by Robert Rose
Do you have any kind of baseline measurement? This may be employee engagement scores or feedback from employees about current communications programs now in place (think across the organization, not just those that may come from marketing or corporate communications).
• The Second Month—Infusing the story
Huddle with leadership and begin to get buy-in to breed a culture of engagement. If you work for a big company and need to cascade through the local level, understand who those key people are.
Identify the connectors within your organization who can work magic because of their credibility and influence. Talk to them about your plan, your goals, their role, and pay attention to their insights and feedback.
Understand who’s most affected by your brand story. Where are you seeing the biggest gaps between how well you tell your brand story outside the company and how well it’s actually executed internally? These are the people you need to start with, so they understand the bigger WHY of their work. Is sales telling a seamless story with marketing? Does the picture that human resources paint match the culture of your company? If you can check these boxes, begin digging deeper into customer service and operational performance.
Include story mapping for employees as you go through this exercise during the second month of the 90-day vision for story mapping.
• The Third Month and Onward—Continual engagement
Lay-out and story map a number of experiences. Collaborate on “if and how” they will benefit each function within the organization, and assemble the plan.
Refer to your CCM framework to ensure that you’re consistently driving relevant and delightful experiences clearly and effectively.
Ensure that the brand voice uses everyday language, so it’s interesting, fun, captivating, and enticing for employees.
Measure the effectiveness of internal content efforts and how well employees are retaining the brand story; make adjustments to improve the performance of your content.
ENDNOTES
70 http://www.gallup.com/poll/165269/worldwide-employees-engaged-work.aspx
71 Liberman, Vadim. Performance Anxiety, The Conference Board Review, Spring 2014.
72 http://www.towerswatson.com/Insights/IC-Types/Survey-Research-Results/2012/07/2012-Towers-Watson-Global-Workforce-Study
73 Collins, Jim and Porras, Jerry. Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies, Harper Business Essentials, 2004, Appendix. Numbers are based on the performance histories of brands that the authors identified as visionary companies and their comparison companies.
74 http://forbes.com/sites/johnkotter/2011/02/10/does-corporate-culture-drive-financial-performance
75 Gladwell, Malcolm. The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big difference. Bay Back Books, 2002.
76 Interview with Carla Johnson, December 19, 2014.
77 http://adage.com/article/btob/companies-employee-engagement-strategy/296257/?utm_content=buffer2a230&utm_medium=social&utm_ source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer
78 http://www.altimetergroup.com/2014/04/contribute-to-altimeters-report-on-employee-engagement-and-advocacy/
79 SiriusDecisions.
80 http://corporatevisions.com/resources/article-archive/why-your-sales-message-doesnt-work/
81 http://corporatevisions.com/the-right-skills/justification-skills/
82 http://adage.com/article/btob/companies-employee-engagement-strategy/296257/?utm_content=buffer2a230&utm_medium=social&utm_ source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer
83 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0A2LKjNC-gM Accessed November17,2014.
“It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.” | Albert Einstein
Ask any marketer what the two biggest trends disrupting business are and you’ll likely get the answer “big data” and “customer centricity.” For the technology-minded (e.g., our CIOs), this means an enormous amount of pressure to get business software to work seamlessly. CIOs must help the business take advantage of all the customer data they are accustomed to storing, while simultaneously developing new ways to manage new unstructured and transactional data. It’s a process that can, in many cases, be overwhelming.
Likewise, marketing’s mandate has expanded to now cover the creation of optimal experiences across every appropriate channel.
So, when it comes to technology to help facilitate all this disruption, you’d think the CMO and CIO would be best friends at this point—kindred spirits working together to bring these concepts together. You’d like to think they’d be like two kids riding in the back seat to Disneyland, working together to make the car go faster.
Yes, you’d like to think that.
But the reality is (as every parent knows) quite different. These days, the CMO and CIO are both screaming, “are we there yet?” from the back seat. The CMO is holding his finger in the CIO’s face, saying, “not touching, not touching.” And the CIO is saying, “mine, mine, mine” to every single thing the CMO picks up.
So, what can we do to ensure that we have a safe and productive ride? We’ve identified four layers, that when implemented well, can provide a bit of sanity to the CCM process.
