A Five Point Checklist to Optimize Your Content Marketing Strategy in 2017

By Patricia Jacoby
Publications Editor
and
Elisha Gist
Marketing Program Manager
Frost & Sullivan

Creating compelling content that performs is an essential requirement for the modern marketing leader. Content marketing, or creating and providing useful content to customers with the end goal of a profitable return, will be most successful if you think through your team’s strategy first and adhere to the following checklist and best practices: 

#1: Target Your Best Prospects First 

The first best practice for effective content marketing is to identify and target your best prospects. This should include your best potential customers as well as your best current customers, as generally 80% of future revenue comes from 20% of existing customers. To identify your best prospects, create a customer persona, or semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer. Personas are based on market research and information about current customers. It’s also important to include demographics and behavior patterns as well as drivers and motivations when creating your customer persona. When putting together your content marketing strategy, focus on these two groups—your best current and best potential customers—first. 

#2: Consider Your Source

When creating your content, consider the author and voice carefully. Make sure your content marketing comes from a credible, authoritative source. It is usually best to have an expert or analyst who can communicate from a vantage point of industry expertise. Ideally your content will also be derived from well-respected research in the marketplace. Accept the fact that perception can progress or hinder the message: content written by a vendor, about the vendor and delivered by that vendor, will be viewed as corporate collateral, not credible research. Utilizing a third-party who has evaluated your product or service or who is recognized in the industry is a great way to present outside validation of your brand’s value in the marketplace. This third-party content could be in the form of a video, white paper, customer case study or over a dozen formats you may choose as your content delivery vehicle.

#3: Make Sure You Create Compelling, Customer-Centric Content

Content is no longer just the written word. The vessel you choose to contain that content is equally as important. Infographics are liked and shared on social media three times more than other any other type of content, and companies using video enjoy 41% more web traffic from search than non-video users. Knowing these statistics, make sure your team’s content is customer-centric and deliver it in a format that will appeal to your target market. For instance, a mix of video, infographics and blogs will diversify your channels and can offer reuse or repurposing of older assets. Consider delivering traditional content such as whitepapers or executive interviews in snackable 30-90 second videos or digital eBooks: your buyers are going to look for these assets and you will capture and delight them with a more modern presentation. 

Content marketing should be leveraged to keep your visitors on your website longer and a balanced combination of content marketing formats can help visitors continue to engage. Consider your audience’s generation as well as their profession and title when selecting your marketing channels and content formats. A multichannel digital approach would be appropriate for some, while more traditional formats such as direct mail might work better for others. The goal of your content marketing is to give your customer the data, information or context they need. Ideally the stories you tell or the information you share will address your customer or potential customer’s pain points and help them solve a problem. 

Utilizing the user personas you’ve developed for your ideal customer, share value added content that will resonate with your buyer. Position your company as a thought leader and only if relevant and additive, work in customer case stories which will provide prospects insights on your company’s client roster and your company’s success stories. Content can be proactive and reactive. Create a library of case studies by vertical to make that instant connection to your audience. Dedicate a section of your website to this content and label it appropriately ‘Customer Case Studies,’ ‘Our Work,’ ‘Success Stories.’ Embrace the idea of repurposing, reusing and recycling to create content that's both timely and lasting. 

Learn to support your story with data: use surveys and brief Q&As to collect data and encourage engagement along the way. Be sure to link responses to internal sales and marketing channels by tying their answers to content or even products that match their needs. Finally, for account based marketing opportunities, consider leveraging your current or potential customer’s trigger events, such as a merger or new product in the marketplace and use those events to create relevant, targeted and timely content. 

#4: Distribution is Key 

When it comes to distributing your content, do so intelligently. Before any content is presented to your audience, make sure your team has a distribution plan and appropriate marketing mechanisms in place. Remember, the goal is to create useful content that brings in leads. 

