Vu, a new brand created by C-Spire, America’s largest private telco company, has been setup to enable the company to build on their existing ability to truly understand their customers and provide them with tailored, personalised content to their mobile. Vu have just released a free iPhone and Android News App that finds, organises and delivers content from numerous news sources across the internet and serves it to the user based on their reading habits and news preferences.
We are seeing a shift in the role of a CMO: from creative to analyst, from ideas person to metrics person. Not that CMOs will lose their creative edge – that is vital – but given the rise of digital, and therefore automation, an ability to take a measurement-based approach is fundamental to understanding customer behaviour and building successful marketing activity.
Content – an oft-used and rarely defined term – is of prime importance to the modern marketer. It is the means by which customers find your proposition online (search or social recommendation). Quality and relevant content engages the audience, because it is interesting, useful, or entertaining. It also helps retain customers. Whether you are blogging, tweeting, writing white papers, or shooting viral videos, you are in the process of content marketing: publishing content in order to fulfil a commercial objective.
When you are creating high volumes of content, or curating content, or just listening to social media content, it is vital to understand, structure and measure. (For a later post, we will look at Content Marketing ROI)
What is Content Analytics?
Content analytics is the process of structuring previously unstructured content, by extracting new information. It is the process of measuring content. The output – the measurements – is in the form of metadata that describes that content. This can include the topics, people, places, companies and concepts in the content, sentiment towards aspects of the content, and the language of that content.
How is Content Analytics useful for marketers?
Content analytics brings a whole raft of benefits to your marketing strategy:
Understand your customer on a granular level
Thanks to semantic and sentiment analysis, no longer are you limited to simply aggregate level ‘page views’ and ‘bounce rates’. Now that you know what each page ‘says’ – i.e. the places, the topics and the sentiments within it – you can build tag-clouds of preferences around each customer as they read that page. This in turn enables you to determine the tastes and even begin to predict the intent of the customer.
Extract more value from your social media community
Data-mining your social media communities for the topics, sentiments and locations of their conversations mean you can build a richer profile of each person on your customer database. This might include their interests, their most shared links and indeed the details of others in their extended network. As a result, you can begin to identify brand advocates and influencers very quickly and much more effectively than just crudely going after those with the largest ‘follower count’.
Quickly identify trends amongst your customer base
When you are subject to thousands of in-bound communications from your customers – be it online reviews or email correspondence – content analytics help immeasurably in filtering and giving structure to the information you receive. If certain words are being used or a particular sentiment is articulated frequently, you can identify these trends and react accordingly, be it in a customer support capacity or for PR purposes.
Reuse and curate content
Every business should be authoring in-house content as part of their content marketing efforts. However, high-quality, original editorial really costs – even more so if part of a long-term strategy. One way to reduce cost per article is through analysing and curating content from partner organisations (or other external sources) which are pertinent to your target market. If done effectively, content curation can establish you as an authoritative source of information in your particular niche and be used as a tool for industry and market insight.
Customer-centric marketing
Once you can know what a piece of content is about and are able to determine the interests of individual customers and prospects in your audience – you are now in a position to offer each person the piece of content that is most relevant to them. This ability to segment your audience and deliver personalised propositions is a powerful marketing asset.
Where now…
The need for content analytics to be a part of a marketer’s arsenal is more important than ever now that marketing channels are becoming increasingly digitised and the volume of content a company deals with on a daily basis grows.
By adding metadata to content, it becomes better optimised for search engines, content delivery and analytics systems. This, in turn, means it can be measured. As a result, you can formulate a content marketing strategy that is structured, scalable and with demonstrable ROI.
In the long run, it is this move towards a more data-focused treatment of content that will revolutionize your digital strategy, deliver actionable customer intelligence and create long-term customer relationships.
Last month, idio held its ‘Future of Financial Services’ breakfast with talks from Graham Nisbet (CIO and Head of IT, Lloyds International Retail Group) and Helen Stevenson (former Group Marketing Director, Lloyds Group).
Over the course of the morning, Graham and Helen took the audience through nearly two decade’s worth of combined experience and insight from working in the financial services industry.
