Experiences- the 7th Era of Marketing

by Robert Rose

  Create a Content Mission

  Perhaps no other topic gets as much attention as the question, “What should we talk about?” Entire books have been written on whether brands should be entertaining, engaging, informative, useful, or all of the above. The one thing that is usually missing is an even more fundamental question, “What is the purpose of the experience we are trying to create?”

  So, now that the organization has formalized and created a charter, it’s time to get busy and start creating. This phase begins to merge into the actual management of the CCM process—and the group will be responsible for either creating new content-driven experiences or improving upon any work that’s already begun.

  In short, it’s time to put content-driven experiences on the agenda.

  This is a shift from most marketing strategies. Marketers have been trained to think medium first and content second. In other words, as marketers, we tend to think, “we need a television campaign” or “we need an email campaign” or “we need a print campaign.” And then we backfill with the message (or content) that will fill that medium.

  Media companies don’t do this. When looking to start something new, a media company will begin with the content and the value it will provide to an audience. Then, it will look at how to best deliver that value TO the audience. This is the change we need to make when developing our content mission. We should think story (or experience) first and then consider the medium through which it will be expressed.

  Any business that’s looking to create an experience-driven mission needs to ask four simple questions:

  1. What is our goal for this experience (what business goal will it satisfy)?

  2. Who will satisfy that goal (who is our audience for this new experience)?

  3. What value (separate from our product/service) will we deliver to this audience?

  4. What makes our approach to delivering this value different?

  Let’s say our business makes pet food. Here’s how we would move through the questions:

  • What is our goal? A perfectly adequate answer might be “to build greater awareness of our new product.”

  • Who will satisfy that goal? What audience? There is almost assuredly more than one answer here but pick ONE. For example: “the new ‘mom’ (i.e., owner) of a puppy that has been adopted by the family.”

  • What value (separate from our product/service) will we deliver to the new mom? The answer, in this case, might be education about all of the things that puppies should and shouldn’t eat.

  • What makes our approach to delivering this value different? We’ll discuss in Chapter 7 how to get to core values. The key is NOT to stop at “value,” but to get to the core differentiator of the business’s approach. Perhaps, in this case, it’s our brand’s belief that puppies should be on specific nutritional diets at specific ages, and that there is a regimen for food that goes way beyond what most pet stores advise.

  As our colleague, Joe Pulizzi, says, “…the content mission is not about what you sell…it’s what you stand for. This will become the basis for your content marketing strategy. It’s based on the informational needs of your customers and prospects, and also inherently drives your business.”66

  You will ultimately have multiple content missions that support different audiences or different parts of the customer journey. The content mission is truly the center of gravity for EACH of the content platforms that the CCM team will create as part of a portfolio of experiences.

  3. MANAGE CCM

  Aristotle famously said, “Well begun is half done.” And, reaching the “manage” portion of our CCM wheel marks the exact halfway point for the CCM framework. The irony is that at this stage many businesses actually start their content-driven experience. In so many cases these days, the strategy is defined by trying to manage the content into some desired (or new) channel.

  In other words, a new social channel like Facebook appears, and the business decides that it needs a Facebook strategy and/or team. Or, mobile technologies become the way that our customers want to engage with content, so the strategy question becomes “how do we transform all the content we’re doing into a mobile interface?”

  As we’ve discussed, these are simply the wrong questions. In order for any enterprise to scale the number of content-driven experiences it ultimately manages, it will need to understand “why” and “what” content should exist in the first place. And then, it will need to understand “how” it can use, reuse, package, repackage, and manage content on ANY channel that may be developed. If the creation and design of CCM enables the business to have a good handle on “why” and “what,” managing CCM will provide it with the means to make smart decisions on “how” and “where” the content will go.

  Developing a process to manage the creation and management of individual “owned media” efforts is probably the most critical piece of what a CCM management process is meant to achieve.

  The CCM team will, of course, have the charter to manage existing owned content-driven experiences such as blogs, websites, print magazines, etc. But the additional responsibility will be to acquire and/or build new ones as well. That first inspirational “experiment” may or may not be performing well, and it may need a new purpose and editorial strategy. Or, the group may decide that there is an opportunity to purchase an existing and already operational independent property, such as a blog or magazine, which will need to be integrated. Or, this group will need to devise new initiatives that will fit into a balanced portfolio of content-driven experiences. This is where mapping and building stories into a balanced portfolio becomes an important and critical skill for the team.

