Content Marketing Mindshift

May 20, 2013 – 1:19 pm
Patti RennerContent is the latest shiny object for marketers to embrace. Providing your customers with utility or entertaining content can help establish a more visible place for you in the hearts and minds of your audience. And because people are so perpetually connected across multiple devices and platforms, it can be tricky to push messaging out to them, hitting the target at the precise moment. Having a unified data platform makes this much easier; however, it’s even better when the customers come to you – when you give them what they need to enhance their day-to-day experiences.
Enhancing their daily experiences is the key concept with content marketing. Helping them save time, stress, money, etc. should be at the heart of your customer-centric approach when considering the best information to offer.

Industry analysts predict the trend toward utility content is a strong one, and technological advances will both support and speed its adoption. According to Online Media Daily, Google execs and agencies are already on the soapbox about what I call this Content Marketing Mindshift.

To quote the article:

“A click turns into a conversation and every page becomes a form of search, Goodman said. “You may not perceive yourself as performing a search, but rather navigating through content during your everyday life,” he said. “Marketers need to think more about the assets they can leverage to make use of content.”

Three steps to help begin this shift:

  1. Look at your customer personas. Who are the people who matter most? What do they need that could be useful to them – perhaps not even in perfect alignment with your product… but more aligned with your overall brand mission. Whatever you try to do for your customers, extend that into your utility content, even if it doesn’t directly point back to a specific product.

  2. Look at your existing data. Check with your customer service inquiries to identify areas of need. Explore any falling-off points and reinforce them with your content to help fortify the path to conversion.

  3. Start with what you’ve got. You probably already got information and resources that can be repurposed into utility content. If you have a blog, look at taking the most popular posts and converting them into a short video. If you have a training guide or user guide, consider reworking each section into a brief user video or recorded webinar.

  4. Go to the end to establish the best place to start. If your product solves a problem or causes something to happen, riff off of that and extend into additional ideas to help. (For instance, Johnson & Johnson has a sleeping baby app complete with parenting tips on baby relaxation, lullabies and bedtime rituals – after their warm bath using Johnson & Johnson Baby Wash.)
By Patti Renner | Posted in marketing | Tags: | Leave a Comment

Email Essentials over Breakfast

May 15, 2013 – 12:00 pm

Ah, email. With all the articles being written about the mobility of consumers, the death of third party cookies and other tech news, it seems like the good old standby email has been overlooked recently.

Even though consumer behavior and technology are evolving at a rapid pace, email remains a preferred way to communicate with your audience. It’s the anchor of customer connections. Even social media channels use it to maintain activity and to invite people back. (“Look who’s following you on Twitter.” “See what your friends are up to…” and so on.) As elementary as email may appear to be, get it wrong and you risk annoying the recipient, losing business, and worse.

At a recent Knotice breakfast, we asked the Knotice team what mistakes marketers seem to be making when it comes to email campaigns. Here’s what they had to say:

“Big mistakes I see include: sending too many emails per week; not having a global unsubscribe; and addressing me as ‘Dear Customer’ when you know my name. Remember, if I sign up for your newsletter, then please send it on a regular basis. I want to receive that information, and I might forget who you are and why I signed up for it in the first place, marking it as spam.” – Micah

“I think the biggest mistake digital marketers make is assuming constant email sends is indicative of engagement instead of a deeper understanding of behavioral indication of a true conversation with the brand.” – Dutch

And Jason has a gripe that, despite all the laws and best practices out there, still happens. “Programs that don’t allow an unsubscribe or subscription updates,” he explains. “I signed up for a rewards program at a major game retailer. The service requires an email address. According to their FAQ, they have no intention of spamming you, but, again, you cannot unsubscribe from their emails and still be part of the program. I’ll be filtering all their correspondence, regardless of content.”

If you’ve made any of the above goofs, not to worry. Here are some posts that you might find helpful:

Email List Cleaning Gets Dirty
4 Quick Tips Before You Hit Send
Refresher on CAN SPAM Laws

By Knotice | Posted in email marketing | Tags: | Leave a Comment

Do Your Customers Want to Get Personal?

