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Susan Gunelius

Susan Gunelius

Only 1 in 7 Companies are Highly Customer Centric

customersNew research from the Chief Marketing Council (CMO) and SAP reveals that most marketing executives agree on three specific things.

First, nearly 3 out of 4 of them (73%) agree that customer centricity is critical to success for the business and for their own roles.

Second, nearly 9 out of 10 of them (86%) agree that customer centricity is not high for their businesses.

Third, nine out of 10 marketers agree that their customers would not say their businesses are customer centric.

This is bad news and reveals a significant gap in business strategy.

In its Mastering Adaptive Customer Engagements report the CMO Council found that the gap exists due to three core challenges as revealed by the quantitative insights collected from over 300 senior marketing executives and from qualitative interviews with 20 marketers from leading brands like MasterCard, Sony Electronics, SunTrust Bank, Thomson Reuters, Nine West Group, Sears Holdings, Western Union, Apartments.com, and more. Those challenges are:

  • People = 22%
  • Processes = 22%
  • Platforms = 5%

More importantly, 52% of marketers said that their biggest challenge to customer centricity is a combination of all three factors—people, processes, and platforms. Considering that people develop the processes and choose the platforms being used, all roads lead back to people. In other words, employees—including leaders—bear much of the responsibility for keeping companies from being customer centric despite the fact that the majority of leaders believe it’s critical for businesses to be customer centric.

Customer centricity and brand stratetgy go hand-in-hand. Why should consumers believe your brand promise if brand experiences aren’t centered on their wants and needs? In its report, the CMO Council identifies five gaps that marketers are looking to close in order to become more customer centric:

  • Establish a customer-centric company culture
  • Align cross-functional teams to work together
  • Establish processes to track customer experiences
  • Prioritize customer experience strategy
  • Hire the right talent to execute

These are all important steps, but one very important thing is missing—accountability. Creating cultures, aligning teams, tracking process performance, and hiring the right talent will fall flat if every employee—from the top down—isn’t held accountable for living the customer-centric culture and brand promise in every decision that they make on a daily basis. Employees have to be empowered to make decisions that support the company culture of customer centricity at the lowest possible level. In other words, they have to be given the opportunity to walk the walk, not just talk the talk.

The full report is available for purchase from the CMO Council. Below is an infographic with highlights from the study.

Mastering-Adaptive-Customer-Engagements_Infographic_600

 Image: Svilen Milev

Leveraging Company Culture for Brand Storytelling

brand storytellingHow do you come up with ideas for brand storytelling? Buyer personas can become characters and consumer problems can become story conflicts, but brand stories should cover external and internal stories. To effectively communicate your brand promise through brand storytelling, you need to tell the whole story.

This is where your company culture can become a source of many brand story ideas. A powerful company culture that executives truly live and which trickles down through all levels of the organization can become a story unto itself. Just look at Zappos to see how a company culture can become the brand story.

Company culture must support the brand promise and it must permeate into every consumer experience with the brand. If your company culture runs counter to your brand promise, then consumers will be confused and turn away from your brand.

With that in mind, company culture isn’t just a Human Resources function. It’s every department’s and every employee’s responsibility. If your organization effectively communicates its culture to employees, holds leaders and employees accountable for living the brand promise, and empowers employees to make decisions on a daily basis in support of that culture, then employee and company performance should improve. This improvement positively affects your brand and how consumers perceive it.

Think about your company culture. Does it support your brand promise? If so, consumers want to hear about it. They want to know that the brand they’re loyal to is backed by a company they can trust from end to end. Therefore, company culture should be included in your brand storytelling. It re-affirms what consumers perceive of your brand and deepens their emotional connection to the brand and thus, deepens their loyalty and advocacy of the brand.

Bottom-line, company culture can be a powerful marketing device if it truly supports your brand promise and the company actually prioritizes it. If your company does, then start leveraging that company culture for brand storytelling as soon as possible. If your company doesn’t, then talk to leadership about reinventing your company culture to improve results, boost employee morale, jumpstart marketing, and spark brand storytelling.

Remember, consumers want to understand the entire brand story. It’s up to you to find those stories and company culture is one of the most important.

Image: stockers9

British Consumers Have Little Tolerance for Technical Problems

online bankingNearly three out of four British consumers avoid companies that regularly have technical problems. That data comes from research by Delphix, a data virtualization company. In fact, ongoing technical problems will motivate 42% of British consumers to switch their business to a different company and another 40% will consider moving their business to another company.

Not only do British consumers have little tolerance for technical problems, they also have high expectations for the type of technology that companies provide in consumer transactions and interactions. Nearly three out of four British consumers expect companies to use the latest technology in customer interactions.

