The New Content Marketing: Mass Customization

In my last post, I stated that the standard B2B content marketing model is in need of improvement. This is because everybody is doing the same thing, creating the same kinds of content, and filling up prospects' email inboxes with it to the point where it's now just so much noise.

So, what's my idea for cutting through the noise? How would I suggest we change the game?

'Case Study': Marketing IBM's EMM Suite

First, let me lay the foundation with an illustration. Let's look at IBM, specifically their Enterprise Marketing Management (EMM) suite, and let's assume that their marketing efforts have attracted a web visitor from American Express.

On the EMM web page, they offer case studies for Citrix, Land's End, Seton Hall University, and Wehkamp. Well, American Express is not an enterprise software provider, a clothing retailer, a university, or a Dutch mail order company. By making these case studies available to an American Express lead, they're hoping that that person will be able to see a little of her own problems and challenges in one of those stories.















They also have some good video content within this section of their website, and repeated on their YouTube channel. For instance, here's a six minute overview of their Digital Marketing Optimization Solution. Again, in this video, they're using data from an activewear retailer, which is not American Express's business.

So, while IBM has published some solid content about their EMM suite, there is a potential communication or engagement disconnect with most visitors, since most visitors won't be in the small handful of verticals represented in the content.

(Another problem with this site is one of the most common that I see in B2B technology marketing. The entire language of the EMM home page, and much of the site, is in terms of solutions, not problems. This requires the web visitor to already have gone through the mental analysis of their problem to have arrived at a solution, but not all have progressed that far. If I have knee pain, I don't search out an arthroscopic surgeon because I don't yet know that I need surgery. I search out a doctor that will help me understand the cause of my knee pain and suggest possible solutions. This is a topic for a future post, however.)

One of their competitors is Adobe's Marketing Cloud, who have at least attempted to engage more directly with their visitors. For instance, they have a section of the page that speaks to specific job titles:

Adobe also has a series of pain-type statements on the top panel, like "social media is worthless," "half your ad spend is wasted," "marketers hate big data," and others. While these may not match any particular visitor's pain, at least they're attempting to move ahead of solutions and more into needs.

So what is IBM to do, given the following constraints?

1. They don't know what company a given visitor is from, or what their particular needs or problems are.
2. They can't publish content for every vertical.

Marketing Mass Customization

My vision for the next generation of content marketing is a system that delivers content customized for each individual visitor. The next wave of B2B content marketing should be marketing mass customization.

Mass customization is a manufacturing concept that was developed in the early 1990s that described the ability to manufacture products fully customized for individual consumers at near-mass-produced costs. The technique relied on advanced technologies, like computer-aided manufacturing, interactive configurators, and automated inventory control systems. Dell, for instance, enables something like this in their PC ordering process.

How would marketing mass customization work? How would IBM be able to provide customized content to each individual visitor? Remember, this is my vision for where content marketing should go, but while that capability may not exist currently, it's certainly not far off because the underlying technologies are already here.

Let's look at constraint number one, above. IBM doesn't have a crystal ball to determine who's visiting their site, but they really don't need one. With IP lookup techniques, supplemented with a few databases, a fairly rich profile of the visitor can be developed. Several companies like NetFactor provide such a service.

The IP identification can be used to quickly determine what vertical the visitor is in, which can then be used to customize the presentation of the home page. This customization can be as simple as highlighting one case study or video over others on the page. In the case of the American Express visitor, IBM could provide material relevant to financial services companies. For instance, they could presume a set of likely challenges that American Express faces, like customer churn, for which they have targeted content on.

In addition to not necessarily knowing a visitor's needs, even IBM can't publish content for every vertical, as I noted in the second constraint. Dealing with this requires some cleverness, but it is possible to address that. Here's an example. There's a bright young company, FlixMaster, that's enabling "creators to build dynamic, interactive videos with drag-and-drop ease." Be sure to watch the demo video to understand the implications of what they do.

