by Robert Rose
KEY CONCEPTS IN THIS CHAPTER
• We are making a business case for content-driven experiences, not the totality of the customer experience. The distinction is important.
• There are three key concepts to our case for Content Creation Management:
1. Marketers now must focus on orchestrating events, not guiding journeys. The buyer’s journey is growing ever more non-linear, and it will be impossible for marketers to scale to meet every new channel. Thus, marketers should simplify, and focus on creating fewer, high-impact experiences that customers want to share.
2. To derive true meaning from data, businesses must develop new strategies that ask honest, insightful questions that improve the process, not prove the success of campaigns or teams.
3. Marketing departments must reorganize around agility, not scale. Today’s challenge is not to be “everywhere we can.” It is to be “anywhere we need to be.” Thus, teams should be centered on creating differentiating content versus content that is structured around platforms or technologies.
• The new focus should be on content as a strategic function in the business. Thus, the creation, management, publishing, and promotion of content requires its own strategic function. We call this Content Creation Management.
ENDNOTES
37 http://www.theguardian.com/media-network/media-network-blog/2014/sep/04/advertising-agencies-dying-marketers-challenges
38 http://hbr.org/2012/05/to-keep-your-customers-keep-it-simple/ar/1
39 Interview with Robert Rose, June 2014.
40 http://adage.com/article/best-practices/kraft-content-drive-broader-marketing-effort/294892/
41 http://www.marketingcharts.com/traditional/2-in-3-cmos-feeling-pressure-from-the-board-to-prove-the-value-of-marketing-36293/
42 https://econsultancy.com/blog/65351-96-of-enterprise-businesses-feeling-the-pressure-of-digital-transformation#i.19dz5w915ufdfu
“If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there.” | Lewis Carroll
What is a “buyer’s journey?” Do our customers really go through some kind of predictive path on their way to buying a product or service? Has this really changed over the last decade?
Customers are definitely more informed than they used to be; that’s no surprise considering all of the technological tools at their disposal. But have the reasons why they make the decisions they do fundamentally changed?
We contend that, no, they haven’t changed. Marketers must still appeal to customers’ personal values and purpose. And yet, marketers still segment buyers by things that lack real relevance to the purchase decision. As Theodore Levitt, one of our greatest marketing professor heroes, once said, “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole.”
In their article, “Marketing Malpractice: The Cause and the Cure,” Clayton M. Christensen, Scott Cook, and Taddy Hall eloquently added to this idea:
“Instead of trying to understand the ‘typical’ customer, find out what jobs people want to get done. Then develop purpose brands: products or services consumers can ‘hire’ to perform those jobs.”43
With the explosive growth of content marketing and the emphasis on targeting influencers, segmentation has become more complicated. Marketers are now targeting “audiences” by using the same flawed practice of targeting buyers by demographics; they are separating them by physical profile rather than by their purpose, or by what they find valuable.
WHY THE TRADITIONAL SALES FUNNEL NO LONGER WORKS
One of our biggest challenges as marketers is that we can’t predict how customers will actually behave. Any success we have stems from the experiences we’ve already designed. As a result, we spend our time trying to improve the efficacy of these experiences and create new ones to replace the old ones.
Further, in order to improve these experiences, we break them up into layers of our sales funnel. The logic goes “we got X many leads from this initiative, so we should do more of this,” independent of how valuable it was to the customer. This certainly makes it easier to manage from our end as marketers—and in a world with a small number of ways for us to design experiences, this feels like a tenable strategy. But, because today’s omnichannel world offers so many ways for customers to move through a buying process, focusing on the traditional sales funnel is no longer realistic.
For starters, the idea of the sales funnel is incredibly outdated. In 1898, Elias St. Elmo Lewis came up with the idea of the purchase funnel, which we tend to call the sales funnel.44 To get there, Lewis spent a lot of time studying the advertising profession. What he saw was the need to create sound practices in advertising that could apply to many industries.45
Lewis’s musings and writings led to the AIDA model—attention, interest, desire, and action—that many marketers still use more than 100 years later. There’s just one problem: Buyers have changed over the last 100 years, and they will continue to change. That’s especially true as we see content playing a bigger and more important role in creating the experiences that influence how people make decisions.
The problem is this: Far too many marketers and companies are still using mid- to late-20th century hierarchies, strategies, and processes.
Gary Vaynerchuk of VaynerMedia said it well: “Market in the year you’re actually living in.” That means you have to create and deliver content and experiences that are relevant for today, and be agile enough to respond to how audiences want them delivered in the future.
With mountains of information instantly available at a buyer’s fingertips, customers now create their own journeys. They educate themselves. But here’s the thing: self-educated audiences don’t necessarily mean well-educated audiences.