For B2B content, consider distributing via LinkedIn and targeted industry websites and newsletters. For B2C content marketing, social media platforms such as Facebook, Pinterest and even Instagram are channels that should be explored and tested. A social media channel’s popularity can be largely generational, so having your customer personas mapped will help you identify the best social avenues to engage with prospects and customers. “A social media channel’s popularity can be largely generational, so having your customer personas mapped will help you identify the best social avenues to engage with prospects and customers.” 

Investigate avenues that are available to your organization for recycling, repurposing and reusing content: a digital newsletter can be a great way to repackage and extend the shelf life of content that might be buried on your website. For a content marketing campaign to succeed, it should be delivered in a mix of formats and channels to align to the myriad of different customer personas a company may be targeting. 

#5: Always Track, Measure and Drive 

Although it’s very important to track and measure your content marketing efforts, many marketing teams find this to be a significant challenge. Prior to launching any campaign, identify exactly what (and how) you are going to track and then begin measuring what is working—or not. You’ll begin to understand what channels and formats are delivering the results you crave— and you can kick the under performing channels (or formats) to the curb. 

Once you have started your content marketing campaign, the first thing you’ll want to track is unique visits. These will provide a standard measure of how many people have viewed your content within a specified time frame. The next thing you’ll want to measure is page views. High page view and unique visitor metrics generally mean that your audience is very engaged and returning regularly to view your content. Another metric to capture is your conversion rate, specifically your micro conversions and macro conversions. A micro conversion is any activity that the user takes towards your primary conversion goal, such as filling out a lead capture form when downloading a white paper. These customers may not have purchased a product yet, but a measureable journey has begun. Macro conversions are any user completing your ultimate conversion goal. These conversion goals vary but generally are a user purchasing from your organization. 

You’ll also begin to learn what other data you need to drive results: beyond user name, company name and title, what other data is necessary for you to qualify leads? Once you’ve started asking—and answering that question— you are ready to implement a lead scoring system so both marketing qualified leads (MQLs) and sales qualified leads (SQLs) have a clear destination through a lead nurturing program or even a first touch by the sales team. 

Transforming Digital through Account Based Marketing and Predictive Analytics

By Kevan Savage
Global Marketing Leader
Life Sciences Solutions Group
ThermoFisher Scientific






Marketing leaders continue to feel pressure to grow revenue through customer experiences across multichannel touchpoints, including digital commerce, social media, mobile, internal and field sales teams along with emerging channels such as IoT (Internet of Things).

With significant advancements in digital platforms, vast internal and external data, increasing competition and customer expectations abounding, what is today’s marketer to do? 

No longer are the days of prospect information sitting in piles of paper notes or business cards, it’s all digitized across CRM, marketing automation and many other technologies. The best part? It’s all available for marketers who focus on increasing the precision and scale of their digital initiatives.

One emerging yet validated strategy forcing both B2C and B2B digital transformation is the convergence of account based marketing and predictive analytics. The power of predictive analytics combined with the rigor of an account-based marketing approach can be a potent combination as detailed here:

How Predictive Analytics Empowers Your Account Based Marketing

It accelerates in-depth customer understanding

• Identification of new accounts and pre-buying signals – including company size, industry and other factors for determining the best fit for your business
• Watch listing prospects, high value accounts, and competitors – like most companies, your CRM is full of companies, predictive models allows you to do this
• Modeling for new commercial opportunities and intelligent engagement

It extends account coverage with your selling teams

• Engaging key accounts digitally at scale with customized content
• Delivering “always on” pre and post-sale, cross sell, up sell, and retention campaigns
• Finding in market buyers—dropping people in your lap who are ready to talk

It ultimately leads to: 

• Customers – Better predict what keeps them coming back or turns them away
• Websites and apps – Understand where and how to optimize and customize content for better conversion
• Clear Visibility to ROI - Predict the most effective allocation of marketing dollars
• Immediacy of insights to selling teams
• A steady flow of revenue protection campaigns
• A steady reliable flow of more mature, qualified opportunities
• Aligning sales and marketing around the accounts that matter most

Adopting Predictive Account Based Marketing At Your Organization

Prepare and Assess

• Assess your data management maturity – do you know what data sources are available to you? How are they structured? Can your digital platforms and teams easily access the data?
• Assess your martech foundation – do you have marketing automation, testing, content and targeting platforms in place? Are you able to track and measure on and offline results from your marketing activities?

