Keeping your content train on the tracks

February 10, 2020 Guest User

In addition to technology and customer data collection, running a successful Customer Experience web platform depends heavily on content. But we notice that when clients build a Customer Experience platform, content is usually the last thing they think about, and they do not see it as a priority. This leads to content integration ‘as-is’ when the new platform goes live. There are three pain points that cause this. We will discuss all three here, and of course give a glimpse into the right solutions.

Pain Point 1: the missing plan

The first pain point we’d like to discuss is the lack of a content strategy. One of the things we hear is that there is a belief that there is enough content already available. But during our content workshop sessions, we expose the gap between the different content levels. There are three levels of content you need if you want to offer your customer a relevant experience during their customer journey:

Hero content: this is content that, in a short period of time, attracts leads that you can convert to sales or a service.
Hub content: this is all about storytelling. Mainly this content helps build a relationship with your customer. It shows them you understand what they are going through, and you’re the brand to help them.
Hygiene content: this is content that just needs to be there. Customers expect this content when they visit your platform or search for your brand.

And preferably, Hero and Hub content is available to speak to different audience segments and is usable on different channels.

Pain Point 2: the missing process

The second pain point is that there is no process in place to create, manage and process content throughout the organisation and across all its different stakeholders. An ideal process includes steps to:

Create, by working with an agile approach. With our clients, we see that different stakeholders are responsible for content within the customer journey. And these different stakeholders also use different copywriting agencies to (co)-write the content for the platform or campaign. This leads to inconsistency in wording and way of writing.
Manage, by selecting a person to be responsible for overseeing the bigger picture on a daily basis. For example, someone who checks and determines when campaign pages can be changed and turned into landing pages. Or recognises that is there already a strong landing page about a proposition that can be personalised and used during the campaign period. In this way, no pages are created that offer no value afterwards. Multiple pages with similar content do not build value, because all the traffic is cannibalised by the new, short-term campaign page.
Process, which involves deciding who needs to be involved when creating content. But even more importantly, who has the mandate to change or push the content when there is a crisis. Using the agile approach and decentralising responsibilities among different professionals, there always should be someone who can overrule the daily process.

Pain Point 3: the missing insight

The third pain point we see is that search (sub)keywords are not taken in account when creating content. What we often see happen is that content is created around the keywords for selling products or services, or for the campaign being run. This a great approach for your Hygiene and Hero levels of content. The objective of these levels of content is to share the product/service USPs, and the great offers you have on them.

But the objective of Hub content is different. Here, the objective should be to build a relationship with your customers and solve their needs or problems. The difference lies in the fact that these customers are mostly still in the awareness phase. They hear, read or see something, or just have a need or problem they want to solve. We see that in this phase, customers search with broader keywords and terms related to their quest for answers and offerings. Here, (sub)keywords need to more developed, more extensive, and more focussed on issues rather than offers.

Relief for your pain (points)

At OnModus, we have a painkiller to solve your content challenges. We call it ‘building the content train’, and it consists of four steps:

Content gap analysis
Keyword research
Content map building
Content roadmap setup (backlog)

And the great thing is, you can start this process in parallel with the technology process, so your content team is ready to integrate content when the technological building blocks are ready.

Hop on the train

Simply building a Customer Experience platform is not enough to offer a great customer experience and attract leads. Content is your platform’s key driver. But without the right amount and context, you are not going to achieve your objectives. Your Customer Experience software will just become a high-end web content management system.

To achieve your objectives of offering relevant communication to your customers and leads, and to build relevant customer datasets that offer even better next best actions, you need to hop on to the content train.

Think differently about Content

September 13, 2018 Guest User

Yes, another blog about content, Sorry, but it is a topic near and dear to my heart. I strongly believe that with the right content strategy, you can build a life-long, loyal relationship with your customer. In my previous blog, Recommendations in Context Marketing, one of the recommendations is to “Think differently about content”. I have received a couple of questions about this. Readers ask if I could explain a bit more what I mean. That’s the reason for this blog post. Today, I’ll cover the questions about content formats and the use of content.