In the last few years, we’ve changed how we think about the process of creating experiences for customers. SiriusDecisions introduced us to their Demand Waterfall™ model, giving us a framework to measure and benchmark demand generation from a B2B buyer’s initial inquiry up to the close of a sale. The Demand Waterfall™ brings together the efforts of sales and marketing in the process.
McKinsey’s Customer Decision Journey model showed us how messy, complex, and interconnected the buying process is, and why buyers don’t logically flow from one decision to the next. Instead, we realized that buyers make decisions and then revisit them, adding and deleting the brands they consider along the way.
One of the big advantages of McKinsey’s model is that it’s circular, rather than linear. Prospects don’t come in at the top of a funnel and drop out the bottom. Instead, they move through an ongoing set of touchpoints before, during, and after a purchase.46
The SiriusDecisions Demand Waterfall™ gave marketers a framework to measure and benchmark B2B demand generation. Credit: SiriusDecisions
The McKinsey Customer Decision Journey recognized the nonlinear process that customers use to make decisions. Credit: McKinsey & Company
The good thing about the Customer Decision Journey model is that it recognizes the back-and-forth and repeated efforts that buyers go through. We’ve all seen buyers who seem indefinitely stuck in a particular stage, fearful of making any kind of a decision, which includes saying, “no thanks.”
So, what’s the bad?
“The problem is in the name itself. Brands may put the decision at the center of the journey, but customers don’t. Jonathan Becher, CMO at SAP, believes that for customers, ‘the pivot is the experience, not the purchase.’ The Customer Decision Journey might be circular, but if the focus is still on the transaction, it is just a funnel eating its own tail.”47
This is the critical point: People now experience a brand many times and in many different ways—and many of these experiences come from sources outside of the brand.
That’s the most important thing that marketers forget about how today’s customers buy: It’s the experience that matters most, and it’s the experience that creates the pivot point. People can be huge fans, significant influencers, and advocates even if th
ey’ve never been (and maybe never will be) a customer.
Take Tesla, for example. In 2014, the starting price of a Tesla car was around $75,000. Equipped with location-based suspension, real-time traffic-based navigation, commute advice, and a smart calendar, it’s not a brand you’d tap if you only need a vehicle to get from point A to B. But, unlike other luxury car manufacturers, Tesla has a huge following of people who will never buy one of their models. Why are these people fans? Because Tesla believes in creating a long-term sustainable society that’s weaned from fossil fuels.48
Do these people matter if they’re not buying a car? Absolutely, they do.
In fact, Tesla believes so much in the need to build a sustainable society that they’ve accelerated the development of technology for the industry. How? One way is that they allow anyone who wants to use their patented technology in good faith to do just that. They realize that their biggest competitor isn’t the electric car, but rather the huge inventory of gasoline-powered cars manufactured every day.49
Marketers who focus on just the people involved in the buying process miss a huge opportunity to create influence and emotionally engage large audiences. If you think that brand advocates are only customers, you’re missing out on the power of social influence. This influence matters a great deal in our digital world; companies can no longer guide buyers by the hand and expect them to end up with their product or service. Marketing has to “set the scene” for buyers AND influencer audiences to have delightful experiences at every stage of today’s nonlinear journeys.
CONTENT-DRIVEN EXPERIENCES, NOT COMPLICATED GUIDED JOURNEYS
When you start to take this outlook on the buyer’s journey, it makes sense why we need to stop supporting a sales-and-marketing-driven process. If we approach it from this perspective, we miss the nuances of how people actually buy, and instead, base our efforts on how enterprises sell. When we organize content around a sales process, we get locked in and don’t think about how buyers make decisions in the real world.
What we should be doing is shifting our focus toward a content-driven experience process. Understanding the buyer’s experience is vital. Customers have a decision journey and our processes need to reflect that.
Most marketers, however, overcomplicate this. We buy into mapping the customer journey and then get overly enthusiastic about detailing and providing a layer or conversion metric for every move. Yes, we need to understand the buyer’s process. But we need to think about the scale that we use to map it. How many times, in our consulting work, have we seen a marketer’s “buyer’s journey” as a series of two dozen conversion points—and some kind of campaign-focused content program to facilitate a decision at each one? The net result is that the brand doesn’t understand how to prioritize, and ultimately creates two dozen mediocre experiences, as opposed to any that are high-impact or deliver true value.
Micro-mapping theoretically gives you more details, but it also creates a bigger problem for marketers unprepared to execute on it compared to not mapping at all. Without a journey, we’re clueless as to where customers go. With too much detail, we’re so overwhelmed that we spread resources too thin when we have to try and cover them all. As a result, we end up creating average (or even negative) experiences in total.
The marketer’s role is to find a happy medium. We should be creating a balanced portfolio of appropriate, relevant, and high-impact experiences at ONLY the stages of the buyer’s journey where we can be most influential and deliver the most value.