May 13, 2013 – 12:01 pm
Patti RennerResearch shows that consumers prefer to engage with brands on a more personal basis. In the last five years things have gone from retailers casting a wide net when it comes to personalization to being very precise about not only addressing people on a very personal level but also serving them the products, accessories, and upsells that would be most attractive to them. Now, instead of having a conversation with someone over a sales counter in a retail shop, retailers are actually having the same intimate conversation, but doing it across digital channels.
Consumers really do want brand consistency across channels. In their mind, what’s a channel? They don’t care whether you’re talking to them through website, email, direct display advertisement or text message. Consumers expect that each time they engage with a brand that the brand is aware of the last conversation with them (regardless of channel) and likes and preferences that have already been established between you.

A pain point comes when the different customer touchpoints and various active channels don’t connect. Who doesn’t find it very irritating to order something online and the next day be served up a display advertisement featuring that product or receive an email that highlights savings on that product when you’ve already purchased it?

When that happens, it means retailers are not serving their customers in a way that benefits the customer. It makes it appear as if they’re not working in the best interest of the customer. As a retailer, if you mess up the conversation flow across channels because your data is not in a single cohesive environment (and those channels are not talking to each other), it causes consumers to lose some trust in the brand. It also results in a loss of intimacy within the brand-customer relationship.

As Forrester Analyst Joanna O’Connell mentioned in our data management webinar last week, only those companies that are truly customer obsessed will survive.

There are plenty more insights from Joanna in our webinar playback. You can access it here.

By Patti Renner | Posted in Personalization | Tags: | Leave a Comment

Mother’s Day Tech 2013

May 10, 2013 – 12:04 pm
Casey BartoMother’s Day is Sunday. If you’re a late shopper and need a few gift ideas (or just want to add to your own personal wish list), we’ve got you covered. In case you’re looking for tech ideas for your mom, we asked some folks around the office to share their stories along with their recommendations.
Here’s what the Knotice team recommends for Mom this Mother’s Day:

“My mother is a 4’10”, 67-year-old, silver haired woman. When the geek squad tech showed up with her new computer for installation and free hour of training he started off with his basic “I know you’ve never seen one of these before, so here’s how you turn it on” routine. My mother interrupted and asked if the wireless supported 802.11N and WPA encryption, because she had set up her new router to handle those. My mother got an Associates’ in Computer Information Systems at the age of 50.

“I recommend the Android/IOS Operating Systems. My daughter, my wife and I all have Android phones. Between us we have enough electronics and different apps for the two grandkids to allow them to draw, color, and practice numbers and letters while they wait for dinner to arrive at a restaurant. However, my 5-year-old grandson is addicted to Angry Birds, so he often ends up there. I wish we had this when our kids were little.” – Sean Overman, Software Engineer III

“For my mother at least, the best technology for her has been the iPhone camera. She has missed almost two decades of memories due to countless times where her camera has had a low or dead battery, or she didn’t change the film, or her SD card was full. Even this past weekend she performed the same “Low battery” mantra (as if we didn’t already know). Luckily we can remind her about her phone so she can at least capture part of the moment – after missing the initial moment trying to magically increase low battery life by pressing more buttons.” – Matt Cole, Account Executive

“I suggest a Kindle Paperwhite. My mom loves to read and we got her a Kindle a few years ago. She and I share the account so that we can still share books. We were thinking about upgrading her to a Paperwhite as she wouldn’t need a light to read in the dark. She likes it because it is simple to search for books right from the device and download them in seconds. It’s also much better than dragging tons of books around with her when she wants to go somewhere and is small enough to fit in her purse. If your mom already has a kindle or the app, a gift card to Amazon always goes over well. That way she can buy new titles and not have to worry. What’s great about this is no paper is involved. Log on to Amazon, plug in mom’s email address and you are set!