Whilst both speakers examined financial services through a different professional lens; Helen – as a marketing director – often focussed on the conflicting imperatives of financial services and their customers – and Graham – as an IT director – shone a light on the technical highs and lows of powering an international financial services group; they unified in the importance of content as a conduit to gain stronger customer relationships, greater brand awareness, foster a strong differentiation to competitors and to ultimately learn more about customer intent.
Awareness is not the issue, trust is.
In most cases, Britain’s great financial service providers do not suffer for lack of brand awareness. In fact, in the wake of various financial scandals and – in Northern Rock’s case – collapses, some have become notorious!
In light of this, two imperatives for any financial services business – whether an emergent pretender or an established institute – is to create (and maintain) authority and foster long-term customer relationships. Apart from the occasional PR furores that make the news, both of these imperatives are being challenged as customer interactions with banks are facilitated online, and thus becoming increasingly functional (based on efficiency and utility) rather than relational. This phenomenon is further exacerbated by online deal aggregators that aggregate the best deals for financial products and thereby become an intermediary between the customer and financial service brands.
“Two imperatives for any financial services business…maintain authority and foster long-term customer relationships”
There is no doubt that as a remedy to this, improved offline experience with branches will be important in fostering a closer brand-customer relationship. But what to do to build trust and authority in the increasingly sophisticated e-banking environment?
By adopting an editorial model towards marketing, that is to say, publishing regular articles and pieces of content to engage customers and prospects. Content marketing, by another name:
To become an authority, you must not only be known as a source of expert information, but an authority that supports your content with facts, outside viewpoints, credible data, and even the opinions (and counter opinions) from other recognized authorities. Curating content from third-party sources can make a brand a go-to source for industry expertise (whilst looking impartial) and building a large stock of published content affords more opportunities for prospective customers to find a financial service brands earlier in the discovery phase when they are trying to find an expert answer to a particular question or need.
By providing a compelling a reason to return to brand sites regularly – to read new material – financial services are more likely to establish trust, encourage conversions and develop a long-term customer relationship. More importantly, content marketing offers an invaluable opportunity for customers to become advocates – sharing branded content on social networks and adding a layer of trust by becoming impartial validators of your services.
Content as a service and differentiator
Helen noted that in early days of the post-Lloyds TSB merger, repeated market surveys were reporting a discernible increase in ‘awareness’, whilst differentiation from competitors would dropped to an ‘all time low’.
Lloyds TSB would eventually recover by initiating “thousands” of customer-service improvement initiatives (for example, Lloyds TSB were the first to send SMS alerts when customers were close to overdraft), however the appreciation that a higher ‘appreciation’ does not necessarily convert to improved consideration.
Branded content provides a distinct way for any business to separate themselves from the pack.
Whereas once upon a time, someone looking to invest their money might have used the services of a financial advisor, much of the knowledge can now be found online. Content-based newsletters or sites don’t just push particular products, but instead instruct and educate (think: ‘Five things to know when buying your first property’ or ‘How to maximise your credit score’) in the way an advisor might. A pertinent example is American Express Open Forum which is a content-based portal delivering daily articles around the issues of being a small business owner or a working professional.
Content for insight
Graham’s own experiences further compounded the view that financial services is an industry that is replete with actionable data:
This is only set to increase as content analytics opens up the opportunity to learn more about customers, their lifestyles, interests and – most importantly – what they intend to do with their savings.
I was really pleased to read this morning that NewsCred have landed $15m in Series B funding, and have announced the New York Times as a new partner. NewsCred are definitely one of the good guys in this newly emerging world of content marketing, with revenue split agreements with publishers that give decent chunks of money back to content originators. For those who don’t know NewsCred’s model, basically they have signed up 2,500 top publications (newspapers, magazines, websites etc) to content syndication agreements, and then resell this content to their clients across the world. They have built a nice dashboard that enables clients to slice and dice content from multiple content partners really easily (based on topics and other facets), and although every content partner needs to confirm agreement with each client (ie you can’t just rock up, pay, and use the content instantly), the process is pretty much as pain-free as syndication license agreements can be (groan…). We recommend them to lots of people that we speak to.
