Month: September 2014

Richard Edwards (pictured) highlights the one essential ingredient that most business marketing/advertising communications lack – experience – and explains why businesses can harness experience as a marketing tool, no matter what they sell.
 
Businesses spend a lot on marketing and advertising. Advertising spend in the UK hit a new high of almost £14bn in 2013 and is set to increase to £14.8bn this year.

Therefore it would seem fair to ask whether businesses are getting their money’s worth. I doubt it is always delivering the best return on investment (ROI) possible. And the reason is, regardless of what method of communication businesses choose, most will miss out on an essential ingredient: experience.

Experiential marketing is important because it helps consumers contextualise the narrative behind your product and service.

Experiences offer sensory, emotional, cognitive, behavioural and relational values rather than functional ones. Incorporating these into your value proposition is likely to persuade a lot more people of the value of your brand than a purely rational approach.

What does an holistic experience look like?

Let’s take perfume as an example. Perfumes are, functionally speaking, a mix of ingredients that produce a pleasant smell to be sprayed in liquid form onto the skin.

But people don’t wear perfume for the constituent parts; they buy it for the experience, they buy it in the hopes that they will feel attractive and desirable and they buy it to give them a sense of confidence.

So how is this experience achieved? By creating an holistic experience of the product.

It starts with the advertising. Perfume ads always feature a model sauntering around looking sexy; there is usually a husky voice saying abstract words like ‘adored’ or ‘eternal’; and there is either a lot of colour, for fun and adventurous brands (think Joop!), or black and white, for brands that focus on being sexy and powerful (e.g CK).

Next comes the in-store experience. The bright lights of each perfume shelf, the imagery displayed around the perfumes – all are meticulously planned to continue the experience.

The bottle is a key part of the experience, from store to home. Some are rough and jagged, others are sleek and curved.

And every time the customer uses the product, they live that vision. Whether or not the perfume can do any of these things. They are not just opening a bottle of chemicals, they are unleashing the hypnotic power of scent from something resembling a mystical carafe!

Applications in other areas of marketing

“But my business is in accounting software, not sexy perfume. Surely we can’t apply the same method?”

Yes, you can. To help break it down, experiential marketing relies on bringing together five distinct dimensions into one holistic experience:

• Feeling – What will it feel like to use your product or service?
• Sensing – How do customers physically sense your product?
• Thinking – The experience still needs to take into account the rational, logic value of your product or service, and also needs to appeal to the customer’s sense of curiosity and intrigue. How obvious can you make the benefits of your product through demonstration? Can you hint at an untapped ocean of potential behind the short demo?
• Acting – What behaviours will your product help to facilitate? Changes in behaviour can be highly motivational and empowering. Think of Nike’s classic Just do it tagline.
• Relating – How does your product or service link the customer to others, to things or even to a projection of their future self?

Social media is an excellent tool for relating, as everyone in their friend group can see, feel and understand how the customer acts differently using your product – bringing the various dimensions together.

The best way of putting the experience together is face-to-face. For example, in the UK, the experience centre for BT Health at their Adastral Park facility shows off a new range of healthcare technology; Quatreus created a situational experience with everything from treatment rooms to the back of an ambulance immersing visitors in the real life environment, allowing them to engage practically with the technology and to experience the benefits for themselves.

As the old Chinese proverb goes: “Tell me and I’ll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I’ll understand.”

Richard Edwards is director, Quatreus – specialising in improving communications for internal and external audiences. 

Udesh Jadnanansing (pictured) explores the phases a business goes through to optimise its digital customer experience.

A customer experience strategy that is securely deployed on digital customer experience goes beyond installing a simple feedback tool on your website. It is not just about collecting feedback, but also about focusing on customer insight and follow-up action. Different organisations use customer feedback in different ways, such as data collection or turning insights into action. However, there are a number of clear phases that a business goes through to optimise its digital customer experience and its worth identifying and understanding these fully to ensure you get the result you need.