Get Organizational Buy-In

• Identify a cross-functional team and establish goals - don’t underestimate the need for collaboration and alignment on the strategy. A strong alignment of sales and marketing is necessary for a team to grasp the full potential of predictive and account based marketing
• Empower your team members to identify high-impact marketing initiatives, set metrics to track business impact, secure any needed investments and include any stakeholders from product, legal or regulatory teams

Identify your Target Accounts and/or contacts 

• Don’t shoot in the dark. When setting up an effective account marketing and predictive analytics strategy, the first step is to identify who you are targeting 
• Using all of the data and technology available to you, this will help prioritize high-value accounts based on revenue potential, which are in market, or as well as other key factors including market influence and purchase potential

Understand your Targets

• Once you've identified your primary targets, you will need to find out more about them and what makes them tick. This can be achieved by investigating their internal structures, taking a closer look at elements including key decision makers and main influencers 
• Once you're familiar with the core information relating to your target accounts, you will be able to segment them in the way you would a persona-based marketing strategy that allows you to reach multiple stakeholders
• If existing assets are available, consider creating custom experiences to reach a broad audience without struggling to keep pace with content production

Act 

• Define and personalize your content - deploy your sales and marketing plays - A truly successful predictive account based campaign employs valuable content that places focus on crucial business challenges your target faces on a regular basis 

       •   Use dynamic content in emails
       •   Use web personalization to increase campaign engagement
       •   Leverage paid media to extend account targeting across the web

• Consider this, some organizations develop work streams for joint account planning, deal identification and management, opportunity mapping, experience delivery and stakeholder management through social-mobile channels

Measure and Optimize

• Create an operational scorecard - Monitor progress in real-time, evaluate program performance, enable marketing and sales performance management, along with campaign ROI
• Don’t underestimate development of use cases and successes, communication is key to continue fostering alignment and fueling investment!
• Maintain agility – consider developing an active optimization cadence, isolating variables and making strategic adjustments across sales and marketing teams
• Product, Sales and Marketing achieve efficiency, greater visibility into the nature of their customers, and are rewarded as an integrated team on customer satisfaction and growth 
• Customers and prospects respond favorably to predictive account based marketing because they are served with information that is more personalized, timely, and relevant to their needs, and are therefore more likely to respond. Consider tying these initiatives into your NPS or CAS customer experience scorecards over time

As marketers gain more experience with the methodology, and both predictive and account based technologies become even more advanced, additional opportunities will emerge for both B2C and B2B marketers. There is no silver bullet. Enjoy the journey and most importantly, have fun!

Kevan Savage is the  Global Marketing Leader, Life Sciences Solutions Group, at ThermoFisher Scientific. In this role he is  responsible for brand, creative services, digital marketing, marketing insights and planning.

A Frost & Sullivan Market Insight

Digital Transformation Meets the Contact Center: 

What Companies Need to Know to Survive in a Digital World

Introduction

On the heels of the push to provide omnichannel customer care, we are witnessing an upsurge of business transformation unheard of five years ago. The focus is on growth, and in order to grow companies must embrace the change occurring in numerous technology segments. Amongst these are the Internet of Things (IoT), Big Data, artificial intelligence and machine learning, mobility and social networking. Enter Digital Transformation (DT); a confluence of technology advancements that drives changes in the consumer base, ignites rapid technology adoption, and opens the door to new business models. DT has the power to completely disrupt the way that goods and services are delivered. This onrush of change is challenging customer service and support organizations unlike anything that has preceded it. 

After years of belt tightening and consolidation, companies have woken up to find themselves in a new competitive environment of disrupted business models. New technology and a changing more empowered and knowledgeable consumer base is pressuring companies to closely look at the way they transact business. For CEOs this new reality is to embrace digital transformation or die trying. This market insight will examine the changes that digital transformation is having on customer care, technology providers, and the steps that forward thinking companies need to take to fully embrace it. 