NewsCred recently acquired the once-darling Daylife (Michael Arrington was an investor), in a move that seems to have been largely about integrating their image licensing platform to complement the text content service that NewsCred delivers. That was a super smart move, as it was probably Daylife’s key asset, and will allow NewsCred clients to really easily incorporate images in their marketing. (Anyone who has dealt with a newspaper’s syndication team regarding image licensing will know the fog of gloom that can rapidly descend…)
This investment is a bet that content marketing is going to eat a decent portion of traditional ad budgets. Greycroft Partners, one of the VCs that are funding NewsCred say:
“more than 30% of marketers’ budgets will be devoted to content marketing this year.”
So, content marketing is here, and budgets are shifting fast. But my key point is that as marketeers become more aware and comfortable with the principles of content marketing, the ominous ROI discussion will follow rapidly. It’s great to understand and believe in the tenets of marketing through relevant, interesting and genuinely useful content, rather than constant bombardment of product offers, but how do you tell your boss it is going to move the bottom line?
At idio, we love partnering with companies like NewsCred, because they believe in the value of quality content to attract, engage and retain customers. idio provides a perfect follow-on to this investment, delivering two key value propositions for companies that use content marketing:
Building real-time contextual intelligence about every single person that engages with that content, across multiple channels. By analysing what people read, create and share, idio learns about their needs and preferences, and predicts what they might need next. This customer intelligence is synched back to the client CRM for use in various insight projects and ongoing campaign management.
Delivering personalised content recommendations, across multiple channels. idio uses the contextual intelligence it is building about every person, to predict which content items are most likely to interest and engage each individual. This content is then delivered through whichever channel the client requires – web, social, email, or mobile. idio doesn’t need to own or control those channels, but simply integrates with existing web content management systems, email service providers and social management tools. And then, of course, idio reports on the increases in engagement and conversion that result from delivering the right content at the right time, to the right person, on the right channel.
So, here’s to NewsCred, and all the client-side marketers that will now need to personalise and optimise their content marketing programmes.
It was with a heavy heart that I read the Emarketer 2013 Predictions. Not just because its taken me until February to get round it to. Yes, right at the top was this wonderful absurdity: Big Data will get Bigger.
(In other shocking news, Israel and Palestine will not be very happy with each other, and bankers will continue to be hated. Ok, now I am being facetious. But seriously…)
Same Old Big Data
Firstly, big data has been here for a long time. If you speak to anyone in marketing at a major bank or telco (or any large company for that matter, although those two sectors have been at the forefront of data marketing) they will tell you that they have dealt with big data for decades. Yes, now we are seeing a shift as publicly available data via social networks is through the roof, and other industries realizing the treasure-trove of data that is available to them, inside and outside their CRM programmes. And yes, we are now getting to the point where there is a large array of tools to enable this, and a popularist appeal to creating meaning from raw data. Big data was around before social data, but now it has become sexy.
Big Data, Big Science
And the ignominiously dubbed “geek” has now become a Data Scientist.
At idio, we are hiring software engineers with postgraduate academic specialisms in Data Science, Machine Learning and Linguistics, but it amazes me the knee-jerk reaction to Big Data that is prevalent in the recruitment sector. Suddenly, every run-of-the-mill web developer has pimped his (or increasingly, fortunately, her) CV to include often dubious references to Data Science, Cloud Computing, and other Big Data buzzwords.
Our CTO, James Griffin, can wax lyrical about the details, drivers and dynamics of this shift that has been dubbed Big Data. But as he regularly points out, the approach and theory actually harks back a hundred or so years to the early days of processing Census data.
So, it’s not new. But yes, it is big and clever. And in 2013, unfortunately, getting biggerer.
The boring conversation is that the data is bigger. The exciting conversation is that the insight, and the value to businesses and consumers is also getting bigger.
For more delectable opining about biggerer data, and perhaps even a glimpse at how we use it to deliver great client results, just ping us.
On Weds 23rd, thirty intrepid telco markeeters braved the inclement weather to meet in Westminster to hear Peter Crayfourd (Head of Customer Lifecycle Strategy, Orange Group) and Aly Richards (idio, CXO and former Head of CRM, O2) discuss the revolutions that are happening with the world of telco.
Drawing upon nearly two decades in the telco world – working across ntl, 3 and Orange – Peter Crayfourd explained in ‘Always Engaged’ the organisation and technological shifts needed to put the customer at the heart of telco operations, and in particular the necessity to move from business-centric goals (e.g. increase revenue, shift product) to CRM thinking (sustain engagement, increase positive sentiment). Key to this, Peter maintained, was tracking customer interactions over a longer period of time, over as many channels as possible – not just the activities within customer contact centres.