“What I do not suggest is an iPad mini. When I asked my mom if she would like it because she could access the internet, play games, look at the weather and still have her Kindle favorites on it, she promptly asked me if it was some sort of candy. And then asked why she would need that if she already had a kindle and a fancy pants phone. She has a Samsung Galaxy S3 – it has the weather on the home screen so she is a weather genius.” – Lesley Matt, Marketing Manager

“The obvious answer here for me is, of course, the connected mobile device. One accessory that plays many roles – baby sitter, always-available photo documentation device, roadside or medical emergency beacon, social and community bulletin board, ready research assistant, and personal task-busting organizer are just a few. Entire markets have been created to brand this device as their own, and the brands that have catered to moms via mobile are those thriving today.

“That said, sometimes forgotten but hugely important for moms is the capability to time-shift and control access to television entertainment via a set-top box. Long a bastion of “we’re going to hell in a hand basket” rabble-rousers, unfettered time in front of the tube was a common element in many theories of societal downfall. Due to their traditionally defined role as household enforcer and content curator, busy moms doing the best they could in more progressed (but hectic) times were taking a lot of heat. While it still works its way in there, TV and the often-amazing content created for it now have an intercession from technology. A helping hand for Moms everywhere is the ability to now control what is and isn’t recorded, what gets skipped, and what gets paused. With user-level passwords and permissions, it also allows a level of control for who in the household can consume appropriate content.” – Dave Lawson, Director of Mobile and Digital Unification

“My favorite mom tech that I use personally is the “Find My iPhone” app to help me track my teenagers’ whereabouts from my iPad. (Sneaky, yes, but they use it to locate me, also.) But the tech gift I want most is the XBOX IllumiRoom augmented reality projector. That would officially make me the coolest mom ever. Love it.” – Patti Renner, Director of Marketing

Happy Mother’s Day from all of us at Knotice!

By Casey Newman | Posted in Uncategorized | Tags: | Leave a Comment

Webinar Recap: Customer Centric Tips

May 8, 2013 – 1:48 pm
Casey BartoIf you missed yesterday’s webinar “Reaching Today’s Customer Requires a Revamp of Current Data Practices” featuring special guest Joanna O’Connell from Forrester Research, no worries.You can access the full playback from the here.
Here are some highlights from concepts tweeted during the live webinar event (#DataRevamp):
  1. Consumers are savvier than ever before. They use more channels, formats and devices to interact with brands. It doesn’t matter where they are or what device they’re using, they expect a relevant, consistent brand experience across all channels.

  2. These always addressable consumers own and use at least 3 devices. Usually from multiple places and are online multiple times a day. The numbers of always addressable consumers will continue to rise in 2012 42% of consumers were always addressable, up from 38% in 2011.

  3. A big challenge for marketers when it comes to serving the always addressable crowd is making user-level data actionable. In most organizations, data is trapped in several different silos or it’s hard to access due to internal hurdles.

  4. Total customer centricity remains out of reach for many marketers, with the biggest barriers to customer centricity being organizational silos and legacy thinking.

  5. Reaching people using third-party ad serving is increasingly becoming a challenge.

Recommendations:

  1. Don’t be afraid to seek expert help, create a customer journey map, audit/leverage 1st party data assets.

  2. Not every company needs to build its own solution to customer-centric marketing. It’s ok to seek out expert help.

  3. Simply relying on your IT team and existing tools to unite your data will likely not be enough. You’ll need a partner.

  4. Get someone to lead the charge when discussing data/DMP needs within your organization. It can make the process easier.

  5. The companies that will survive and win are the companies that are truly customer-obsessed.

If you’d like to chat about how you can get started on your way to true customer-centricity by unifying your data to better connect with customers, drop us a line. We’re here to help.

By Casey Newman | Posted in Data | Tags: | Leave a Comment

6 Steps to Data Integration

May 6, 2013 – 1:13 pm
Patti RennerYou already know that your audience is savvy – people have all sorts of new tech toys with which they can engage with your brand or company from an array of devices. From PC at work, to laptop at home, to smartphone, to iPad, to Kindle, to Google TV… it’s enough to blow your mind. For marketers, not only is there the issue of reach; there also is the need of consistency and real relevance across touchpoints and channels. Get it right and it’s a moment of wonder and awe, as if your brand universe aligns around the customer (cue choirs of angels singing). But it takes some planning and investment to get there.

