Marketing Automation Stack-on-a-Shoestring
Automated full lifecycle customer engagement has become a necessity and not a luxury. Even small companies without the staff or money for a big enterprise system need the ability to monitor their brand and industry, automatically convert website visitors to email marketing candidates to sales opportunities and provide live, real-time sales support.
5 Easy Steps to Better Content
How can you get your content noticed in the flood of content? How can you hold your customers attention long enough to create a connection? How can you make your customers care about your content?
The Most Important Marketing Skill in 2016
Almost every marketing related article I read over the last month focused on two key assertions:
- Technology is king and companies are investing heavily in technology in 2016
- Content is king and companies are investing heavily in content creation in 2016
Where is all that content going to come from?
If marketing organizations are staffing up with software developers and platform managers, who is going to develop the content?
2016: The Year of Contextual Relevance
In 2016 context relevance will be most important factor driving customer satisfaction and loyalty. Marketing is currently leading the charge on contextual relevance but customer demand for contextual relevance extends beyond the presentation of offers.
A Holistic Customer Experience Design
We encourage organizations to take a holistic approach when designing their customers end-to-end experience. When we approach a project in a holistic way we are attempting to understand every factor that could potentially affect a customers perception of the experience.
To help illustrate the concept of designing holistically, let's take a look at some elements of the customer journey:
- Time
- Space
- Senses
- Culture
Why Does Experience Design Matter?
As consumers, we are confronted by an overwhelming variety sameness. Similar (or even identical) products and services with differences that only the experts see or care about.
As companies, we face incredibly fierce competition. Barriers to getting new products to market are incredibly low. The cost to develop new products, both physical and digital, has never been lower. The advantages of new features are short-lived and quickly copied. The result is price or feature wars and rapid commoditization.
Google's Micro-Moments: Great for Google, Terrible for Companies
Google is making a tremendous push for companies to be present in a customers "micro-moments", the small moments where a customer either decides to buy or explores a possible buy, enabled by their mobile device. This concept is great for Google, they sell services that get companies to pay for snippets of attention at the moment when a search for product or service occurs. For companies, a near-sighted focus on micro-moments becomes a race to the bottom in terms of price, loyalty and long-term relationships.
Right-emphasizing Digital in the Customer Journey
Digital is a tremendous advantage for companies that understand their customers behavior and apply technologies that make interactions more effective and enjoyable within the context of the overall customer journey.
But digital is not a shortcut to great experiences.
The Experience Differentiator: An Introduction to Customer Experience Design (Denver Startup Week 2015 Presentation)
It has never been easier to get new products and services to market, leading to increasing competition and market saturation. In this environment of near total product and service parity, the customer experience is often the only meaningful differentiator.
This talk was delivered at Denver Startup Week 2015