Digital Transformation and Customer Care 

Frost & Sullivan defines Digital Transformation as the strategy and execution of harnessing digital assets and information across an organization, bringing all areas of the business into alignment with the needs of all stakeholders, including employees, customers, prospects, suppliers, distributors and partners. It is as much a mindset as it is a change in technology and its use. This is an age where customer loyalty increasingly is in question. Nowadays, consumers associate the brand with the experience forcing companies to innovate on how they engage, nurture, and retain customers. It requires a new way of thinking and the sometimes destruction of the status quo to create new models of engagement. On a basic level this means understanding what a customer is really trying to achieve and make it easier for them todo so, but also anticipate what they might need beyond that. On an organizational level it means understanding how every touch-point can be used together to deliver faster and better results and deeper more engaging customer interactions. 

How does this apply to customer care? A comparison can be drawn organizationally between the evolutions that have been occurring within the contact center and digital assets across an organization. In essence, digital transformation is to digital channels the way omnichannel is to all channels. Omnichannel customer care evolved from the maturation of multichannel customer engagement, in which the biggest challenge was tying together disparate interaction channels and silos of data to support a seamless customer journey. 

Digital transformation includes a broader perspective in order to:

• Improve customer and business experience 
• Foster innovation within the business 
• Add value to all stakeholders out of combined assets 
• Create new experiences to foster deeper customer relationships 

Digital transformation and omnichannel delivery also share something else as well. The second biggest challenge with omnichannel is gaining cross organizational support to make it happen. Too often newer channels, such as web or social, aren’t initiated from within the contact center. Creating an omnichannel strategy therefore entails getting buy in, support, and skill set from different owners to ensure all channels can work in concert for seamless customer journeys. It also involves taking resulting data from those journeys to analyze and provide continuous feedback for improvement. The same goes for digital transformation.

The Digital Connection 

Digital Transformation is not easy and it can be uncomfortable. It involves understanding the needs of prospects and customers, as well as the needs of different customer segments. What are they trying to achieve? Are customers young and tech savvy, older generation digital immigrants trying to embrace change – or not? Or are they a mix of both? Consumers want to know who they are doing business with. They want to know where products are sourced from, who businesses are partnering with and what they bring to the party. In essence they want to know why they should do business with you. Understanding the different profiles and needs of customers is even more important as the population ages, grows more digitally savvy and uses digital assets to bridge work and nonwork time. 

Frost & Sullivan’s 2015-2016 Megatrends series on “The Future of Work” shows that by 2025 Millennials (1981-2000) will comprise 48.3% of the workforce. Generation Z (2001-2015), who grew up as digital natives, will comprise 15% of the labor force. These populations work and play differently than prior generations. They are always on and socially aware. They blur the lines between work and non-work time, and increasingly are digital nomads - working from anywhere. Therefore, finding ways to connect with them as they move throughout their day is a crucial part of this transformation.

Transformation of the Customer Experience Starts at the Top 

The rising base of post Baby Boomers (Millennials, Gen X, Y, Z, etc.) consumes technology and services faster than any prior generation in history. Unlike prior generations, they grew up surrounded by increasingly complex technology. The most eye-opening difference is the relationship that has developed between consumers and their devices. While Baby Boomers were amazed by punch cards and Cray computers, computing power and applications now can be found on any wrist, or in every pocket or purse. New ways of accessing and consuming information has become the norm. These newer consumers instantly research any question or issue, often from mobile devices, and tend to troubleshoot before seeking help. They also eagerly discuss their issues and findings on social networks. 

However, it’s not just Gen X, Y and Z that is changing. As customers of all generations have become more informed, they also have become less patient and demand quick resolution to their issues. They seek transparency from the enterprises they do business with, and demand to know more about the relevancy and value of what companies are offering. More than ever technology change and innovation needs to be delivered from the top down. The chief customer experience officer of 2014 needs to become the chief digital transformation officer, chief innovation officer or chief innovation strategist of 2016. Innovation not supported financially, culturally, and organizationally, by the top, is doomed to stagnate. Innovation and hence, digital transformation were top of mind in 2015. 

