translating customer engagement from strategy to action

… from strategy to action

By Marcus R. TewksburyAnalystTheMarketingMojo.com

Marcus R. Tewksbury 2Translating Customer Engagement : : from Strategy to Action

… cycle, goals, stages, and revenue 3

… initiate a conversation 8

… solve a problem 9

… marketing through delivery 10

… enliven engagement in your daily exchanges 13

… extend the relationship 11

… drive incremental improvement through consistent measurement 19

… 3 keys to successfully engaging your customers 21

22… who is Marcus Tewksbury?

… from strategy to action

Marcus R. Tewksbury 3

… is driven by the changing form and manner of communication

For the last couple of years pundits and thought leaders have been trumpeting the demise of traditional marketing techniques. It’s been pretty universal, spanning numerous verticals that prospects and customers are no longer as receptive to broadcast messaging…

… and while most everyone agrees at a strategic level and can offer metaphors and platitudes as to what to do about it, very few have offered actionable direction.

Enter Customer Engagement Marketing (CEM). CEM offers marketers and integrated approach for employing strategic, engagement best practices and translating those into specific executable and measurable campaigns and activities.

…Friedman

Today we need to make more material, make it more quickly and in more rapidly changing formats. We need to distribute it in more channels, measure infinitely greater and more timely data streams, negotiate with more partners for different kinds of inventory, and support all that with an ever growing arsenal of technology and talent. A failure in any part of the ecosystem will crash the entire process …Gotlieb

"Today, the customer is in charge, and whoever is best at putting the customer in charge makes all the money." And: "Allow consumers to help you shape the brand experience. . . . Content is no longer something you push out. Content is an invitation to engage."

… Belmont

In order to better understand consumer behavior, researchers must look at both digital and non-digital social networks. Agencies must continue to innovate track a single consumer's behavior across channels or a holistic solution that displays all marketing in one place, along with actionable insights.

…Godin…Talbot

Many of the clients that I'm talking right now to are struggling with the realization that marketing is now a dialogue.

Translating Customer Engagement : : from Strategy to Action

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/


… establish a framework of understanding and a platform for dialog

Ch

urn

Co

mp

etition

Discovery

Education

Evaluation

Purchase

Maintenance

Verification

Extension

While many have advanced definitions of a customer lifecycle, from highly regarded pundits like Jim Sterne to lesser known's like Claudia Imhoff (to whom I owe a a tip of the cap), at the core they need to convey two fundamental points:

1. The customer, or lead needs to be central to everything you do. Value most be constantly framed in terms and dialogs relative to the customer.

2. All customers will mature (hopefully!) through a number of stages during their engagement. And messages appropriate at one stage may not be for another.



… there are no short cuts to systematically growing relationships

Ch

urn

Co

mp

etition

Discovery

Education

Evaluation

Purchase

Maintenance

Verification

Extension

A well articulated engagement strategy will address moving customers clockwise around the cycle…

… where a traditional one will frequently seek to convert with every interaction regardless of stage



… develop strategies that mature relationships through their life stages

Ch

urn

Co

mp

etition

Discovery

Education

Evaluation

Purchase

Maintenance

Verification

Extension

AwarenessRetention

Performance Acquisition

Operationalize this process by breaking the cycle into distinct quadrants where by each quadrant is symbolic of a higher order marketing program. The intent is to break the relationship down into its component parts that enable focus on actionable goals as opposed to dependent down stream outcomes – like revenue or sales meetings.



… engagement is directly correlated to revenue performance

Time

Awareness

Awareness

Acquisition

Acquisition

Performance

Performance

Retention

Retention

N N + 1 ….

Each program plays a fundamental role in generating revenue and its thus possible to attribute revenue to all levels of the funnel.

Overtime as retention (and the customer pool) grows so does the cross, up, and renewal revenues. Retention over time is key for compounding returns.



… attract attention, make a connection, and initiate dialog

Awareness

Awareness

Acquisition

Acquisition

Performance

Performance

Retention

Retention

The main goal of the Awareness phase is to leverage both brand and interactive advertising to initiate a dialog with a customer.

… and a few general rules of thumb:

• Branding is critical. As you seek to engage with someone it is critical they understand with whom they are speaking.

• Conversation starters. While building Awareness It can’t be iterated enough how key it is to be speaking in terms relative to the customer. The goal is simply to get them listening.

• Set content free. Your customers are going to spend a majority of their time at properties you don’t own. You can either pay (advertising) to reach them, or find ways to engage with the community by becoming a contributing member.