FOUR LAYERS IN A CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE FOCUS
Both the marketing strategy and the tools that support it should make the customer’s journey as easy and compelling as possible. It’s the CIO’s job to make that journey easy to facilitate, scalable, and flexible for the CMO’s team. And it’s the CMO’s job to understand the design of the experiences so well that he or she can communicate the team’s needs to the CIO. Together they have to focus on:
Awareness and introduction
Owned-media platforms like blogs, social, and websites are yesterday’s media buy. Before the customer is even a “known” visitor, the marketer can create value by tracking the consumption of content and usage patterns to understand their interests and what is valuable to them.
The technology strategy here should be lightweight, flexible, and often disposable. Things change rapidly here. Collaboration with any number of external sources from people, channels, languages, and styles will be required. This is where marketers will need to move the fastest to be the most effective. In short: the CIO should care the least about this layer.
Engagement and relationship
As visitors become leads, more emphasis is needed on using data and the insight it can provide to develop a more delightful experience that will pay dividends down the road. The goal here is to inform every other part of the organization how the business can operate to meet and exceed customer expectations. This is where a unified customer experience management solution is so critical.
It’s essential to have a management process here that can integrate into the fast-moving technology of the awareness and introduction stage, but also scale to meet the optimization, data, and insight requirements of every stage through to the CRM system. Put simply, the CMO needs to understand this process much more deeply and design more carefully here. This differs from the awareness stage. Thus, more care should be put into fewer experiences that change less often. A more holistic process is needed.
Intelligence and insight
After leads become customers, it is critical to develop a methodology and process that is centered on learning how customer’s needs evolve. The focus should be not only on developing strategies to feed data back into the acquisition of new customers, but also on how to use that data to retain customers and upsell or cross-sell additional products and services. The ultimate goal is to create brand evangelists.
Here the technology and process must focus on how the customer experience system can draw data out of other, more enterprise back-end systems in order to optimize experiences for well-known customers. Integration is the key. The CIO must work with the CMO to understand “what data is needed” to optimize the experience, before developing the integration strategies to acquire the data.
Shared values and exceeded expectations
This is les
s of a physical layer and more of a final attribute that is the foundation of the other three. It involves developing a shared vision with both marketing and technology to see how partnering with customers and the business can become an integral part of the business strategy.
It is not enough for the CMO and CIO to understand one another’s strategy and acronyms. The two teams must actively collaborate to develop a joint strategy for customer-centricity and the technology needed to facilitate it.
Ultimately, the goal of these four layers is to help the CMO and CIO understand and communicate the “approach” to technology and customer-centricity. It’s easy for the CIO to get caught up in the “we have a tool for that” mindset and decide myopically that because it’s a “content tool” it can solve any and every content problem. Conversely, the CMO can easily get wrapped up in the “I need everything yesterday because it’s always about more” state of mind. Getting the marketing team to view “content as a process” (rather than “content as a campaign”) will help everyone develop a more considered approach to deeper customer engagement infrastructures.
To summarize:
• The CMO should focus on the WHAT—and make it as compelling, relevant, and resonant as possible.
• The CIO should focus on the HOW—making it as fast, easy, and flexible as possible.
SOFTWARE SOLUTIONS: SOLVING THE WHAT AND HOW
Remember, only within the last six years has the enterprise needed to manage the explosion of digital content channels. Even up until the mid-2000s, the term web content management (WCM) described a system that would enable the organization to create, edit, publish, and deliver content to a singular (or, in some cases, multiple) website. This was simply making the organization more efficient at doing something it was already doing—managing content. However, as marketing and content have become more important, enterprise-class solutions for WCM, marketing campaign management, web analytics, and CRM have all been evolving to offer new “engagement” features.
Simultaneously, disruptive marketing tools that facilitated higher levels of content relevance, social conversation, and engagement began to emerge in the mid-2000s. Over the last six years, these tools have been maturing and finding their way into the marketer’s toolbox. Software solutions for marketing automation, content testing and optimization, social publishing, and sentiment analysis have sprung up as disruptive replacements for old processes. These systems offer marketers new capabilities, while providing technology teams with even more systems to integrate into a cohesive new strategy.
While software vendors race to keep up with all of the different customer channels, methods, and interfaces that they must enable marketers to manage and monitor, marketing departments struggle to avoid technology overload. As one frustrated CMO exclaimed at the Forrester CIO-CMO Summit in 2013, “I feel more like a CIO than a CMO! I have marketing automation, CRM, listening platforms. I’m up to my eyeballs in technology.”84
This confusion has led to years of chaos in the deployment of digital content, marketing, content optimization, social, and measurement systems across the enterprise. To address this, enterprises have usually adopted one of two strategies:
• Rely on a rock-solid enterprise content management/digital marketing backbone technology. Usually this project is a consolidation of smaller web content management systems, multiple marketing solutions, and perhaps early forays into social publishing and analytics. This global enterprise system provides the core functions to the marketing teams, which allows them to manage content, create campaigns, monitor success, and build out functionality—but prevents them from innovating quickly.