The customer experience is a hot topic, with a lot of time and energy invested in analysing it and ways to improve it. However, often, the customer experience is confused with user experience. It’s important to realise that these are two different things. Broadly speaking, user experience focuses on ease of use – for example, apps, websites and other digital channels. Customer experience is about the multichannel customer experience as part of the overall business strategy. It is based on the brand values of a company and ensures that all interaction points (touch points) are aligned to connect the ‘journeys’ that a customer goes through in order to reach a goal as well as possible.

With this in mind you should also look at digital channels. For example, within a website, a customer goes through several steps to achieve a goal. As an organisation you want this to go as smoothly as possible, and you want to excel on the points that are most important. If you have the digital customer experience approached from a user experience thought you will definitely miss a number of important issues.

Not just a ‘project’ 

It is important to remember that organising the digital experience is not just a side project – it needs to be part of the overall customer experience strategy. This means that the focus on the customer is not a ‘project’ for a single department, it is part of the overall business strategy and needs to follow the brand values throughout the organisation.

Customers are closer to your business than ever before, with a myriad of multichannel touch points, even traditionally offline outlets are embracing more and more online activities and increasingly digitized processes – just think of all self-service and online sales. Equally, when clients go through these processes but then have issues they will often go somewhere else. It is essential, especially in this digital age, to develop a loyal customer base, because customers can switch very easily. To secure loyal customers you must also align the customer experience in the digital channels as well as your stores and call centre. The interaction moments that customers have with companies form the full experience and customer feedback is the key metric to achieve a customer experience that goes beyond your channels.

Can you hear the voice of the customer? 

To develop a digital customer experience strategy it is useful to have insight into the phases a company goes through. Here are the typical phases:

Phase 1 – The Early Stage 

Initially many companies look at their website statistics. There are tools in place to see where the visitor enters and exits, which pages are doing well and which pages are not. There will probably be some A / B testing in place and they are mainly looking at click behaviour and quantitative research. In this phase, the organisation has not yet conducted qualitative research because the current understanding is enough, according to the controller, or perhaps because there is no time at that stage. For example, an organisation knows where a visitor leaves the site, but not why and the focus is on numbers alone.

Phase 2 – The Traditional Route 

At this point, companies look beyond pure numbers and statistics. Here companies use one-time or periodical website questionnaires, for example as part of their customer satisfaction programme. We all know the long pop-up questionnaires with 20+ questions about ‘what is your age?’ and ‘why are you here?’ and ‘how would you rate these aspects of our website?’. Qualitative feedback and open comments are used, but not yet ‘in the moment’ as the customer is going through the process. Customer feedback is mainly used for general web-evaluation purposes, which has its uses but the end is not yet in sight.

Phase 3 – The Experimental Venture 

By this phase the link with real time feedback is in place. If, as in phase 2, a periodic examination is done (semi-annually or quarterly), the research results are too late. When a customer is unhappy, you are unable to restore the relationship immediately. And so there are now tools used such as a feedback forms on every page of the website, where customers can specify where they get stuck and are encountering problems. The company focuses on direct feedback from the customer, but the focus is still mainly on collecting feedback. This phase is not the final destination but it has the advantage that the costs involved to achieve results do not have to be very high. There are several ‘plug-and-play’ tools available to install a feedback form on the entire website.

Phase 4 – The strategic approach 

When companies have mastered the digital customer experience, they arrived in the fourth phase. The company monitors all major online customer journeys and captures useful feedback on a structural and real-time base. Based on the collected quantitative and qualitative data, action is taken. Internally action is taken to participate in the continuous optimisation of digital channels and internal processes. Also the feedback loop is closed in a way that customers are engaged and they see something is happening with their feedback (ie. when an issue with the website or app has been resolved), this is conveyed back to the customer as closed loop feedback. The focus in this phase is turning insight into action.

A good analogy is to think of a traditional offline store. When people visit a grocery store and leave their shopping basket loaded with products standing near the freezer area and walk out, you can assume the store owner wants to know why. Is it the type of product? Is it too expensive? The owner does not wait six months before a survey is distributed and results are analysed. Instead, he continuously monitors where things go wrong (or very well) and he takes action. When you connect this concept to the current stage many organisations are in concerning their digital channels, there is an increasing distance between the customer and the company. It all may seem less personal. The bakery on the corner usually knows what customers think of his bread. But when thousands of customers are ordering products online on a daily base, then it’s a different story.