  Keep in mind that there will be multiple “flavors” across initiatives. For example, SAP’s Customer Edge blog is a platform that was conceived internally, built with the help of agencies, and is now managed almost entirely by Gurdeep Dhillon’s content marketing team. In contrast, American Express leaned more toward outsourcing for its OPEN Network, the educational community for business owners looking for expert advice on managing their companies.

  Mary Ann Fitzmaurice Reilly, senior vice president, American Express OPEN, described the model in a July 2010 interview with Fast Company:

  “…it takes a small army, both internal and external,” offered Mary Ann, who mentioned a litany of external partners who help with site development, article content, online media, and related live events. When discussing why AmEx sought outside help like Federated Media for bloggers, Mary Ann pointed out that, “You can’t do it alone; there are a lot of experts—leverage them to make the most robust solution you can.”67

  Determining the right model to build and manage a sustainable owned media property will take the collective CCM team’s efforts. Time and again, the CCM governing body will be called upon to provide the business case for why a new content platform (e.g., a blog, event, print magazine) will provide value. But then, once the group approves that effort, the management process will be critical to executing the initiative successfully.

  Map the Experiences You Will Create

  The first step in determining whether any initiative is worth doing (or worth continuing) is to create an executional map, both from an editorial and a project-mapping perspective. The goal of this process is to create a high-level editorial and creative strategy—as well as to define the business goals and measurement—that will justify the existence of a given platform.

  Put in its simplest terms, once an initiative has gone beyond the “this seems like a good idea” stage, the group has to determine what it will take to make it real.

  To accomplish this, we have seen methodologies such as Agile take hold within businesses (especially within marketing groups) and pay some of the biggest dividends for this kind of work. Other methodologies (e.g., the Lean Startup by Eric Ries, Radical Management by Stephen Denning, and Discovery Driven Growth by Rita Gunther McGrath) have created tremendous opportunities and we encourage a deeper exploration of all of the
se approaches.

  But, in Chapter 7, we will take a deep dive into the specific approach that WE recommend for creating a story map for individual initiatives. This very specific methodology is both a template and an operational model to reach two distinct goals. The first goal of the story mapping process is to create an editorial and creative strategy that helps to align the larger story with the brand approach.

  Ultimately, the story map not only helps to align business goals, it helps to align the purpose of the editorial and creative to create a compelling experience. Unlike a marketing campaign, the team is building a plan for something that is meant to last. In short, both goals are how to plan the first modules of a permanent space station, not a mission to temporarily orbit the earth and successfully land.

  Build the Experiences and Their Purpose

  One of the biggest complaints in creating content-driven experiences is that “we have to wait for results.” This isn’t true. Deploying a smart map—and a process for managing your progress—should give you immediate indication of how you’re progressing toward a goal and the ability to course-correct along the way.

  Once you have a plan in place, the CCM group may be responsible for managing the ongoing development and execution of your platforms. Referring to the goals and timelines that you established within the initial mapping process will give the team a projection of what “success” should look like at this relative point in time. Then, in order to achieve “success,” the CCM team will need to look to “where we are,” and then make assumptions about “what needs to be true” at various waypoints along the path.

  But, how will you know if you are tracking successfully? What will be the primary indicators of whether this initiative should remain a piece of your experience portfolio? This is the process of “building stories.”

  As part of Chapter 7, we provide an actionable plan that provides the best chance of success for an innovative, new, and usually unproven customer experience platform. This includes things like project plans, timelines, budgets, success metrics, resources, and all of the other things that will be needed to create and, more importantly, sustain value over the long haul.

  Manage a Portfolio of Experiences

  Assuming we’ve established and met our minimally accepted success—and our new experiential or content-driven platform is officially a “going concern”—it’s time to make new maps, as well as set the course for ongoing operations of the platform.

  Here, more than specific steps, it’s important for the CCM process and governing group to infuse a number of core competencies and build processes to support them. These include:

  • Portfolio management. As mentioned above, the CCM’s true mission is to manage the portfolio of experiences related to communications for the business (or perhaps just their part of the business). The strategic management of content as a portfolio of owned, earned, and paid strategies will be the overriding mission of the group. This is where becoming a media company, and not simply acting like one, is so important. The CCM group must manage the entire universe of the content value.

  • Continual innovation. An eye will be needed to continually look for new story maps and innovations over time.

  • Discipline. The discipline to manage the portfolio against a larger performance goal (and perhaps an even broader story map) will be critical.

  As we explain in Chapter 7, success may simply be about executing exactly as planned. Or, as is most often the case, it may mean improvising based on a sudden, unplanned challenge or obstacle. One of the subjects that we detail in Chapter 7 is how to get into a review cycle that is not based on major developmental milestones, but on progress toward the different phases of the story as the team has mapped it. Exactly how granular you make these rhythmic review cycles will depend largely on how confident you are about the assumptions you’ve made.