Content formats

Let's start with a little bit of context. I was working with a brand on a new brand proposition. We wanted to directly use this opportunity to optimise their customer journey. The best option was to create experience content that solved the customers’pain point and offered the product as the problem-solver. This way, we would anticipate customers’ needs, and the needs of the business.

We created three experience roadmaps. Each one was based on the proposition that would lead the customer through his/her experience journey to a path to purchase. We decided to start small, so we briefed the content agency on one roadmap. We asked if we could have a kitchen review within a couple of weeks, because we wanted to see if they understood the briefing and if we would receive the content in the way we were expecting it. At the kitchen review, the agency showed the first ideas and we were really enthusiastic about them. But they indeed did what we expected: they presented the content in a straight format. Just like a TV game show that has the same format every week, only with different questions and players. Or like a print campaign that has the same set-up every month, only with different copy. So we explained that we liked the ideas, but we didn't like the output. It felt like they had just transplanted traditional marketing tools into a digital jacket. ‘Let’s do video, because that is digital’. This is not what an experience content journey should look like.

A true experience content journey is based on a touch point on the experience content roadmap. A diverse collection of content should be created around that touch point: a leading article on your website and summary of it in your newsletter, a short teaser video on your own Facebook channel, the header image of the article on your Instagram or Pinterest account, an extended version of the video on your video channel, a banner of the header image on a partner website, etc. By serving the same content in different ways, the collected data will show you how your content is performing. It will tell you which channels your audiences are tuned into, and which are working best. Every touch point should have its own set of varied content and, over time, data analytics will tell you who consumes what, and when. It will tell you your customer’s story. This brings me conveniently to the next point: content usage.

Use of content

Formats and usage are very closely intertwined. For me, content shouldn't be produced in a vaccuum, but rather in cohesion with all other content. It should be all interlinked. I always use here the example of running a magazine. Take, for example, Elle or Vogue: you’ll find the big, leading content articles in the printed magazine itself. But on all the other channels, you find excerpts of that main article. These excerpts work as traffic drivers to buy the magazine. A picture on Instagram or a Facebook post about the new summer colours will trigger readers to buy the magazine and read about the whole summer collection.

The same is applicable for other brands. The touch points on your customer journey are the ‘storyboards’ of your brand – the roadmap for your communication. Your web platform is your ‘magazine’, and contains all the information your customers need to know. Excerpts from these touch point ‘stories’ need to be deployed to your owned, paid, and earned channels. Yes, I said it. Your earned channels, too. See if you can build an eco-partnership with similar information platforms or retail platforms. You can do some inspirational storytelling about your brand and develop an expert role with the audiences, where your product or service is the problem-solver. This way, earned channels get the traffic and the sell, and you the loyalty benefits that come with your role as an expert.

In my day-to-day job, I see a lot brands struggling with their content strategy. That’s because they need to think differently about creating content than they did before. The days when they could just send a message out there are over. And their investments in content creation don't meet their expectations. Because they’re still working with out-dated content models. Recognise yourself in these points? Or, do you have a totally different view on this topic? I’m looking forward to hearing from you.

Recommendations in Context Marketing

July 20, 2018 Renate van der Vaart

The first half of 2018 has come to an end. But we still have 6 new exciting digital marketing months ahead of us! I look forward to creating and executing new and exciting ideas with you. Developing the next level of Context Marketing will provide your customers with even more context for your brand.

Recently, I was asked for my thoughts about content marketing in 2018. My expectations are that a lot of brands have new propositions and ideas on how to engage with their customers, so they are going to expand their customer journey with more and new content based on their 2018 message. But just creating more content is not the answer. What should be the answer is to create content that gives your customer context around your storytelling. Simply, you need to show ‘what’s in it for them’. Why should they spend time on your branded content? What does it bring to their lives? My recommendations are:

Start making full use of your platform

Without a solid home for your content with easy access to all available articles, tools and services, it is not easy to distribute the right content, to the right person, at the right time, at the right place and right channel. To achieve this, start testing which content is relevant to your customers and why. In addition, if your customers come to your platform from another channel, make their visit personal. Max joins the conversation and says, ‘as an international business partner, I hear this pain point a lot. Clients tell us that they don't make full use of their platform.’ So, together with all the stakeholders, we:

Take the guesswork out of Context Marketing

Create a data plan and start testing the data you have. Listen and learn from this data, because this is the true story of your customers. And if your digital team or IT department doesn't have the skills, invest in or hire a Business Intelligence specialist. Alex agrees. He saw companies spending costly marketing resources on building Excel sheets to get the data right. ‘But this way, they don't have the time to really focus on what they are good at. Namely, storytelling.’ Read also his blog, Solving pain points through analytics.