This expectation is particularly high among banking customers. Nearly four out of five British consumers expect banks to use the latest technology in customer interactions. Furthermore, one in four banking customers believe that online banking or payment processes should never have a technical problem. That doesn’t mean the other three out of four banking customers will accept technical problems. The other three in four banking customers will only accept a technical problem once per 10 month period.

Outdated technology also motivates British consumers to move their business to a different company. The Delphix survey found that 49% of British consumers will switch their business to a different company if technical updates are not made in a timely manner.

User Experience as a Strategic Imperative

Bottom-line, user experience in all digital interactions must be a top priority, because a negative user experience has a direct effect on sales and profits. Nearly one in two consumers will switch from your company to a competitor if they experience technical problems when trying to complete a transaction or another activity. There is no room for failure. Not only do you need to ensure there are no problems, but you also need to use the most current technology possible. The research data shows that outdated technology delivers a user experience which doesn’t meet consumer expectations. As a result, your brand image suffers, and ultimately, you lose sales and profits.

With the increase in mobile shopping and brand communications—where consumers are quick to update to the latest devices with all of the latest capabilities—it’s even more important to keep up with evolving technology. Consumers know what capabilities are available, and they expect your brand to offer them in all consumer touch points.

Of course, the danger is adding all of the technical bells and whistles possible, which ends up negatively affecting the user experience. Visit the Disney website and try to book a dinner reservation or reserve passes for attractions and you’ll see what I mean. It looks nice but the site is extremely frustrating to consumers when you actually want to do something. With that in mind, be very careful to exercise restraint. The best user experience doesn’t need to have every bell and whistle available. Simple design can be far more effective in terms of meeting consumer expectations based on their transactional needs.

How do you prioritize user experience so your customers maintain a positive perception of your brand and remain loyal? Leave a comment and share your thoughts on the prioritization of user experience in 2014.

Image: Kip Curry

IAB Releases 3 Principles to Stop Online Ad Fraud

mouse click online advertising click fraudOnline ad fraud has been a big problem for brand advertisers for years, and now, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) has taken new steps to curb it.

Back in December of 2013, the IAB Traffic of Good Intent Task Force released a set of best practices to reduce exposure to online ad traffic fraud, and now, the IAB is expanding those efforts. This week, the IAB announced that the IAB Traffic of Good Intent Task Force has become the Anti-Fraud Working Group and will focus on eliminating fraud across the advertising industry.

As it’s first step, the Anti-Fraud Working Group released three principles that should be used to identify and eliminate fraudulent traffic (and the inventory it creates). In a press release, the IAB described these Anti-Fraud Principles as, “a series of three tenets meant to root poor-quality ad traffic out of the system once and for all.” The IAB explains that the Anti-Fraud Principles are just one step in the IAB Trustworthy Supply Chain Initiatives that will address challenges facing digital marketing today.

The three Anti-Fraud Principles focus on detection, identification, and transparency:

Principle 1: Fraud Detection

The IAB states that suppliers should be required to implement technological and business practices that identify ad bots and illegitimate human activity. Furthermore, suppliers must prevent that traffic from being sold to advertisers.

Principle 2: Source Identification

The IAB states that suppliers should provide assurances to buyers that the inventory they pay for is from legitimate sources. To do this, the IAB recommends providing the specific URL of each ad placement to the advertiser.

Principle 3: Process Transparency

The IAB states that suppliers should provide details of the business and technical processes they use to adhere to the first two principles.

The IAB has also created a taxonomy that provides definitions of key terms used in online advertising transactions, so advertisers and suppliers are using the same terms and understand the same things about anti-fraud. The IAB believes that by working together, advertisers and suppliers can eliminate online ad fraud throughout the digital supply chain.

Let’s face it, marketers need online ad fraud to go away or they’re wasting valuable budget dollars. The Anti-Fraud Principles are a step in the right direction, but as the Anti-Fraud Working Group knows, there is more work to be done. Let’s keep the conversation going so eliminating ad fraud remains a top priority.

Image: Karen Andrews

Tumblr Referrals Produce Highest Mobile Revenue Per Visit for Brands

tumblrTumblr referrals just got bumped up higher on many brands’ priority lists. The 2014 U.S. Mobile Benchmark Report from Adobe Digital Index was released this month, and Tumblr referrals were found to drive the highest revenue per visit (RPV) from mobile devices.

Driving $2.57 per visit generated to a retail site on tablets and $0.67 on smartphones, Tumblr outpaced Facebook which only drove $1.55 on tablet devices and $0.42 on smartphones. Both Twitter and Pinterest generated less than half the revenue per visit from smartphones as Facebook. However, Twitter outpaced Pinterest on revenue per visit from tablets coming in at just over $1.00 per visit while Pinterest came in at just under $1.00 per visit.

The story on PCs is a bit different. Revenue generated per visit from PCs was highest for Facebook followed by Pinterest, Twitter, and Tumblr, respectively.