The tricky part of stage four of the maturity model is that this takes effort and commitment from within the organisation. The challenge of working with customer feedback is that it transcends the online marketing department. Customer feedback also plays a role in the sales department, customer service, the website management team and so on. Implementing a feedback form on your website is easy to do, but to work as customer centric organisation the voice of the customer should be heard in the entire organisation. To accomplish that there is a need for cultural change.

Udesh Jadnanansing is managing partner at Customer Experience Management software specialist Mopinion.  

There is an illustration to demonstrate the phases mentioned above – download it here.

Shweta Jhajharia (pictured) explains how every business can create an unlimited marketing budget for their product or service.

Is your mind-set holding back your marketing? Many business owners have three flawed beliefs that keep them from successful marketing:

1. Marketing is a big cost.
2. We should market to as many people as we possibly can.
3. We should ‘get our name out there’.

However, these beliefs are false and prevent businesses from effectively marketing their business.

Instead, every business owner should follow these seven steps and they’ll find themselves churning out marketing that brings in quality leads and – importantly – recovers its own costs.

Step 1: Define measurable marketing objectives (MMOs)

Put a number to it. Get as specific as you can about the who, where, what and how.

How do you determine that number? Start by aligning it with your Measurable Business Objectives (MBOs) – which should also be specific. These have to align, otherwise what is the point in your marketing?

Step 2: Tightly define your ‘Who’

You don’t need to figure out your target market but rather your target person. That is; who is the ideal person for you to sell your product to? What does this person like? What are the common problems this person faces? How does this person communicate?

Step 3: Define how you’ll communicate with them

You need to step inside your ideal target person’s shoes and figure out what their problem is.

An easy way to map this out is to use a graph that goes from imagined to immediate on one axis and towards and away on the other axis.

You then have four quadrants where you can fill in problems associated with this person. You should have roughly three in each quadrant.

1. Immediate Away – These are the ‘Frustrations’
2. Immediate Towards – These are the ‘Wants’
3. Imagined Away – These are the ‘Fears’
4. Imagined Towards – These are the ‘Aspirations’

When you map it out this way, you can then consider the different issues in each quadrant and how to approach them.

Step 4: Work out the acquisition costs

When you are creating a marketing budget, you must first think about the allowable budget to acquire a client.

You do this by figuring out the gross profit of your products. That is, taking the price that you’re selling your product for and taking away the variable costs involved in producing it.

That gross profit then becomes the absolute maximum that you have to spend in acquiring your customer.

Step 5: Choose your channel, offer and cost

If you aren’t a corporate yet, then your primary focus needs to be on brand activation, rather than awareness, i.e every piece of marketing you do should have a clear call to action (CTA) with a strong reason.

An example can be something as simple as: “Get a £200 voucher towards your next order when you call us at XXX.”

You then need to decide how much you’re spending and what channel you’re using. Use your allowable acquisition costs and compare it to the actual acquisition costs (the conversion rate of that channel).

From this, you can figure out which channel makes the most sense and which ones need improving.

Step 6: Measure the return on your marketing investment

Once you’ve chosen your channel and run a campaign, you then need to measure the actual return from your marketing investment.

You’d use the same calculations as you used to determine which channel was better, but with the actual numbers that have come from your campaign.
Importantly, find out what the final net position is. Is it positive? If so – then do it again and again and again. You have just created an unlimited marketing budget.

Step 7: Automate your unlimited budget spend

Now that you have found a strategy that works and continue over and over, it’s time to systemise it.

Explore automation tools and train your team so they can maintain the process with minimal input from you.

Once that’s sorted out you can then leave that to operate by itself, while you spend your time seeking out further sources of unlimited marketing budget.

Shweta Jhajharia is principal coach and founder of The London Coaching Group.