What that means for IBM is that their video that I highlighted above could be restructured to be much more customized to each viewer. The video, at six minutes, is too long and contains too much information, anyway. What if, after a brief intro, the video offered the website visitor a couple of different options for aspects of EMM that she might be interested in? Not only does the visitor get to see just what she is interested in, but she also tells IBM, through analytics, what that is.

The Foundation of Marketing Mass Customization is Here

Clearly, full marketing mass customization is not here yet, but as I illustrated, the building blocks are. My vision for next-generation content marketing is that every visitor to a website, or every reader of email, gets a unique set of content that specifically addresses their needs and problems. That's how marketers can cut through the noise of all of the marketing messages our audience receives.

(Stadium chair provided by kongsky and crystal ball by digitalart, both at freedigitalphotos.net.)

Moving Beyond Content Marketing

I went to bed last night thinking about a question. I'll share the question in a moment, but first let me say why I went to bed thinking about a question.

It's fairly common for me to go to sleep considering some particularly challenging problem. I find that the time before I'm fully awake can be a time of imaginative free-thinking that can lead to creative solutions. It's one of the ways that I solve problems. Other times that I find to be productive for problem-solving thought include when I'm in the shower, or when I'm out on a long, exhausting bike ride. When I empty my mind of other thought, either through exhaustion, or snoozing, or similar activities, I can typically achieve some clarity on thorny questions.

The question I was noodling last night was this. The standard B2B marketing success playbook looks something like this:

1. Create various forms of content:
• Thought leadership pieces on where your industry is going
• White papers addressing particular challenges in your customers' environments
• Case studies describing how your product or service improved your customers' business
2. Make that content visible through a wide variety of channels, frequently behind registration walls:
• Social media channels
• On the company website
• In email newsletters
3. Use the gathered email addresses from registrations to feed a marketing automation process
4. Track user activity and adapt content to drive users to a conversion point

There are various challenges and problems with this model:

• Everybody wants to be the thought leader in their segment, but that clearly can't be the case.
• All customers get lots of these marketing automation emails.
• Recent data shows that while companies believe they're engaging customers, they may not actually be doing so.
• All companies within every segment are pursuing exactly the same playbook, which, in the mind of their consumers, leads to a lot of noise.

It seems to me a new playbook is needed to break through this noise. 

Since it's Super Bowl week, let me provide a football analogy. In the mid-1980s, San Francisco 49ers coach Bill Walsh introduced what came to be known as the West Coast offense, which emphasized short, horizontal passing routes in lieu of running plays in order to stretch defenses to open up long runs and passes. It was highly successful and changed the game for the next twenty years. Now, with the recent advent of quarterbacks capable of running as well as passing, like Cam Newton, Robert Griffin III, and Colin Kaepernick, the read option offense may again be redefining the game.

So what is going to redefine the B2B marketing game? That's the problem I went to sleep considering. What did I come up with? I have an idea, which I'll share in my next post, so please check back here in the next week or two, or subscribe in the box to the right so you'll be notified when I publish. In the meantime, if you have thoughts on this, please leave a comment.

(Images provided by freedigitalphotos.net. The sleeping man image -- not me, by the way -- is from imagery majestic, and the football is from Idea go.)

Digital Marketing is ... Marketing

I am a digital marketer. By that I mean that I use digital marketing tools and channels to promote products and services. These tools and channels include: SEO, PPC, display or banners, advanced targeting techniques, social media communications, social media advertising, remarketing, affiliates, analytics, conversion optimization, A/B testing, email, and marketing automation. But the most important word in the phrase 'digital marketer' is marketer, not digital.

What's important to me about these tools is not that they utilize cool, advanced technologies, and they're steeped in data, and they help automate or optimize complex campaigns or processes. Don't get me wrong, I'm an engineer by training and I LOVE all that stuff. No, what's really important about those digital marketing tools is that they help me market to today's consumer.

It's common for practitioners of digital marketing to get caught up in the tools, the data, and the technology, and forget the marketing fundamentals. But digital marketing is just a subset of marketing, and based on the same fundamentals.