Given the revenue per visit data, it’s important to determine where social networks’ referred traffic comes from. For Pinterest, 64% of referred traffic comes from mobile browsers. For Twitter, 62% of referrals come from tablets and smartphones.

Another interesting finding for brands from the Adobe report relates to content sharing. Today, personalized content sharing through email and text messaging is more than twice as popular than group sharing via social media (70% to 30%). The breakdown from the report shows how significantly things have changed between 2013 and 2014:

  • iMessage sharing is up 259% over 2013
  • Pinterest sharing is up 131% over 2013
  • Email sharing is up 5.2% over 2013
  • Facebook sharing is down 42.6% from 2013
  • URL link sharing is down 26.8% from 2013
  • Twitter sharing is down 22.6% from 2013

For brands, it’s particularly interesting to note the change in Facebook sharing. Given recent changes to Facebook’s algorithm that makes it very difficult for content published on Facebook Pages to appear organically in Facebook fans’ feeds, the drop in user sharing adds one more log to the fire that is causing brands to pull back on their Facebook focus. On the other hand, Pinterest sharing is soaring and Tumblr revenue per visit is higher. Bottom-line, Facebook might be the biggest, but it’s not necessarily the best when it comes to connecting your brand with consumer audiences, particularly mobile audiences.

Have you shifted money or time away from Facebook yet to focus on more niche marketing opportunities? Have you considered doing so? Leave a comment and share your thoughts.

You can follow the link at the beginning of this article to access the complete report with all of the details from Adobe.

Image: Josh James licensed CC BY 2.0

State of Inbound Marketing for Corporations in 2014

state of inbound 2014 hubspotThe fifth annual State of Inbound report was been released by HubSpot, and again, thousands of marketers from around the world report that inbound marketing is very effective for their companies. In fact, companies are increasing investments in inbound and they’re experiencing positive ROI from those initiatives.

Marketers report that in 2014, blogging has the most significant impact on performance. Respondents who have prioritized blogging are 13-times more likely to achieve positive ROI than marketers who have not prioritized it. Behind blogging, the top inbound marketing projects are SEO/organic search, content distribution/amplification, long-form/visual content creation, webinars, interactive content creation, online tools, product how-to videos, and premium trials.

Overall, inbound tactics have increased with 85% of marketers using inbound in 2014 while only 60% used it in 2013. In total, half of the marketers who responded to HubSpot’s survey in B2B, B2C, and nonprofit sectors ranked inbound as their number one lead source. However, inbound success does not come without overcoming some challenges. Marketers identified the following top marketing challenges in 2014:

  1. Proving the ROI of marketing activities
  2. Securing enough budget
  3. Managing websites
  4. Targeting content for an international audience
  5. Hiring top talent
  6. Training the team
  7. Finding an executive sponsor

Interestingly, six of the above challenges could be linked directly to manpower resources:

  1. Proving the ROI of marketing activities requires someone with the knowledge and ability to collect the right data, crunch the numbers, and interpret them correctly.
  2. Securing enough budget requires having money to pay the team that will create, publish, design, and share the content.
  3. Managing websites requires having people on hand who can make the necessary edits to keep the content flowing.
  4. Targeting content for an international audience requires team members who understand international markets and can manage the translation and publishing process on a daily basis.
  5. Hiring top talent represents a direct investment in manpower resources.
  6. Training the team requires investing in ensuring your team has the right knowledge and skills to maximize the ROI of your marketing efforts.

Bottom-line, a successful inbound marketing strategy requires budget, but to overcome inbound challenges, a significant amount of budget must be invested in the right manpower to support and execute the strategy.

For large companies with more than 1,000 employees, the top marketing priorities in 2014 are increasing the number of contacts/leads and converting those contacts/leads into customers. Not far behind on the priority list are proving the ROI of marketing activities, reaching relevant audiences, and increasing revenue derived from existing customers. Farther down on the priority list is reducing the cost of contacts/leads/customer acquisition.

It’s interesting to see that large companies are very focused on increasing leads and turning leads into customers but they’re less concerned with proving the ROI of the marketing tactics they use to get those leads or reducing the costs to get those leads ($27/inbound lead and $45/outbound lead for companies with more than 1,000 employees). According to the survey respondents (from both large and small companies), only 53% are measuring ROI. The report authors explain:

Marketers that measure inbound ROI are 17 times more likely to see the same or greater ROI over the previous year. It’s likely that selection bias is impacting the data. After all, higher performing marketers are more likely to measure results, thus they are more likely to drive growth. Nevertheless, there’s a strong correlation between simply measuring ROI and achieving it. Marketers that are not currently measuring ROI should begin immediately.

You can follow the link at the beginning of the article to download the complete 54-page report and 42 charts from HubSpot (contact information required for download).

Image: HubSpot