  4. MEASURE CCM

  At the Content Marketing Institute’s Executive Forum in May 2014, the tension around the subjects of measurement and delighting audiences with content was palpable—so much so, that “inventing new forms and paradigms of measurement” was the winning “big idea” of the forum’s idea “competition.” The consensus that the 50 executive-level participants (from brands of all sizes) reached was that measurement in marketing is fundamentally broken and there should be new ideas proposed to reinvent the way that companies measure success—especially as it pertains to content-driven experiences.

  To be clear, this is not a book about marketing measurement. There are innumerable experts in the field who can explain how deriving customer insight out of the mountains of data we are collecting can be transformed into smart business strategies.

  However, as it pertains to the CCM process, measurement—especially where it relates to content-driven experiences—needs to be rebooted. The perception of the inability to measure (as opposed to the actual results) is the most often cited reason why content marketing initiatives are cancelled. And so, as we move into the new era of experiences, it will be incumbent upon us as we “lean in with our capital M” to CHANGE how we approach measurement.

  Construct Your Measurement Plan

  As the CCM team matures and begins to manage more initiatives as part of a portfolio of experiences, it will need to balance the goals of each of these initiatives against the overall performance of marketing more broadly.

  In other words, the lead generation experiences may be working beautifully, but perhaps they are affecting (perhaps even hampering) the performance or attention being paid to experiences at the nurturing or loyalty level. This is where creating a measurement plan that fits across the entirety of the portfolio is important.

  Discrete groups such as marketing, advertising, sales enablement, PR, and customer service will be doing things that are (hopefully) in concert with what the CCM group is managing. But, many times, resources will need to be rebalanced, or focused on a particular need. A key pillar of CCM is to manage the entire universe of the experience value, not just any one platform.

  Think of how George Lucas (and now Disney) manages the portfolio of the Star Wars universe. It’s a portfolio of story maps and platforms from movies, to books, to television shows, to products, etc. They all have different heroes, investments, and management teams. They all have schedules and calendars and have to introduce stories in a very particular and logical order. They all have business goals, budgets, revenue to account for, and costs to manage. And, most importantly, they all have overlapping audiences who will know if the “order of the universe” is mismanaged. Everything within that universe conforms to a set of “story physics.” How each story map fits into the larger picture is an incredibly important piece of managing the puzzle.

  In addition to managing similar responsibilities, your CCM group will be responsible for identifying new story maps and innovating over time. So not only will your team be constantly executing, but also constantly evolving.

  In Chapter 10, we propose a complete framework for measuring content-driven experiences and show you how the measurement of these initiatives can be aligned into a holistic dashboard that can be managed by the CCM group.

  Evaluate Stories and Experiences

  This is probably the most difficult part of creating a formalized CCM function in any business. For many organizations, this kind of radical shift in the way initiatives are pitched, created, managed, launched, and either continued or decommissioned is a fundamental (even emotionally disruptive) cultural shift.

  We’ve discovered that one of the worst ways to make this shift happen is, paradoxically, to take traditional project management practices and segment teams to a “skunk works” type of project. The challenge with this type of approach is that, whether successful or not, the project teams can often have a difficult time integrating themselves into the larger organization. This makes evaluating the value of these types of experiences over time very difficult, because it becomes about the skunk works team fighting for survival rather than the ex
perience being managed.

  For example, in one large software company, the marketing organization decided that a “dream team” would be assembled and separated to handle all digital content platforms. Their first project was to create a completely self-driven blog network to make the disparate product groups more “social” and “experiential.” Given a mandate by the C-suite, the dream team found themselves using that mandate as a very large stick to “persuade” other members of the existing web, content, social, and marketing teams to change their ways to accommodate the project. Decisions were made solely by the dream team and then relayed down to the various constituents who would have to execute them. As you might expect, politics reared its ugly head, distrust was sown, and ultimately, even though the team succeeded in launching the blog network, the initiative failed. Because no one wanted to continue on with the team, they ultimately lost momentum and the “dream team” was disbanded.

  We see this kind of mistake made all the time. A group gets together in a back room and starts making decisions about better processes, new projects, innovations—all on their own.

  In contrast, story mapping and the successful execution of a formalized CCM process are almost always about mobilizing the unique strengths and talents of ALL the people in the organization. Therefore, the CCM governing body needs to be inclusive and create self-organizing teams that, in many cases, are external to the governing body. Projects (and story maps) should be created collaboratively, perhaps in replicated workshops that include all manner of teams from cross-functional departments.