What fundamentals? Well, the real basics, like the three Cs and four Ps:

For instance, the four Ps* define the product marketing mix, of which digital channels are a component. Digital technologies have different characteristics than traditional technologies, like greater speed and immediacy, bidirectional communication between the consumer and the company, rich data, and tremendous reach. But for the digital marketing mix to succeed, a solid understanding of the 3 Cs is required, and the market segmentation and targeting and the product differentiation and positioning derived from the 3 Cs analysis must all be properly implemented for the digital marketing to be successful.

This is why, when I'm approaching a new digital marketing problem, I always start with very basic questions, like who is the audience, what's the message and positioning, or what do we want them to do? For example, I once wrote a blog piece about a taco stand vendor who ignored these fundamentals when implementing a QR code on his stand, presumably because he thought that, in tech-crazy Boulder, Colorado, a QR code would be cool.

So when I call myself a digital marketer, what I really mean is that I'm a marketer that has a particular affinity for, and skill set in, the digital portion of the marketing toolkit.

*This presentation format for the four Ps is based on that presented in the excellent marketing text by Perreault, Cannon (@learnthe4ps, @teachthe4ps), and McCarthy, Essentials of Marketing. 

(Image courtesy of jscreationzs at freedigitalphotos.net)

Engagement Marketing, Revisited

It's all about data and testing

As you saw in my last post, I have spent some time recently discussing engagement marketing. At Burns, we defined engagement marketing as brands engaging customers and prospects when, where, and how those customers and prospects want to engage. It is an aspect of marketing that has been enabled and shaped by the rise and evolution of social media.

There is now some evidence that we may be missing the mark a bit on what it means for marketers to truly engage, or how customers interpret engagement.

First, Steve Olenski at Social Media Today wrote about a recent report from Forbes Insights and Turn called “The New Rules of engagement: Measuring the Power of Social Currency." His main conclusion is that this new report shows that what marketers interpret as customer engagement, and the metrics they use to evaluate it, is significantly different from how customers themselves define engagement with brands. He has written about this issue before, and now states that this "disconnect is alive and well and may even be widening."

You can read his well-written post in detail, but the report data below will quickly illustrate his point.

If you examine the first line of data, only 15% of consumers said they feel engaged with a brand when they share an ad, but ad or other content forwarding is a relatively strong influence on marketers' engagement measurement. This is an example of the data driving Steve's conclusion that there's a big disconnect between consumers' and marketers' views of engagement.

If you read all of Steve's post and the original report, you might simplistically conclude that consumers really just want two things: deals or promotions and funny ads. I'm being a bit facetious here, but you could certainly conclude that, as a marketer, you need to completely rethink what engagement really means and how you should measure it.

Not So Fast, Here's a Deeper Look at the Data

Courtney Livingston writes a great response to Steve's post, questioning the type of conclusion I illustrated above. Courtney states that if you look at all the data, including the chart I show above, there's actually a significant amount of correlation between the consumers' and marketers' responses. In the case of this chart, there a 0.5 to 0.75 correlation between the two response sets. That's a reasonable good correlation, and other data in the report correlates even better.

In other words, Courtney states that "marketers are headed in the right direction (maybe not on the right track, but not completely lost, either)." She goes on to reasonably state that, "As an action has more significance to a consumer, it should also hold more weight in a brand’s engagement measurement model." The question then becomes, how do marketers act on this data?

What's a Marketer to Do?

As I said before, engagement is an aspect of marketing constantly being shaped by the evolving usage models of social media, so as marketers we're only left with data and testing. In this case, the Forbes Insights report has provided a rich set of data from which we can form testable hypotheses. 

For instance, the report clearly highlights the relative importance of humor in ads, as compared to thought-provoking characteristics. (I have long been a proponent of using humor in digital marketing channels, even some that don't typically use it, like pay-per-click advertising. For example, I gave a webinar last year on Creative PPC techniques in which I highlight using humor to improve clickthrough rates.) This is an easily testable characteristic. You could run two separate ads, one thought-provoking and one humorous, in a variety of channels and measure their relative success using metrics appropriate to those channels. The aggregation of all of those metrics should provide some excellent insight to support or refute the report hypothesized importance of humor.