Think differently about your content

Think differently in the broadest sense of the term, from creation, use, channels and formats. Every piece of content needs to feel unique to your customers. It must trigger them to read or use more and repeatedly convince them that your brand is one they need in their lives because you understand them. Lars adds that it is important that you really think in advance about how you could solve a pain point. ‘The "design thinking" method is great to achieve this,’ he says. This approach, with every stakeholder around the table, gives you insights into both business needs and customer needs. And that can bring new ways to optimise content journeys. Also, an optimised UX design will create an easy path from context to purchase.

Here at OnModus, we call these three recommendations enablement, and this is what we believe in. We support and coach brands in their digital marketing efforts. We give them the right tools and teach them the right skills, which we learned ‘by doing’ our roles with different brands in different branches. We focus on a fully optimised customer journey and platform from start to finish. Want to learn more about us or talk to us? Don't hesitate to contact us at flow@onmodus.com.

Looking forward to hearing from you and learn your thoughts on these points.

Getting personal with Sitecore

May 3, 2018 Max Goijarts

So, here you are. You’re ready to start experimenting with personalisation. Your organisation has invested in top-of-the-line marketing automation technology and is focusing all its efforts on becoming customer-centric and data-driven. Part of this (business) transformation involves delivering personalised, relevant experiences – whether on your website, in an email, or with (social) media campaigns.

Personalisation is a marketing tactic that delivers relevant and in-context experiences that increase engagement, build loyalty, and drive business goals on each of your customer-facing channels. Personalisation’s positive impact and Return on Investment (ROI) has been proven in many cases. Businesses that personalise web experiences see an average 19% increase in sales(1), and overall marketing spend is reduced by 30% using personalisation and testing(2).

Looking at these figures, it is surprising to see how many businesses are still not using personalisation and A/B testing. In fact, some studies show that 62% of marketers are not incorporating personalisation into their e-commerce sales cycle(3). This continues to surprise us, as does the fact that the biggest hurdle to kicking off personalisation is often due to doubts about ROI.

OnModus can offer hands-on, easy-to-implement personalisation strategies, derived from our various (proven) Accelerate programs(4). These programs are focussed on quick wins that help marketers build motivation and momentum for change. We then iterate on small successes and implement using the various in-house agile test teams we have trained and coached throughout the years.

Defining a hypothesis, such as ‘treating second-time visitors on our homepage differently will increase engagement value’, is a good way to create quick wins. It is important to set the goal and conversion metrics before each test, to be able to identify changes in the test data. After each test cycle, we present findings to upper management in sprint cycles.

Quick Win 1: Personalise your landing pages to match your Adwords Ads

If you are running Adwords campaigns, this quick win could be very beneficial. The idea is to add parts of the search query to your landing pages, and by doing so make the page more relevant. The search query your customers use reveals a lot of information about their intent and can be added to the landing page, for example in the title head. With Sitecore and personalisation, when a visitor comes from a specific SEA campaign, you have the ability to target the visitor with this specific context.

For example, let’s say Strava sets up an Adwords campaign that targets two sets of keywords: ‘Cycling Training App’ and ‘Cycling Practice App’. Using the Sitecore Campaign Manager, we are able to adjust the title on the landing page to “Challenge yourself and download our Cycling Training App”. This resonates well with visitors from the ‘Cycling Training’ ads, but less with the visitors from the ‘Cycling Practice’ ads. From our hands-on experience, this can reduce the bounce rate for ad campaigns by more than 30%, and have a significant impact on your ad spend.