To support you in your journey toward cross-channel bliss, here are the steps to get you moving in the right direction when uniting your data around a common goal – happy customers who want more from you.

  1. Start with what you’ve got. Do an audit of what data you have, and where it lives. What are you collecting right now? If people sign in for emails, what fields are included in the form? Do you track purchase history by customer name or ID? Do you ask gender or category preferences? What about web search activity? Call center details? Get a list together so you can see what you have, and what you may be missing that could be helpful to your messaging.
  2. Build a team. Bring together people from across your internal silos, working together to move things forward as you centralize your data. With so many projects and tasks, the best way to keep things on track is with cross-company involvement. Team members should have authority or responsibility over a specific channel or data source so there’s ownership in the decisions being made across the organization, especially as priorities shift toward an integrated data approach. You’ll want both their brains and their buy-in on this.
  3. Map out customer personas. Your data integration has a single purpose – to better serve and engage your customer. This can be difficult to do if you’re not sure who you’re selling to. See how the data you have can support the buyer/customer across their entire customer journey. Consider different situations when people buy from you. Chart out the steps a sample persona prospect may take as they are introduced to your brand or services. Then see what type of data can be collected and leveraged to make each of those experiences terrific.
  4. Investigate the details. Be the Sherlock Holmes of the customer journey, then smooth and improve any rough spots you discover along the way. As you piece together your data, look for trends. Spend time on the stories behind the numbers. Ask yourself “why” things are happening as they are instead of focused on the “how.”
  5. Reduce friction with facts. Use your data to identify real issues. Is there a falling off point along the way? Are your email campaigns doing well, but activity off of purchase confirmation emails is weak? Do people click through to the home page but jump off without browsing deeper into the site? These can indicate a point of friction on the path to conversion.
  6. Work together. Not only do you need to be working together within your organization to establish shared priorities to pull your data together, you also can work with partners specializing in Data Management to both educate and support you along the way. There are resources available to you when you’re ready to put your ideas into action.

    7. Want more? Knotice is hosting a special live webinar event tomorrow at 2PM ET featuring special guest Joanna O’Connell of Forrester Research. Register now, so even if you can’t make it to the webinar, you can still gain access to the playback. It’s an hour well spent to help with your data integration efforts. See you then!
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By Patti Renner | Posted in Data | Tags: | Leave a Comment

Is Big Data a Big Headache?

May 3, 2013 – 11:58 am

New Picture

If data integration is on your roadmap, you’re not alone. Most marketers are struggling with the same issues when it comes to pulling together data from across sources to better understand and reach their customers.
To help you get the most from your data, join us next week for a special live webinar, “Reaching Today’s Customer Requires a Revamp of Current Data Practices,” featuring Forrester Principal Analyst Joanna O’Connell, with Knotice CEO and Co-Founder Brian Deagan, on Tuesday at 2 p.m. EST.

Among other things, Joanna and Brian will discuss the current state of data management, including new research, plus solutions and ideas to get you started for some quick wins.

Does Big Data make you feel like this?

Does Big Data make you feel like this?

  1. How top marketers are approaching data management, including the challenges they still face.
  2. Key insights to help your organization solve for data intake and personalization challenges across channels, touchpoints and device types.
  3. Best practices for data management for customer-centric messaging and richer insights.

    4. Bring your questions and challenges – we’ll have Q&A time at the end of the presentation. You can save a seat now at http://www.knotice.com/webinar. And if you can’t make it, register anyway and we’ll send you an access link to the play-back after the event. See you there!
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    By Knotice | Posted in Data | Tags: | Leave a Comment

    Do Not Track: Is a Negotiated Solution the Answer?

    May 1, 2013 – 11:58 am
    Casey BartoLast week there was a storm brewing on Capitol Hill as the Senate Commerce Committee held a hearing on the status of the floundering Do Not Track initiative.
    Plans for the initiative have slowed to a crawl, prompting the need for the Do Not Track Online Act to be reintroduced in the Senate a few months ago.
    Senator Jay Rockefeller isn’t pleased with the slow pace of things and blasted the advertising industry last week saying the industry “is dragging its feet on development of Do Not Track… and I believe they are doing it purposely.”