I'm a big believer in letting the data speak and testing, testing, testing. I'll be interested to see if anyone provides real consumer data to support or refute any of the report's conclusions.

(Image courtesy of adamr at freedigitalphotos.net)

I'm back! (Blogging, I mean.)

This blog has been effectively silent since December 2009, or three years. Why? Well, mostly because my blogging energy has been applied to developing content for my employers. If you look at all the material I have created over these three years, I certainly haven't been silent.

Here's a partial list of my work during that stretch. I either completely or mostly authored all of the pieces below:

Seminars, webinars, and university courses:

• Planning Your 2013 Marketing Budget

• Digital Marketing Overview

• Local Online Marketing

• Creative PPC Techniques

• SEO is Easy. Seriously.

Video blog posts:

• Engagement Marketing Defined

• Engagement Marketing: Never Stop the Conversation

Text blog posts:

• QR Codes: Don’t Forget Your Marketing Basics!

• Top 10 Usage Guidelines for QR Codes

• Problem-Solving via QR Codes

• FISA Cans CAN SPAM: Two Major Differences Between the Canadian and US Anti-SPAM Laws

Digital publications:

• 2012 Digital Marketing Trends Survey

• Achieving Goals With Engagement Marketing

Well, I want to re-introduce you all to this blog now because I'm going to start publishing here again. There are a number of topics that I'd like to explore independent of the context of a particular company, and this is the best place to do so. Hopefully, you'll enjoy the new content. Stay tuned ...

(Image courtesy of Just2Shutter at freedigitalphotos.net)

Rockets!

Wow, it has been over two months since I last posted. In some ways, I feel bad about that, but it's really just an indication of how busy I have been at Parallel Path.

Because of this busyness, I was determined to spend the Thanksgiving weekend 'unplugged' and not working, and to get in some quality time with my family. And it worked out just as I had hoped, with lots of throwing the football around, playing kickball, and generally goofing off. One of the highlights was on Friday, when the boys and I (and some other family members) spent the day shooting rockets. It was a beautiful, clear day with no wind; perfect for rockets.

As regular readers of this blog know, for many years I put on Big Science Saturday for the boys. That has waned quite a bit, but we still seem to find time for fun and practical applications of science, and launching rockets is a perfect example. We have been launching rockets (of theEstes variety) off and on for a couple of years now.

What was particularly fun about this launch is that we have started to experiment with getting the rockets to do fun things they weren't necessarily designed for. By doing so, I hope the boys start learning about some of the basic physics involved in rocket flight.

This weekend we experimented with launching an 'astronaut' in the rocket. The astronaut was made from Legos, and you can kind of see him in the lower left of

this photo (thanks to Pawel for all of the pics):

The Lego astronaut had his own parachute that deployed separately from the rocket's recovery chute. We then went through several launch cycles, first by Maddox:

... then by Ryan:

I'm not sure the boys learned much about rocket physics through the activity, but they did learn what happens when you don't put enough protective wadding between the rocket motor and your astronaut. We ended up with a very scorched astronaut dude:

Overall, a tremendous day.

More Mac Hijinks

Yes, yet another Mac vs. Windows post. Sorry, but I just keep stumbling across interesting stuff.

A while ago I posted on the Apple TV ads that beat up on Windows. Well, it turns out that Apple doesn't confine their shots to their advertising. I stumbled across a subtle shot embedded in my new Snow Leopard operating system update.

One of the few new (visible) features in Snow Leopard is that the cover flow view is integrated into the Finder window. This provides a cool way to quickly view the files and subfolders in a folder. Here's an example:

Today I was looking for some documents on our corporate network using this Finder view. When I viewed the network, I saw several servers in the Finder window:

The first couple of times I saw this view, it didn't occur to me that these images were intended to represent Windows servers. When I realized this, I wondered what the text might be on the screens, so I blew it up:

You may not be able to see the detail, but it's the Windows blue screen of death!

They never miss an opportunity to take a swing. I love it.