Customer Experience is the sum of all experiences a customer has with a supplier of goods or services over the duration of their relationship with that supplier
The problem is telco companies aren’t tracking every customer interaction, let alone over a sustained period. Rather, telco insight and operational strategies are calculated from ‘snap shots’ of a particular sample of customers, usually taken every 15mins over very narrow criteria (such as, how strong network signals are, how many products have sold, how many calls made) . Whereas, Peter was at pains to explain the need to track customers on an individual level for as long as they are a customer. This required a shift, not just in corporate culture, but also systems that can handle the vast amounts of interaction data that comes from tracking telco customers; in call-centres, on websites, across email and in the social cloud.
Aly Richards carried on the theme of continual engagement, examining how the efficacy of the Next-Best-Action technology installed in every telco organisation – which suggest on-the-fly scripts to call centre agents based on known customer data which suggest the best proposition to make, and how a US wireless telco called C-Spire (client) were using ‘Next-Best-Content’ to build on the limitations of NBA.
Telcos have run out of things to say
Aly explained that although Next-Best-Action had been a boon to telcos in the last decade, the initial successes of the technology would eventually stall as NBA is completely reliant on a limited product range to offer each customer.
There are only so many mobile packages or services a call operator can offer you, before you have heard them all. This explains the drop in conversions and accepted propositions for most telcos who run extended campaigns using NBA.
As C-Spire found, using content in digital comms extends the conversation with their customer base and prospects beyond simply trumpeting on about a particular product offering. This made recipients of their emails more likely to engage with C-Spire on favourable terms and not just engage when there was a problem.
Content allows telcos to continue to ‘talk’ to customers about lifestyle interests without necessarily being limited to a small product pool. Futhermore, through content curation, telcos are able to have enough content to have an ongoing conversation with customers, whatever their interests.
Content as a service
C-Spire pride themselves on their brand promise of ‘Personalised Wireless’.
The next extension of the their personalised service brand was to make content a service. Not just publishing content, but actually using personalisation as value proposition to encourage customers to continually engage with C-Spire.
Through using idio’s platform, C-Spire were able to curate and publish content around a wide variety of topics a typical C-Spire customer would be interested in. This in turn was personalised on the web and in emails based on what each customer was reading on-site and sharing on social media. As such, the content was providing utility to each customer by providing them with content which was personalised to their particular interests such as ‘politics’, ‘sport’ and ‘faith’.
Data And Insight from content
The result from having engaged readers on multiple channels is that you can learn a huge amount about your market.
By understanding what each piece of content is talking about by using content analytics, C-Spire can build very detailed customer profiles (insight graphs) of every individual user based on what content they are consuming online.
This in turn was useful for segmentation and campaigns as it allows C-Spire to bracket customers beyond the usual data such as product bought, age, geography and begin to target those with similar or very specific interests.
For those interested in learning more, Aly Richards will be running a ‘Future of Telco Marketing’ webinar on Thurs 14th February at 10AM. If you would like to sign-up, please go here
Today we’re all digital explorers, seeking out online ratings, social media-based peer reviews, videos, and in-depth product details as we move down the path to purchase – even more so when making the major decision of committing to a new phone contract.
The new reality of multi-channel customer engagement means customers are more vocal and more informed than ever before. Telecoms marketeers and modern marketing strategies have to evolve in light of the rapidly changing shape of consumer behaviours to capitalise on this complexity, gain greater returns and earn longer-term customer relationships.
On Wednesday 23rd January, idio will be holding its thirteenth industry breakfast on ‘The Future of Telco Marketing’ with Peter Crayfourd speaking on how telcos can define an end-to-end 360 view of the customer experience to power more relevant and timely communications, and Aly will show how idio enabled US telco C-Spire to deliver on their brand promise of ‘Personalised Wireless’ through daily news emails personalised to individual customer interests.
Peter is Head of Customer Lifecycle Experience at Orange Group. Prior to the role at Orange, Peter spent seven years with 3 in the UK focussing on customer engagement strategy and proposition development.
Aly has over twenty years experience implementing customer relationship management solutions for blue-chip companies, and was previously Head of CRM at O2.Aly is currently Chief Experience Officer at idio.
