Big Data!

As such then, it is with great pleasure then that we announce that James ‘Griff’ Griffin, Idio CTO, will be speaking on ‘The Big Business Behind Big Data’ for General Assembly (London) this Weds at White Bear Yard, Clerkenwell.

Griff has recently written an article for popular contrarian tech-journal ‘The Kernel’ which served to give a helpful introduction to Big Data. Wednesday’s lecture will develop these themes, including:

• The history of Big Data
• Notable individuals in the field
• Current Big Data technologies
•  Current case studies of successful business applications
•  Predictions for Big Data’s applications in the future

Tickets and information for ‘The Big Business Behind Big Data’ can be found here.

Rearden's Travel App

The Rearden Commerce‘s services are found on different platforms, such as the Chase Ultimate Rewards Program and even American Express AXIOM service. The company offers apps and content capabilities that allow transactions across travel, procurement and finance sectors. However, Rearden wishes to go further and make their e-commerce services provide more personalized content in order to talk to consumers even more directly – without the hassle of translating all the data and analysis results.

Rearden’s VP of analytics, Steve Bernstein, has been utilizing the data collected from Rearden’s Deem e-commerce service in order to translate data from traveler services as a means towards consumer personalization.

Rearden’s Deem service

One example of how they do this is by using reviews of hotels and other travel services and integrating it into an intelligently curated, more direct feedback for people to use. It’s essentially reducing “noise” that can be found in user reviews and making it even more useful customer experience.

Rearden also offer services launched on the App Store as a free program called CWT To Go that accompanies the customer as a business travel companion. It offers up-to-date flight information, hotel and taxi options, and even mobile boarding passes, (albeit with something called a CWT Portrait Profile for identification purposes).

As Bernstein describes, “Once semantic-driven data is injected into the process, new patterns will emerge that might make it easier for us to sort a list of hotels for that user even better suited to his tastes. Structured data feeds tend to be binary in the sense that this hotel has wireless or not.” So, Rearden wants to make the customer experience so personalized that hotels with Wi-Fi, nice pools, and other benefits can be found more easily by a customer.

Using idio in the same light

This sort of technology will be emerging quite soon, as Bernstein and Rearden expect, and soon enough hotel websites and other travel service websites will soon be able to take the personalized customer experience to the next level. In a similar way, the idio platform has already launched services that cater to this form of personalization.

Data-driven analytics used to be hard to translate into content easily accessed by customers, in a way that they could still understand and be useful to their own needs. However, services such as Deem and the idio platform understand and work within a changing market that needs to pull analytics and data together, using real time engagement. Some examples with idio include the Slim.Fast digital magazine, first starting with raw data churned by semantic technology into a carefully filtered stream of relevant, digestible content for the target audience. Using a specified brand persona that best describes the typical customer, the idio platform’s technology uses carefully wired metadata to filter content in articles which are then categorized and published on predestined ‘channels’ (Healthy Eating, Weight Loss, etc). This option allows each Slim.Fast customer to only receive content that is interesting and relevant to them.

The report also reveals better rates of customer acquisition depending on how frequently you blog: 100% of respondents who said they blog multiples a day found customers from their blog, compared to 90% of those who blog daily and 69% of who blog a few times weekly.

While blogging clearly brings about better and more direct means of engagement between customer and company, there are a few add-ons we can include that aren’t discussed in the report.

We can learn three things:

Consolidate your company blog and social media

• It’s important to remember that alongside the company blog, social media offers an important parallel function. Many organizations are sceptical about how far social media platforms go, (we’re not – we often blog about the benefits and ways of incorporating those channels in business), but over 40% of the survey respondents who use Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn alongside their company blogs report customer acquisition through those channels too. Many times, companies already have customers on those platforms – why not turn those existing ‘friends’ into readers too, hence starting and sustaining a ‘virtuous cycle‘.

Choose relevant, high-quality content

• As impressive as the survey stats are, (and it continues to  remould inbound/outbound marketing budgets everywhere), any random company blog that’s churning out 5 posts a day religiously does not necessarily win customers over. Companies that invest in their blog must ensure it’s packed (no matter how often or little) with relevant, quality content. Doing a bit of market research homework or simply knowing your target audience is a start.

Keyword to make the blog heard

• Ensure your great company blog content isn’t being shoved into the darker corners of the internet by incorporating a basic SEO concept. Choosing the most relevant keywords to attach to each blog post is going to make it easier for others to Google for your blog – and your company.

The slickness of what Jetsetter’s done comes not only with picking a pretty relevant song by an artist with a worldwide following, but including some bonus incentives: alongside the download is an offer of a chance to win a trip, packaged with concert and pre-sale tickets.

The concept of bringing a different commodity (music) into travel marketing isn’t completely new, but the underlying takeaway here is the horizontal direction of content branding – grabbing hold of other key customer interest fields (i.e. your product is one of them) and making them relevant and relateable. Undoubtedly the more this style of marketing Jetsetter applies, (more deals, more artists, etc), the more customers will feel they can come to for a fuller, enhanced experience.

This form of brand extension is a great way of supporting strong content marketing strategy, where the company becomes a relevant authority in their domain, beyond just a sales pitch.

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Aly Richards (Global CEM Practice Leader, Acxiom)

Companies are having to re-orient themselves around customers in order to build sustainable competitive advantage. Marketing is moving from being broadcast and planned, to individualised and predictive. The companies that consistently create great customer experiences in this open, social, and networked world, will hold the keys to success.