• Deploy ad hoc “point solution” systems. These technologies separately handle websites, blogging, content optimization, marketing automation, and social media management. More typical in midsized organizations, this is usually the result of “as needed” technology acquisition. The result is often small, cobbled-together integration. This is where the “CMO as CIO” feeling is most pronounced. These organizations have typically over-purchased technology. Many systems go underused or even forgotten, and are typically replaced as each new marketing requirement dictates.
The challenges for the marketing team with the enterprise backbone technology are that they are typically:
• Frustrated with the speed at which they can move
• Dissatisfied with the upgrades that the vendor is making (usually well behind the curve) and the agility they have shown
• Extremely dependent on their internal (or agency side) technology group for any new capabilities, publishing channels, or new processes they must facilitate.
The challenges with the ad hoc point solution system, however, are just as pronounced. In this case, the marketing team is:
• Frustrated by the lack of consistency between any two systems they’ve adopted
• Always behind the curve when it comes to adoption among the wider team across the enterprise
• Seemingly in a constant state of design/redesign/implementation for new systems
• Usually over budget in technology, and challenged with finding consistent measurability across a longer time frame.
To address these challenges and enable new engagement strategies, we need a new technology model for marketing teams. This new model of enterprise marketing technology provides scalability and sustainability, as well as the agility required for today’s constantly changing landscape.
NEW MARKETING TECHNOLOGY MODEL: BUILT TO CHANGE
In his paper “Systems of Engagement and the Future of Enterprise IT,” Geoffrey Moore explains that we are in a “new era of IT.” According to Moore, the old “systems of record” (the large backbone IT systems) are now being supplemented and extended by “systems of engagement” solutions that are built to facilitate communication and collaboration. In describing the importance of this “sea change,” Moore says:
“Amidst the texting and Twittering and Facebooking of a generation of digital natives, the fundamentals of next-generation communication and collaboration are being worked out. For them it is clear, there is no going back. So, at a minimum, if you expect these folks to be your customers, your employees, and your citizens…then you need to apply THEIR expectations to the next generation of enterprise IT systems.”85
Moore specifically analyzes content management and business intelligence applications and points out that the focus must be “on empowering the middle of the enterprise to communicate and collaborate across business boundaries, global time zones, and language and cultural barriers, using next-generation IT applications and infrastructure adapted from the consumer space.”
Moore is certainly right about the needed changes. But, he takes a long-term view of the transformation. Today, the requirement for marketing to adapt immediately means that this new technology adoption model must be adjusted quickly for the new and evolving realities.
THE NEW EXPERIENCES TECHNOLOGY STACK: A BACKBONE WITH ROOM TO FLEX
A new model to facilitate a seventh era of marketing—one that will empower marketers to create powerful digital content experiences—is starting to emerge from a few forward-looking technology vendors. This new model accommodates the need of large enterprises to scale and provide consistent experiences across a large employee base that adapts to the conversational, flexible, and chaotic nature of today’s marketing organization.
One vendor offering a suite of products can deliver this model or multiple vendors’ products can be integrated seamlessly. The key is that this marketing technology stack approach can be optimized for today’s content marketing and engagement processes.
The stack is comprised of three discrete layers that, at the lower end, are made up of systems of record and become systems of engagement as they move closer to the customer on the front end. In every case, they must be flexible and interchangeable.
This is not a physical architecture of a specific technology solution, but rather a model that marketers can use to begi
n developing their business requirements for the technology solutions they require.
The layers are:
• Core data management. This is the lowest layer—the foundation and storage of customer, content, and transactional data; it serves the global enterprise. It is supported by large databases and closely adheres to standards so that data can be easily extracted and used. Whether cloud-based or closely held within the organization, it should enable information as a service.
• Engagement management. This middle layer of technology should be able to interface with anything above and below it. It provides the interface into, and out of, the core data management layer and provides optimization based on business rules that can be applied to display content contextually.
• Content channel and experience management. This top layer should be as flexible, portable, and/or disposable as any media strategy used to be. Content channels such as YouTube, Facebook, or blogs are the marketer’s new “media buy.” They are important only so long as they are useful. This layer will be constantly changing and morphing, so it should aim for zero-friction in order to add or dispose of elements easily.