The original plan for this talk was to review all the potential parts of the marketing stack, as well as a sampling of vendors for each. But since that would've been a *really* boring talk to sit through, I did some of that here, but I gave it a twist.
The New Marketing Stack: Necessary tools from content marketing to marketing automation
1. @TwitterHandle • #intelcontent
The new marketing stack
Necessary tools, from content marketing to marketing automation.
Scott Liewehr
CEO, Digital Clarity Group
@sliewehr
@sliewehr • #intelcontent
13. Of companies with “CX” initiatives:
2.3% have improved
69.2% remain the same
28.5% have gotten WORSE
Source: Forrester’s CX Index of 299 brands between Q1 and Q3 2015
55. Get your processes in line
(don’t overwhelm)
Get your tools in line
(don’t over-automate)
Get your organization in line
(so that you don’t over-market) So…
What you may already know… with a bit of extra insight
What you probably haven’t thought of… but could if you were obsessed like me
More than 2000 technology options out there (actually, more than 2000 CMSs alone), so lots to choose from
Will take you through the different options – what to automate, what not to, and more
For once, I won’t show the martech lumascape
New technologies, new features, new expectations, new responsibilities, new metrics, new demands…
While digital has opened up a ton of opportunities for marketers, the increasing amount of noise and activity online makes it really tough to be heard and seen. For a business, this means two things:
Every lead is precious and worth fighting for
The marketing effort required today is several times higher than it was 10 years ago
Some like to say we’re in the Age of the Customer. No we’re not! I don’t think we should name an Era after what we’re striving for, but rather after what we’ve achieved.
We’ve done everything we can do to be less personal: big box retailers, the internet, IVR, digital, automated-everything… Heads are buried in phones and gadgets
Sure, we’ve made strides in some areas, but please don’t tell me that buying an airline ticket online is more customer centric than your travel agent booking it for you. Convenient? Maybe. More personal? No way.
Oftentimes it’s more about minimizing poor experiences than it is about making decent experiences incrementally better.
So, we focus on the customer…
Is it working?
“Automation” means employing machine labor and intelligence to perform a process or produce a product.
It also means that the process involved is repetitive and structured. For now, even the smartest machines have to be programmed in advance.
Advance programming means that the need for a process has to be predicted, and that means that changing the process is difficult and time-consuming.
The implication is that automation is good for businesses where there isn’t much change. In other words, we’re talking about business in the 1950s or thereabouts.
With disruption abound, this is treacherous territory
Listening – about your brand, about memes and hot topics (for ideas to write about), etc.
Listening refers to the process of searching and monitoring public conversations and shared content for mentions of brands, products, services, questions, or other keywords with the intention of identifying and understanding trends. Some software has automatic sentiment tracking, which is the ability to compare two organizations against one another to determine the relative “share of voice”. They also may provide trend analysis to show emerging and popular conversations. Listening can also be done manually by examining the news feeds of various sites or individuals to uncover valuable intelligence based on what they share. – Hootsuite, Social Mention, Icerocket (blogs), Topsy, etc.
(As a consumer, not a fan) Promotion and Advertising are two interrelated activities that cover the use of any paid method used to generate awareness about a product, service, website or marketplace. Promotion can involve offline activities such as business cards or posters, or online activities such as display advertisements, social media promoted posts or PPC. – Advertising platform,
However, retargeting, that’s a no-no – would you follow someone around a store and show up everywhere they are only to jump out at the checkout counter?
Publishing / content marketing – only automate curation on social - Content marketing is the use of media, such as written text, pictures, videos, slideshows and more, to earn attention and traffic with the intent to position a company or individual as knowledgeable and trusted, and to generate new prospects and customers. Content marketing is most successful when focused on providing valuable information to the target audience. Content can either be created or curated (collected and organized from around the web).
Engaging – don’t even think about it - Engagement is the process of directly connecting with another individual, and using a mixture of listening, content marketing and conversation skills to build trust and loyalty by solving problems and providing value
Measuring - Measurement and analytics should be applied to all of the other four components of social media in order to understand and improve the effectiveness of each activity.
CRM is a no-brainer. Automatic capture from lead forms, and most integrate with many of the other systems so you get a full view of the customer’s interests.
Getting the data in order is just the beginning. Using this data to drive conversions is the big battle. This starts with mapping your sales cycle, identifying the various touch-points and opportunities for follow–ups, and then automating the follow-ups themselves or the reminders for the personal ones (depending on the kind of business you run).
Yes, we have the tools to automate this, but when was the last time you couldn’t figure out an automated email? Was there ever a time that, if you knew it was an automated email, that you went ahead and read it? Unless it was a brand you loooooved, that’s doubtful.
Aside from the authoring process, which you should not automate,
Content Curation
Curata, google alerts, feedly, storify, buzzsumo, list.ly
Project Management
Traditional like Basecamp, Asana, Teamwork and Trello
Content planning like Kapost and DivvyHQ
NLP has made huge gains in recent years
Narrative content generation, e.g. Wordsmith by Automated Insights.
Data-driven writing platforms
Aside from the authoring process, which you should not automate,
Davies proposed that revolutions don’t happen because life is intolerable for people, which was basically Marx’s theory. He points out correctly that there are countries all over the world and all through history where life was and is terrible, but people don’t revolt. Keep in mind that of the 7 billion people on earth right now, about 5 and a half billion of them live on less than $5 a day, and about 3 billion of them live on less than $2 a day. Over a billion of them don’t even have access to sanitation or safe drinking water. But they’re not revolting. Why is that?
Davies proposed that it’s not life being terrible that provokes revolutions. Instead, it’s all about the gap between what people expect life to be like and what it’s actually like. When that gap is small - people live in squalor, but just figure that’s the hand life has dealt them - then you don’t have revolution. But when that gap is large, when people expect that life is going to get a lot better very quickly and it doesn’t, then they revolt.
So you’re raising the bar on expectation
How many of your companies would be able to deliver on your heightened expectations