Content Marketing to attract small business owners

For those of you who aren’t aware (shame on you, it’s been around since 2007!), OPEN Forum is an online resource and social networking hub for small-business owners and entrepreneurs searching for practical information and tips for industry experts. Part of the support is in the form of collaborative social interactions with other SME owners in Connectodex (OF’s private social network), however informative content written by experts in the IdeaHub section is the major reason for the site’s success.

The site’s content is primarily centred around “powering small business success”, and whilst the commercial goal is to increase brand awareness and sign-ups to AmEx products, American Express intentionally do not publish self-promotional bumpf but instead give customers content that they want and need.

Popular topics  within the IdeaHub  include personal productivity, business management and finance – these are all topics that AmEx can legitimately have a voice in – without looking opportunistic – and are issues close to the brand’s values and services. More importantly, rather than obliquely trumpeting product-specific content around American Express cards, content marketing has meant that AmEx:

• Becomes a trusted authority on the concerns of small business owners
• Develops long-term relationships with prospects even when they are not currently in the market for an AmEx product

What have been the results of adopting a content marketing proposition that supports the needs of US business owners?

(source: Scott Roen, VP OPEN Forum)

That stats speak for themselves:

• In 2010, Jason Rudman (Content Strategist for Open Forum) was quoted as saying, “We’ve grown the traffic on OPENForum.com roughly 350% year over year. That’s unique monthly visits in 2008 versus 2009. We have more than 8,100 Twitter followers and over 9,000 OPEN cardmembers with profiles OPENForum.com”.
• As of March 2010, Open Forum passed passed 1 million monthly unique visitors.
• As of 2010, 85% traffic comes from unpaid sources as readers share the content with their own social networks, bringing back more visitors:

“Earned traffic generated through OPEN Forum sharing saves marketing dollars…Roughly 85 – 90% of our traffic comes from organic means. Not advertising. People are coming to us because they search on an article. They read it, they share it through their Facebook friends or their followers on LinkedIn” – Scott Roen, VP OPEN Forum

Although Roen is reticent to say how much marketing dollars they have saved, it’s clear that pursuing an owned media proposition is credible strategy over AmEx’s traditional paid media approach.

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For more interesting articles on content marketing:

• 7 Reasons Why Your Marketing Should Be Content-Based
• Five Simple Ways To Create A Content Marketing Strategy For Brands
• Content Marketing ROI

According to the Adestra/Econsultancy Email Marketing Industry Census of 2012, one of the largest surveys in the UK, the study found key areas which marketers and businesses should focus their email marketing on rather than doing a “batch and blast” strategy.

The survey found out that ROI is high for companies who utilize email marketing, but, revenue altogether still suffers because they still neglect to use segmentation, testing, and systems integration.

What can a business do to alleviate this? Simple: implement these key features into the campaign, on top of striving to make your email land into a High Priority inbox immediately. Here is the break down of all three.

Segmentation in email marketing

Companies who practice segmentation, even the most basic type, can see as much as 95% increase in ROI. Segmentation can mean the difference between loyal customers or a failed campaign.

Segmentation increases the relevancy of messages so that customers get more value out of the campaign. You can start by breaking down your email list strategy into, say, ‘prospects vs. clients’. For example, if you have a prospect that has recently converted into a client, you want to be sending them emails that are catered to further your business-client relationship, and not an impersonal, mis-targeted email campaign that is more suitable for a prospect. Eventually, the more you monitor your results, the more refined the segments in your email lists will be, (ex. major clients, list member loyalty, geography, improved purchasing likeness, etc).

Segmentation is necessary to nurture any personalized content marketing campaign, as it assures customers you are working with them via interest-based behavioural data, where you have considered their specific wants and needs.

Testing the campaign

Campaigns should always be tested for their relevancy and potency to reach a potential customer or client. According to the Adestra survey, 81% of companies that do regular testing see instant and satisfactory ROI, while 72% of companies that only do occasional testing see a response and a measly 37% of companies that do no testing see any kind of reaction at all.

Instead of being in the 37% bracket, test your campaign in order to ensure success. Like any other channel of marketing, email still needs to be tested and constantly measured to make sure it is still bringing in clients. There’s software out there to test email campaigns and to keep tabs on them, most of them inexpensive or even free to use.

Systems integration

Integrating data requires forethought and planning, and usually requires building good connections between the various tools that host or use customer data, rather than creating “one database to rule the world.”

From our perspective, personalized content marketing is entirely dependent on blending together customer data from multiple channels; this clearly requires some systems integration. This is data you’ve collected about the customer’s persona – anything from how long they’ve worked in the industry to what types of content they downloaded previously, or in a consumer context, perhaps their purchase habits and content interests – is fundamental to creating a powerful personalization process. To go back to the Adestra survey, they discovered that “well integrated” data with email campaigns see as much as a 49% increase in seeing excellent ROI and a wildly successful campaign.

Final thoughts

As managing director of Adestra, Henry Hyder-Smith, says: “Get the basics right and you will sell more.” That means testing the campaign, segmentation of the campaign, and integration are all key in today’s market.

According to both Adestra and Econsultancy, only 3% of companies surveyed are implementing these simple and easy steps to their next campaign. They will be missing out on high ROI, a successful campaign, and ultimately lose revenue and valuable time from less than stellar email content.

Don’t fall into the batch and blast habit, start thinking smart with your email marketing with these three simple steps to ensure real success and a constantly high ROI.