Quick Win 2: Treat first-time visitors differently than second-time visitors

New visitors are a great opportunity for your brand, and by treating them with extra care, you can get ahead of your competition. The same principles apply online as those you would use to introduce yourself to someone for the first time offline. By using personalisation to give first-time visitors a warm welcome, you show your appreciation. And also the level of detail you operate on as a brand.

Welcoming messages can vary from calls-to-action to chat functionality that invites new customers to contact you. The content could present the depth and breadth of different services / products you offer. Within Sitecore, personalisation rules can be used to set up different messaging for different visitor levels on a component level.

Be aware that not all first-time visitors are new to your brand and domain. It’s possible that the visitor is using his or her desktop after first having browsed via his or her mobile. Or browsing from home instead of from work. Therefore, make the welcome message subtle, and not too obvious.

Quick Win 3: Base personalisation efforts on incoming traffic source

The referral source your visitor is coming from could be a potential foundation for personalisation opportunities. The difference between someone who visits from your company page on LinkedIn and someone who comes in via an organic search query from Google tells a lot about their intention and interest.

Maybe you are dealing with different client relationships, such as customers and suppliers. A supplier almost always uses certain referrals, for example LinkedIn traffic. When personalising specific content based on the referral source, the context of the visit is improved, and engagement is likely to increase.

By setting up personalisation test around incoming traffic, you are able to test different hypotheses and will get a better understanding of what type of content your visitors are interested in.

What to do next

According to Customer Experience Expert Paul Fennemore, applying personalisation over your different channels, consistently, is what to strive next for. “An omnichannel consistent experience, which include your platform, mobile app, email and social channels will be the next step for context marketers to dig into”

Paul continues “For this to operate well and effective, one integrated view of your customer is necessary, with data insights from existing systems such as CRM, ERP and logistics systems. Sitecore 9 and xConnect are great examples to start this conversation off”.

Accelerate

These examples are part of our Sitecore Accelerate program – a service specifically designed to make full use of the SXP capabilities. Our MVPs will train your marketers to become personalisation experts, fully capable of running an in-house agile test team.

Interested in accelerating your Sitecore platform? Don’t hesitate to contact us.

Context marketing boosts leading FMCG brand conversions by 25%

October 24, 2017 Max Goijarts

Previously released in Internet Retailing on October 16, 2017 by Paul Skeldon.

Understanding the intent of your customer leads to more relevancy, an increase in engagement – with brands such as Danone and Dr. Oetker seeing an uplift of 25% in e-commerce conversion and brand engagement.

So finds OnModus, a customer experience strategy firm operating in the UK, Germany and Benelux, which works with Top100 FMCG brands to not only help with engagement but to understand the context of what shoppers are doing.

A shifting model

“Our clients are top 100 FMCG’s, popular brands which traditionally put a lot of effort in creating big marketing moments in which their brands can shine,” explains Lars Wisselink, Design Strategist at OnModus. “Clearly, this model is shifting. Due to the change of behaviour of customers, we move to a more customer centric approach in marketing activities”

Wisselink continues: “What is important to be effective in your communication as a brand is to tap into the intent of your customers, being in the moment. The use of implicit and explicit customer data is crucial to understand this context, we help discover these insights for marketers to become more effective. Software such as Sitecore helps delivering this experience”.

Test and learn

Brands such as Danone and Dr. Oetker increasingly want to establish a data-first strategy to enable context marketing. By helping them iterating on small successes, they get results in early and can test and learn.

“We work in multidisciplinary teams to come up with creative hypotheses which we test in an agile fashion,” says Wisselink. “Our context marketing teams work in sprints of two weeks, in which they create and test hypotheses. At the end of each sprint, learnings and ROI improvements are presented to business stakeholders.”

According to Wisselink, a typical example is retargeting people who, for example, have just been looking at a new pair of shoes. “For us, this does not mean you should retarget that customer over and over with the same pair of shoes,” he says.

Instead, understand the moment, the intent of the customer. What blog posts have they been reading, which referral url they came from, how does their purchase history look like. By using this context, you will get a clear picture of where this customer is in their journey. This data can be used to adjust the (retargeting) message and change strategy.

How do you start?