    In addition, Rockefeller claimed the AdChoices Program from the Digital Advertising Alliance doesn’t satisfy the FTC’s call for a Do Not Track standard.

    The hearing on the Hill comes a few months after FireFox announced it would disable 3rd-party cookies by default.

    Harvey Anderson, Mozilla’s SVP of business and legal affairs and general counsel told the hearing that the industry isn’t moving forward quickly enough.

    Responding the slow pace of the initiative, California legislators introduced a bill designed to “require an operator to disclose whether or not it honors a request from a consumer to disable online tracking,” reads the draft legislation. “The bill would also require an operator to disclose if it does not allow third parties to conduct online tracking on the commercial Web site or online service.”

    Matthew Schwartz at Information Week writes, “The proposed legislation sounds a rare note of clarity in the contentious debate surrounding do-not-track proposals, asking website operators simply: Do you honor consumers’ do-not-track requests?”

    If an agreement is not reached soon, “escalation around these competing interests will create major problems for both individuals and the businesses that depend on the internet,” writes Peter Swire, The co-chair of the W3C Do Not Track standards process, at Wired.

    So, what can be done to help advertisers, the government and consumers reach an acceptable agreement on Do Not Track?
    Swire suggests negotiation. “A negotiated Do Not Track standard offers the best way to avoid the arms race: It would allow individual users to indicate whether they wish to have personalized ads based on their surfing habits. It would allow websites and advertising networks to continue their existing cookie-based models with the consumers who don’t opt out. And it would help avoid the sizzling controversy and escalation around cookie blocking and technical counter-measures.”

    What are your thoughts on Swire’s comments and the current state of Do Not Track? Share below!
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    By Casey Newman | Posted in Industry News | Leave a Comment

    Redefining Roles within Marketing

    April 29, 2013 – 1:34 pm
    Patti RennerOne overlooked challenge of adopting a customer-centric cross-channel approach for marketing is not technology – it’s people. Teams within your organization are aligned around channel-specific responsibilities. Budgets are designed around channel-specific activities. The traditional funnel concept no longer works, but that doesn’t mean anyone is racing to replace it.
    I invite you to take a step back and consider what is really going on with your customers. Here are some trends.
    1. Customers no longer respond well to marketing messages pushed out to them. They want stories, useful information, and ideas to entertain or enlighten them. The fact that this useful, entertaining content (aka “utility content”) is attached to your brand is a plus for you.

    2. People need depth of content to help them make a decision, or to validate the emotional “I-gotta-have-this” impulse when considering your offer. Websites, landing pages, case studies, videos, review forums… all of these help support the decision to buy. And since people are more likely to either ignore or not trust your advertising messages, these depth channels are worth attention.

    3. People are social. They want relationships with other people and with the brands they choose (in many, but not all cases). They use their purchase patterns to define themselves as individuals. To enhance your relationship, use your data to see what sites (social and others) your audience uses most often. Where do they spend their time connecting with others? Are they on Facebook, or are they scanning the recipe or weight-loss forums? Are they part of an online community? Are they posting to Pinterest or looking up DIY projects on home-improvement sites for inspiration? Be where they are, offering your brand as a helpful, supportive resource for them.

    Knowing the value of reaching the customer with the information they want in the manner they prefer means your approach needs to shift internally. Nate Elliott, an analyst at Forrester Research brought up some interesting points at his closing remarks at the recent Marketing Leadership Forum event. While I’m not a huge fan of the forced acronyms (RaDaR, SoLoMo), etc.), he did bring up some excellent points about how today’s buyers engage. My question is this: If you had no legacy systems and were starting from scratch, would you structure things as they are today? Nate suggests changing up titles to reflect what the people do instead of the tools they use. I wonder how much easier it might be if you had a “Head of Reach” instead of “director of digital” or a “Head of Relationships” instead of “director of social engagement.” Something to consider as the funnel is crushed under the heel of today’s consumer. These are exciting times indeed.

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    By Patti Renner | Posted in marketing | Tags: | Leave a Comment
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