This is event is for digital marketeers and CRM professionals working for telco brands.
Places are very limited, so please RSVP as soon as possible.
The professional separation between SEOs and Content Marketers in some organisations never fails to stop intriguing me.
At one prestigious agency I was at last month, I learnt that there was next to no dialogue between their SEO core and their Content division.
I found this incredible. Hopefully, as content marketing continues to mature as a practice, agencies and in-house marketing teams will begin to see the value of co-operating and co-labouring with their SEO and content teams, for both strategic and commercial imperatives.
This is particularly important as creative, marketing and PR agencies shift to becoming the much-vaunted, all-conquering ‘Customer Engagement Agency’.
Marrying the disciplines of content marketing and SEO shouldn’t be a big ask, indeed it should be a natural partnership: Read more →
Today we’re all digital explorers, seeking out online ratings, social media-based peer reviews, videos, and in-depth product details as we move down the path to purchase – even more so when making a major decision like buying a car!
The new reality of multi-channel customer engagement means customers are more vocal and more informed than ever before. Automotive marketeers and modern marketing strategies have to evolve in light of the rapidly changing shape of car purchases to capitalise on this complexity, gain greater returns and earn longer-term customer relationships.
WANT TO LEARN MORE?
Download idio’s ‘The Future of Automotive Marketing’ White Paper -> here
We usually partner with an agency to serve clients. Because idio is a technology platform, we sit alongside a partner who has a strategic voice to the client and can provide creative and planning services that realise the value idio delivers.
Recently, we have been asked by a few prospective partners what we look for in an agency partner. It’s a good question, as we are quite picky. We used to decide based on a gut-level assessment of fit, in terms of vision for the client and market, culture, credibility and reputation. The vision piece is really important, as we can only really deliver lasting value to the end client when the agency is casting a brave vision for changing the client organisation, shaping products and services around the current and emerging customer behaviours and needs. Unfortunately, some agencies are simply still marketing at the 1990’s consumer. Time has moved on, behaviour has changed, and so has the technology that can deliver on the ageless promise of customer-centricity.
Fortunately, our friends at Forrester have defined a new marketing services target to strive for, which they have named the “Customer Engagement Agency” (CEA). When it was first published, in early 2012, it gave verbiage to our previous beliefs about the direction of marketing services and the type of agency we work well with.
The shifts in the market
We have seen a few agencies start to use the CEA badge, and we expect this to increase. But beyond the badge, there is an underlying vision of the future that truly separates these agencies from much of the landscape.
Customers care about experience, not channels.
The channel-centric approach has now passed. It used to make sense to organise marketing by the channel on which it would be received, but today, with a proliferation of channels, and an increasingly multi-channel consumer, it just doesn’t. If companies do not realise that customers don’t differentiate the technological and organisational challenges that exist between platforms, but just want the right communication sent to the most relevant channel, they run the risk of alienating the very customers they are working elsewhere to acquire. Customer-centric companies aim to deliver a seamless and co-ordinated experience across every channel.
Marketing in the future will shift from brand push to consumer pull.
We have been banging this drum for a while. Campaign is such an ugly word, with connotations of a military assault to subdue an enemy! We believe ongoing, iterative conversations are a better description of modern marketing. For an amusing look at the shift from push to pull, have a look at the Content Marketing Manifesto we wrote a while ago.
Customers will continue to create huge volumes of data, but they will get more savvy about managing it. Marketers who respect this, and give value for the data exchange will win, by helping the end customer win.
Product-centric marketing will gradually be overtaken by customer-centric propositions.
Marketers must evolve to meet their customer’s expectations.
The challenge facing modern marketers is to meet and exceed consumers’ relentlessly rising expectations. This is not just an evolution of tools and approaches, but a new approach which is based on the fundamental shift from push to pull marketing. The campaign approach will no longer generate the returns, goodwill or ongoing relationships necessary for succeeding. Understanding the customer is vitally important. And not just understanding their social-demographic bracket. Real, evolving, customer intelligence is vital to deliver on the promise of relevance to every consumer. And marketing must change, to be able to not only record, but activate this intelligence within it’s communications.