But how to start? “Probably your current data structure contains already many clues about typical behavioural patterns, for different persona segments within your customer base,” explains Wisselink. “These segments can tell you something about the intent, the job your customer is trying to get done. Use these insights to target a specific segment. Iterate and learn from small successes. At OnModus we provide a practical implementation strategy towards context marketing, and lead by example. We know the advantages and also how to overcome the common pitfalls and hurdles. We don’t provide you with documentation and implementation plans, instead we are in it for the results.”

How Content Marketers can become Context Marketers

October 11, 2017 Guest User

By Renate van der Vaart, Customer Experience Specialist & Sitecore MVP

The marketing world is rapidly changing, and so is the behaviour of your customers. In the last couple of years, we have all been told that if we want to build relationships with our customers, then content marketing is the way to go. But if EVERYBODY has great content on their platforms, is content still enough to build a relationship? How can you be sure you are distinctive enough?

Our partner, Sitecore, asked these questions when we started working together. Sitecore’s philosophy is based on Context Marketing: giving your content the right context. And I could not help wondering, is Context Marketing the next big thing in digital marketing? In my opinion, it is.

What is Context Marketing? It’s bringing together three digital pillars to successfully integrate content with your data. Let me walk you through it.

Pillar 1: Content Management

Content management is all about bringing the relevant message to your customer. That is easier said than done, because how do you know what the right message is? My answer: look at your data and step into the shoes of your customer. Once you know what he is looking for, you can combine this with one of your brand’s stories. For example, if you are a content marketer working with consumer brands, then you need to:

Define a content strategy - what do you want to achieve with your content?
Create the content and give it context by linking it to customer needs, and your data and brand story.
Manage and publish – check and adjust the content, and get it approved and published.
Evaluate - check that the content meets your goals and aligns with your business KPIs.

Pillar 2: Omni-channel Automation

This pillar is all about connecting more deeply with your customers. Start again by analysing your data and looking at your customers’ behaviour. Which channels are they visiting, what are they doing there, and what content are they consuming? Whatever channel they visit, it is important to provide your customers with consistent, relevant messaging and look and feel, so they do not feel disconnected from their journey. Use data to infer visitor intent and use personalisation rules to provide relevant content and calls-to-action.

For example, on your platform, you recruit customers to subscribe to your newsletter. But customers who already have a subscription to your newsletter also visit your platform. So if a customer comes to your platform from a ‘read more’ button in the newsletter, it seems strange to show them a call-to-action that asks them to sign up for a newsletter subscription. So instead, you should show them you know them, based on the data in their profile. Serve them calls-to-action that highlight their previous behaviour and the channel they are coming from. This will give your customer a more personalised and relevant experience. Think here of a call-to-action that invites them to read a similar article, or invites them to provide feedback as a ‘loyal subscriber’.

Pillar 3: Contextual Intelligence

The third pillar in Context Marketing is Contextual Intelligence. This is about making your customer feel that he is an individual person and that you as a brand listen to his needs in real time. So he is not just one of many customers on your platform: you are there just for him. On this basis, Contextual Intelligence can only work when you use the data you have collected from his past behaviour and his current needs.

Here’s an example: a customer lands on an article page on your platform and reads the article. The article page also contains a default call-to-action, for example a link to your contact service centre, with a message that ‘they are always there for you’. The page also offers links to relevant pages, so he clicks to the next page within the same theme. On this page, the contact centre call-to-action can be already a little bit more specific, based on his current behaviour. The further he clicks within the same themes, age bracket or relevant products, the better you can adjust the contact centre calls-to-action. This gives the customer the feeling that you are listening to him, and have relevant information to share. The call-to-action can change from ‘they are always there for you’, to ‘our service centre can answer your questions about healthy eating’, to ‘Did you know we’ve got an upcoming event about how to cook healthier meals? Reach out to our service centre to find out more’.

I believe that combining these three pillars together will give you the best of all possibilities in digital marketing. The glue between these three pillars is data. So the first step to Context Marketing should be to make your marketing data-driven. I totally believe in this philosophy. Whilst content is still king, it’s just not that powerful without context!

Best,

Renate