To say that we can “guide” a buying process across every decision point with content isn’t true. Buyers will do what they want and we lack enough control over that process to be able to guide them.
Instead of trying to force people into a next step of a complex process that we’ve created, we must create experiences that are so mesmerizing and valuable that buyers want to take the next step, and then we make it obvious what that next step could be. Along the way, we have to look at how our content is performing and how well it’s creating the right experiences for our audiences.
One of the biggest roles that marketing has taken on in the last few years is to reach audiences in the moments that influence their decisions the most. For example, when you look at a product on Amazon, they show you what others also bought along with that particular item. They know you’re already in the buying mode, and they know what you’re interested in, so they’re creating an experience that makes it easy for you to take the next step.
Let’s look at how Visa mapped its customer engagement journey and shifted from being transaction-centric to focusing on the holistic customer experience.
When McKinsey introduced the circular Customer Decision Journey model, the Visa team recognized characteristics in its own business.
“Through changes in the omnichannel world, we saw that we needed to move away from transactions (swipe of a Visa card) to a full value-added experience in which transactions were one component of the consumer journey,” said Antonio Lucio, global chief marketing and communications officer for Visa. “There were experiences before, during, and after the swipe that we were realizing through research and trends. When we saw the McKinsey research, we knew it was time for us to look at things more holistically.”50
When Visa transitioned to a new CEO in late 2012, they began looking at how they could maintain the vibrancy of their brand over the next 10 to 15 years. They realized that they needed to make some fundamental changes, particularly with how they evolve consumers (B2C side) and merchants (B2B side), in order to create deeper relationships with them. To do that, they needed to explore how they could create a holistic and integrated consumer experience.
Lucio’s team started by studying the data they had on customers, and how and when Visa interacted with those customers.
“We have 2.5 billion accounts on file, which is more accounts than Facebook and Google combined,” explained Lucio. “We saw that we had significant opportunities to combine our data with that of our merchants and issuing partners, and then combine it with the data that we had from Facebook and Google. It allowed us to create a more informed, richer decision journey that brought to light more points of opportunities for engagement with Visa.”51
During this process, the team looked at how a typical U.S. consumer would go about researching and booking a vacation to Mexico. They considered each point in the process (e.g., reading reviews on TripAdvisor, asking for input from their social networks, shopping prices, and making reservations online), as well as how the consumer would make decisions regarding entertainment and dining choices during the vacation.
Using research and data, Lucio’s team was able to map a rich customer decision journey. Visa now had the critical interaction points and could drive more transactions into the business.
“I wouldn’t say that we have this completely figured out,” added Lucio, “but as we evolve through a better and richer use of data, our model is going to become more robust and iterative, especially as we’re able to cross more data with our clients, Facebook, and Google. We’ll be able to easily test different messages at decision points and make sure that they are the right messages. This is how we’ll continue to move from transactions to a comprehensive consumer experience.”52
STOP ORGANIZING MARKETING AROUND SOFTWARE AND HARDWARE
Marketers tend to get caught up in new platforms and technologies and build strategies around them. We now have a Facebook strategy, a LinkedIn strategy, and a mobile strategy. With the exponential growth and simultaneous decline of channels, this strategy is untenable. Brands will never be able to keep up with the next “new thing” in terms of marketing channels. And by assembling teams to focus solely on channels, brands will over-rationalize efforts to keep them viable well after the usefulness of the channel may have run its course. We would never consider having a “print marketing team,” so why should we have a “mobile marketing” or “Facebook marketing” team?
Instead of pursuing independent, s
iloed strategies, we must examine the bigger picture of how customers consume content and what they experience in the process. We know that certain experiences inspire people and make them want “more” change as they get deeper into the engagement journey. How can we make the buyer experience more effective in these phases of the decision-making process?
Think about the process rather than the form. Stop trying to nail down content specifics for each stage. We need to better understand how we can react to what an audience needs, so that we can respond to any situation. We need to think about the experiences we’re creating with each of our channels. How do we use content to deliver those experiences? Forget about ROI for a moment; this isn’t about generating tons of traffic—it’s about using compelling content to create conversations.
Vail Resorts does a great job of this with its EpicMix program. The EpicMix ski pass connects subscribers to an online and mobile app that captures the experience of snowboarders and skiers on Vail Resort mountains. People can track their vertical feet climbed, earn pins, post to social channels, share photos, track ski and snowboard progress, and join racing competitions.
Vail Resorts understands that customers expect relevant content and touchpoints across every area of the organization and through every channel. Your customers are no different. Each of their experiences—from your website, to phone conversations, to live chats, brick-and-mortar stores, to Facebook posts—must be consistent.