The Customer Journey

The Chinese philosopher credited with founding the philosophical system of Taoism said, “The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.”

So much of the customer journey has changed with the adoption of smartphones and mobile computing over the last five years.  22% of the global population owns a smartphone or connected device and this growing trend has shifted the balance of power from brands to consumers.

68% of connected consumers tend to trust the opinions and reviews that others post online, according to research from Nielson.  This has an immediate impact for every industry.  As evidence of this, a Harvard Business study that covers seven years of Yelp reviews concludes that a one star bump in a restaurant’s overall rating (based on five stars) impacts revenue 5%-9%.

You can’t ignore a prospect without risking a blow to your reputation and business.  Consumers have a loud voice and they’re willing to flex their muscles to make sure that they are heard.

The paths that your customers take are not linear and what they expect on their journey is a personalized experience.  They’re willing to provide personal data to brands, but brands need to be able to aggregate, synthesize and convert that data into meaningful experiences that deepen the relationship.

Understand that first step in the journey you want your customers to take and start thinking about how you’re going to build lasting, meaningful relationships.

Social Drip and Big Data Working Together

Targeted sharing is a “peer-to-peer digital persuasion tool” which was deployed during the final weeks of the presidential campaign to help get out the vote and reach 18-29 year-old voters. The Obama campaign used the technique to target a user’s friends and to encourage them to get to the polls and vote.

The key with this specific example of social marketing is that many folks who registered for the Obama campaign Facebook App allowed the campaign access to their list of friends and the campaign was able to cross-reference that data with their own data on those users’ friends. Connecting the two pieces of data allowed the campaign to figure out which content to share with a user and which of their friends that user should share the content with. The campaign mentioned that 85% of people 18-29 were a friend of a friend of Barack Obama.

This is a great example of the raw power that social media has for marketers.

Persuading someone to perform their civic duty is much easier to do than convincing them to buy a product.

Targeting users based on certain characteristics has always been a fundamental technique that marketers employ to relate with customers more intimately and increase the chances that a message connects. With social media, this has been difficult to do but the payoffs are now materializing for marketers.

For brands, this example would be quite sophisticated, as you’d need to have data on quite a lot of people and also have access to a customer’s data on Facebook for the technique to work at scale—not to mention a call to action to make it payoff. The campaign had 1 million fans on their FB app and the average person has 190 friends.

Custom Audiences, which is a feature on a much smaller scale, just launched on Facebook. It allows brands to target a specific group of users with whom they already have a relationship with, on or off Facebook. This feature lets brands target customers by email, phone, or Facebook ID number. A brand can upload their list of users and select those that they’d like to target. This provides marketers more flexibility to segment and target audiences with dynamic content specific to their wants and needs—and even their purchasing habits.

This creates options for brands that have detailed records of their customers and want to be able to communicate with them through Facebook.

The added benefit to this type of marketing is that individuals that already know your brand are going to be more receptive to your messages and that increases the likelihood that there will be spillover into their friends’ newsfeed.

Many brands that were slow to the game on Facebook will now have an easier time catching up on the social platform.

In the end, brands won’t increase their marketing budgets to accommodate these new channel features, they’ll siphon money away from existing channels. The real question is which channels will suffer?

My opinion, new technology only has a solid payoff until everyone saturates the channel.

Changing the Game: Social Influence & Engagement

In a recent Forrester report, How Social Media is Changing Brand Building, they report that 93% of marketers polled agree that they need to “reinvent their brand building strategies as a result of digital innovations like social and mobile.”

If you look at your social strategy as something that has to be measured you may be missing the bigger picture.  Social is about what it forces you to do on a daily basis—evolve the conversation that surrounds your brand.

To position your brand in traditional channels requires a well thought out message and some creative combined with good placement of the message.  If you approach social marketing that way, you’ll be missing the biggest part of the process. The context of the conversation has to have a comfortable flow and “content, in the right context is ultimately king,” says Deanna Brown, CEO of Federated Media Publishing.

You have to put more time into building the content that will fuel your conversation because a social effort requires you to continuously engage your customers or audience. The conversation needs to be anchored down with substance then expanded with conversation.

To give you an idea how important content is, in a WSJ article about GM, it’s noted that GM spends $3 producing content for every $1 they spend promoting that content on Facebook.

Once you get into a rhythm of producing content that your audience consumes and you understand how they engage with your brand based on that content, those insights can conveniently be incorporated into other marketing channels such as e-mail, website, SEO or banner ads.

What we’re now learning is that social media isn’t a channel that is going to drive transactional sales, as noted by an IBM report discussing referral business on Black Friday.

When evaluating social media, stick to the idea that it’s primarily a channel that will help you reinvent your brand and not a channel that will help you drive transactional sales. If you focus on the brand, the sales will come.

Where Good Ideas Come From by Steven Johnson

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