The Shifts in Agency-Land
Alongside the shifting nature of marketing, the agency landscape is changing fast. Existing competencies are shifting in importance, and new capabilities are being demanded by clients. We are seeing media agencies building up owned and earned media teams, whether called “social”, “digital” or “content”; we are seeing PR agencies fight for digital work, and digital agencies take on PR staff; we are seeing direct agencies build in creative competencies and creative agencies that start caring about data. Everyone is making a different sized land-grab in a different direction.
As Forrester have stated, marketers need a new type of agency to help them evolve.
Forward-thinking agency leaders are adding services and changing how they approach the marketing ecosystem, shifting from a traditional campaign-centric view of the world to one of continuous customer engagement. We call this emerging class of providers “customer engagement agencies” (CEAs) and define them as:
Agencies that focus on defining customer-oriented business strategies and mapping them to tactics and execution. They help clients maximize customer profitability and optimize customer experiences by applying data and analytics to every interaction.
What do these new agencies look like?
The Forrester map of Customer Engagement Agencies
From single channel, to multi-channel, to cross-channel
Existing agencies were built around the channel they controlled: print specialists, email specialists, experiential specialists, social specialists, and the rest. Now there is an understanding that since marketing involves multiple channels, taking this view from the beginning, the middle and the end of a campaign is important, and creates more value.
However, CEAs take the next step as well. They realise that the interplay between channels is important, and can be co-ordinated. It’s not just enough to be active on each channel, but since the customer will no doubt journey across multiple channels, the creative idea, message, and analytics need to follow consistently and progressively across those channels. What happens on one channel should impact other channels.
CEAs will therefore become masters of plotting cross-channel customer journeys, co-ordinating activity that influences that journey, and build in measurement techniques that attribute across channels.
Build a broader and deeper team
The agencies we would class as vying for the CEA name are hiring staff that would not have been hired at a normal agency. They don’t hire according to traditional agency roles, but rather place a high value on understanding emerging customer behaviour, whether the actual role is in creative, planning, or business development. They place a strong emphasis on collecting first-hand data about their customers interests and behaviours, and are eager to try new approaches to engagement and influence.
Sell business change, not a marketing service
We think it is exciting that CEAs are not obeying the confines of a marketing brief, but are assertive in suggesting solutions to the client that actually change the way their processes, resourcing, or product delivery works, in order to better serve the customer. In this way, CEAs are increasingly going to compete with Systems Integrators (like Accenture and Deloitte). We have seen this cause resistance from some clients, who want the agency “back in their box”, but forward-thinking clients are embracing this approach, realising that marketing, and particularly the understanding of customer behaviour and how they can be best influenced through quality experiences, is often limited in impact because of entrenched business structures. If the customer truly is king, everything in an organisation is up for consideration of change, if the customer can be better served.
Remuneration is changing, and is more aligned
Here is an interesting facet of the CEA; remuneration is closely tied with performance – and not just performance against activity objectives, but on the resultant business outcomes. Several CEAs are starting to take the leap out of the comfort zone of the traditional charging structures, and are betting their fees on positive client outcomes. This might be in the form of fees that scale with business success, or in some cases a commission-type approach based on planned objectives such as customer acquisition or retention. Because of this close alignment with the company, in remuneration as well as in knowledge and strategic importance, it is likely that CEAs will not work closely with clients that compete directly, but rather align to a single player in each industry subcategory.
Invest in technology platforms
Another hallmark of CEAs (at the risk of sounding self-serving, but Forrester do list this is as one of the key attributes of a CEA) is that they tend to build close partnerships with emerging technology platforms, or indeed build their own in-house. They do not compete on technology capabilities, but certainly use them as a differentiation, and to achieve the goals that their clients are demanding. Whereas in the past the technology has been a question that is left to last (“ok, so how do we actually do this now?”), CEAs have the understanding of the proprietary and open-source platforms that are relevant, and build that into the very core of their proposals.
Summary
At idio we believe in the future as described above, and encourage all our partners to read what Forrester has to say about this newly-defined segment, and those chasing after the badge of Customer Engagement Agency. Of course, CEAs will be cut in many different shapes, and won’t necessarily reflect every attribute listed above. But the vision of a closely aligned, customer-centric, business-changing agency model is exciting, and the mix of creative flair with deep customer intelligence expertise is one that we believe will increasingly be patterned.
I was really pleased to 