Sample Activities:


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nike-Logo-Orange.svg


… put out the fires while differentiating your offering

Awareness

Awareness

Acquisition

Acquisition

Performance

Performance

Retention

Retention

Sample Activities:

Once you’ve begun a dialog, you then need to accomplish two things with your Acquisition program:

1. Offer Solutions. If you’d correctly identified points of pain, customers are going to be very interested in how you propose to solve them. Provide detailed explanations, but remember the goal is to sell, not educate. Of course, also make sure to document your offering’s role in the solution.

2. Differentiate. At some point during Acquisition the informed customer is going to become knowledgeable about the competition.


http://blogs.forrester.com/customer_experience/

http://www.gartner.com/silentlocalechooser.jsp?locale=wcw


… empower customers to be internal champions

Awareness

Awareness

Acquisition

Acquisition

Performance

Performance

Retention

Retention

Sample Activities:

The role of marketing does not end with the sale. One of the best ways to promote growth over time is to retain and expand the customer base. One way to accomplish this is to ensure your customers aren’t just satisfied with their purchase, but that they are raving, passionate fans.

Some contemporary business strategies,namely Net Promoter Score (NPS), evensuggest you can run your entire business on asingle metric driven from within a Performanceprogram.



… extend the value proposition while identifying new pains

Awareness

Awareness

Acquisition

Acquisition

Performance

Performance

Retention

Retention

Sample Activities:

Retention programs are all about finding ways to extend the relationship. Not just to makes additional touches, but to find ways to continue adding value with small, incremental messages. The goal is to do just enough to be front of mind when the customer is ready to begin engaging with their next burning issue.



… by redefining your traditional marketing processes

Audience

DecisionPoints

Activity

End State

End State

ActivityActivityActivity

DecisionPoints

ActivityActivity

Ch

urn

Co

mp

etition

Discovery

Education

Evaluation

Purchase

Maintenance

Verification

Extension

AwarenessRetention


Awareness

Acquisition

Performance

Retention

The culmination of laying out your engagement cycle and funnel is a customer focused understanding that will enable you to build effective nurturing campaigns.

Nurturing campaigns are the working end of engagement marketing.



… simple steps for creating and optimizing your new campaigns

Audience

DecisionPoints

Activity

End State

End State


DecisionPoints

ActivityActivity

4 Steps to Nurturing Campaigns

1. Chose an Audience

2. Select a Theme

3. Visualize Outcomes

4. Layout Plan

It can’t be iterated enough that you shouldn’t dive straight into the campaigns themselves. Engagement marketing represents a philosophical change in approach and laying out effective nurturing campaigns is tied to the precursor strategic vision.



… with whom you’d like to speak

Audience

DecisionPoints

Activity

End State

End State


DecisionPoints

ActivityActivity

Identifying and selecting the right audience is critical to the success of any campaign. In so doing there are three primary things to keep in mind:

1. Strategic Fit. You need to understand the needs of specific vertical and horizontal groups and the depth of industry experience to know where your products are a good fit.

2. Robust Data. At the very core of customer understanding is a complete, multi-channel data set. You can’t possibly understand your customers if you don’t know them.

3. Analytic Tools. One of the biggest problems today is breaking down all the available data into actionable insights. Strong tools are the key to making the data useful.



… to use as a theme throughout the campaign

Audience

DecisionPoints

Activity

End State

End State


DecisionPoints

ActivityActivity

The opening activity of the campaign is pivotal for establishing the central theme. It all needs to be broad enough to capture interest while routing customers to their optimal end state.

Two possible ways to achieve this are to focus on a horizontal group…

Or a vertical one.

Activity



… know where the campaign can take the relationship

DecisionPoints

Activity

End State

End State


DecisionPoints

ActivityActivity

Given your audience, theme, and program life stage map out as many possible outcomes from the engagement as you can. Question your assumptions and work through different scenarios. What you want to do is understand a behavior before it happens. In the end, some responses will be positive, some negative, and others neutral. Regardless, they should all give you valuable insight to the customer.

Audience



… with a sequence of steps aimed at a specific end state

Activity

End State

ActivityActivity

Activity

The key to laying out any campaign, nurturing or otherwise, is to be flexible and open minded. However, you need to do so in a very specific, scientific manner.

At each step in your campaign flow you need to be able to measure how each activity is performing. The goal is always to add relative value to the customer with each step and if a specific activity is underperforming it needs to be swapped out. In this way, the campaign should be very organic.