For instance, in KPMG’s CEO Outlook for 2015 Innovation was in the top five most critical challenges for CEOs, along with financial growth (30%), focus on operational excellence (27%), strengthening of brand (26%), expanding geographically (26%) and innovation (25%), and was again in the top five for strategic priorities in the next three years as well. 

New Ways, New Business Models 

New Business Models Creation of transformational business models that use digital assets can have a huge impact on customer service. It requires cross organizational support to go beyond that of omnichannel to address unmet customer needs and create new customer experiences. While small changes can create new customer experiences, large changes can create disruptive business models that radically change the way a business service is offered. 

For instance, Uber and Lyft revolutionized transportation, creating an amazingly different Customer Experience than consumers were accustomed to. Both companies disrupted an ageold business model in the process. Airbnb has done the same for the hospitality industry. Selfdriving cars with full-service dashboards, including virtual assistant capabilities, show the promise of transforming the automotive industry. In each of these cases, the new models provide a radically different user experience than before by anticipating customer needs. They are engaging. They address consumer pain points, such as the need for ease and convenience. Moreover, in some cases they decrease costs to the consumer.

Perhaps as interesting, is that the companies creating these applications have elevated consumers into the business model themselves with no start-up costs. Suddenly you or I could be a taxi driver or B&B owner, with no overhead and no education or experience. Market disruption, of course, is not without its downside. New models that lack regulation, can give unfair advantage to the disrupter. For instance, ride sharing app companies have skirted the city licensing requirements that taxis endure. These advantages can leave a traditional market caught unaware, driving companies out of a market. Despite this, DT within these markets is driving meteoric adoption unlike anything previously seen. 

Summary 

Digital transformation is a journey, but one that companies need to embark on if they are to survive not just the onslaught of traditional competition, but new market entrants. It is also a necessary component in keeping pace with the rapidly changing consumer base. While there are too many developing technology components to delve into in this insight, the following areas should be on the radar of any company starting on the digital transformation path: 

• Movement to the Cloud. The benefits of moving applications and infrastructure to the cloud has been well documented, as it provides an easier path to eliminating data silos, and smoothing customer journeys 
• Emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT). Companies need to investigate the impact that device connectivity, cloud computing, and advanced analytics can have on changing the Customer Experience 
• Security. Companies should keep abreast and plan for the ongoing security threats to digital assets 
• Big Data. As explained in Frost & Sullivan’s recent market insight “The Contact Center is Rich with Data – Why Add More?” Big Data is moving beyond the realms of data projects and into enriching what companies know about customers 
• Advanced Analytics. Companies are well advised to investigate how to make use of advancements in analytics. Understanding customer wants, needs, and behavior and predicting outcomes is key to owning the Customer Experience. Areas to investigate Digital Transformation Meets the Contact Center 6 include advancements in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and speech and text analytics
• Virtual Assistants, Intelligent Personal Assistants and Robotic Process Automation. Customers prefer to self-serve before contacting a business. Embellishing self-service options from the growing ranks of digital personal assistants can help differentiate and transform customer interaction
• Mobility. Companies need to meet customers where they live and that is on mobile devices. Extending business access to the device of choice for the consumer is key in changing the Customer Experience and cementing brand loyalty

Developing a holistic digital transformation strategy involves the blending of technology assets with a deep understanding of how consumers work and play. It involves not just the elimination of data silos to create seamless customer journeys, but in enriching those journeys. This can involve creating simply creating proactive rather than reactive customer interactions. Or it can go beyond to encompass data and interaction capabilities that hook in third party suppliers, partners or other participants to create entirely new Customer Experiences. Rethink service delivery. For instance, allowing a customer to place and order and click on a package tracking link to check on delivery is great. Providing video status of a car repair, or rewarding a customer of a concert ticket order with a free download of the artist’s song from a partner service, is better. Transforming the way a business thinks will transform the Customer Experience.