Audience

DecisionPoints

End State

Activity

DecisionPoints

Activity

Measure all of your activities. Deliverability,Opens, Clicks, etc. All of the cross channelinteractions then need to be mapped back to thecustomer. There is a difference betweenknowledge and understanding.



… delivering many of the same messages, just taking a different path

Email

Webinars

Events

AdsSearch

Website

SFA

…

Same

How: The channels of execution, and the tools used to activate a message will remain largely unchanged.

Change

Who: At the core your target audience will most likely stay the same, but you will begin grouping them in new ways.

What: Data driven content can optimize message delivery as well as spur the development of a new wave of customer centric content.

When: Sequencing of messages represents the most dramatic changes. No message is delivered in isolation and delivered value can hinge on timing.



… objectives should be actionable and specific to stage

Awareness

Acquisition

Performance

Retention Actives, cross-sell penetration, referrals, etc.

Meetings, deals, duration, cost per X, revenue, etc.

Surveys, benchmarks, NPS, ROI, deployment days, etc.

Buzz, impressions, opens, clicks, link backs, referrals, digg, tweets, registrations, etc.



… what marketing can learn from operations

Audience

Decis ion

Points

Activity

End State

End State


Decis ion

Points

ActivityActivity

Ch

urn

Co

mp

etition

Discovery

Education

Evaluation

Purchase

Maintenance

Verification

Extension

AwarenessRetention


Awareness

Acquisition

Performance

Retention

Another import aspect of the frameworks is that they provide a stable basis for measuring and evaluating the performance of your activities. A key element to engagement marketing is the ability to measure the impact of virtually everything you do and the ability to make multiple micro adjustments to messages, sequence, and cadence.

Successful engagement marketing is driven by the ability to continually improve.



… will accelerate your demand generation and optimize your return on marketing investment (ROMI)

Customer Engagement Marketing represents an evolution of traditional marketing processes engendered by the ascent of bi-directional digital channels and the greater depth and breadth of addressable customer data. Where traditional campaigns have failed to deliver meaningful exchanges, engagement marketing supports two-way dyadic communication flow needed to cultivate meaningful relationships.

At the times the strategy can certainly sound like mumbo-jumbo, but when you start breaking it down you can make significant impact on the performance of your marketing dollar by:

1. Customer Engagement Cycle. You have to start thinking in terms of the target audience. What is relevant and valuable to your audience and how can you advance them through their needs stages? These questions should guide you in crafting every message and laying out your campaigns.

2. Measurement Framework. To improve something you need to be able to measure it. This is critical to building engagement as you constantly need to be evaluating your actions at the message, campaign, and program level.

3. Nurturing Campaigns. Enliven the strategy with sequenced messages. Employ scientific rigor to an organic, creative process to guide rapid, micro adjustments to your overall course.



… who is Marcus Tewksbury?

He is a respected author, speaker, and thought leader on optimizing marketing organizations to most efficiently, and effectively create value added experiences for high worth customers; a process that he has termed Customer Relationship Marketing, or CRM(arketing).

This approach to CRM, is not new, but rather a throwback to its roots when it was about strategically structuring the marketing organization to maximize the likelihood of a positive customer experience and analyzing their life cycle to determine the lowest friction, and highest return activities as opposed to the call centers and data aggregation, research efforts it is now commonly associated with.

Largely, the credit for his thoughts and approaches are owed to the numerous clients whose problems Marcus has helped solve over the years. Some of whom, include: Coach, Baxter Healthcare, JP Morgan, Hot Topic, Hallmark, Walgreens, Wal-Mart, Tower Records, and KAO Campgrounds.

Tewk’s highly referenced, and often visited blog, serves the dual purpose of providing a comprehensive, unbiased listing of firms and services relevant to the marketing organization, and also as a forum for interacting with senior marketers about game changing strategic innovations. You can visit the blog at www.themarketingmojo.com.

Over the years, a number of Marcus’ thought leadership pieces have been cited or presented in mainstream or industry events and articles, specifically with the likes of DWI Review, NCDM, CRM World, DMA Monthly, and The Economist. Marcus has also lectured at the Purdue’s Krannert Graduate School of Management, Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business, and at Loyola University.

With roots in the DC and Boston areas, he currently resides with his wife in Chicago, IL.


http://www.themarketingmojo.com/

translating customer engagement from strategy to action

Business

customer lifecycle

aawareness customer

marcus tewksbury

customer performance

action marcus

engagement best practices

action cycle

revenue performance