Five Things You Can't Afford To Forget About Customer Journeys

This is my attempt at describing the customer journey today. Obviously this varies by industry and organisation, but my hope is that it captures the essence of what has changed.

5 Things.

1. Marketing Spend has become more fragmented. 
2. Most media, even traditional, has some form of two way interaction.
3. There is a need for a centralised content hub.
4. There is no set destination that we are driving the customer to. They can buy anywhere.
5. People still listen to other people. That can never be underestimated and is the secret sauce in your customer journey.

Looking at this, how can organisations be anything but customer-centric?

Content Consumption Workflow

Content marketing is the new buzz word for digital marketers everywhere. But, for any organisation that does not have a clear content marketing strategy, how would one begin?

eConsultancy published an excellent article on Aug 27, which introduced the Content Marketing Team Matrix. If an organisation is serious about content marketing, then most of those roles need to be dedicated positions with their digital marketing team.

Obviously, all of the 16 roles would not exist on day one.

So, what is the minimal viable product for content marketing? Three clear priorities emerge:

1. Content - There must be some resources dedicated to creating great content. It is the fuel that keeps the engine running.

2. Data - Any efforts must be measured and fed back towards creating better content. We need people to measure the response that any live content generated, who it attracted and how they engaged.

3. Community Management - Someone needs to oversee that regular content is being delivered to the different customer communities. In the absence of a CCO (Chief Content Officer), you may want to begin with a team of community managers that can ensure the whole process works efficiently end-to-end.

Content is the most important part of the three, I can't stress it enough.

And if the processes you begin with revolve around delivering great content, then it may look like this. This is my Content Consumption Workflow, that can be the starting point for a content marketing team.

The most important roles in this workflow (in decreasing order of priority) are:

1. Content Creators - these are the people who can pull together internal and external content that your audience will find interesting and exciting.

2. Community Manager - The community manager gets this content to their community, which is made up of customers, non-customers and influencers. They can also play the role of content producer in the early days.

3. Listener - Your listener is also your data person. Their responsibility is to measure the responses from the live content and ensure the insights are making it back to the content creators. And that feedback is hopefully generating better content going forward.

4. Producer (optional) - The producer makes sure the content has the right format and look-and-feel. They will liaise with the community managers and make sure they are handed ready to publish content.

5. Curator (optional) - This role is really needed once you are generating a serious amount of content. They will be responsible for ensure the right content is passed on to the community managers that would find it most valuable.


Creating your process this way ensures that you have the right focus from day one - getting great content out there. Eventually, this will become more sophisticated over time and one day you will need an optimiser, data scientist, CCO etc. But for most of us, this should get the ball rolling quite nicely indeed.

Content Marketing: 3 Things Before You Begin.

One: Forget About Your Brand, Nobody Cares.

Yes, you have shiny brand objectives. 

But this isn't about you.

Content marketing is one of the most customer-centric activities your organisation can undertake. It defines why you do what you do. So, instead of focusing on the brand objectives, focus on your customers' objectives. It will always lead to better content.

And if it's the right content for your audience, it will align to the brand objectives anyway.

Two: Empathize With and Listen To Your Audience

Remember that this is a two-way communication channel. More often than not, I see organisations putting good content out there, but not bothering to sustain the conversation. Instead they focus on the next piece of content.

Responding and conversing with your readers is just as, if not more, important than the content itself. Make the most of this chance and learn what your customers really want. 

Three: If They Don't Trust You, Results Will Take Time.

For organisations that have an issue with image, or are in an industry struggling with trust (like banks), there is a long road to recovery. Content marketing is a step in the right direction. However, expect backlashes and negativity when you first begin.

Worse still, you may even get a disengaged audience. This is where being patient and continually churning out good content and following up on any responses, will build credit.

Remember, this isn't a touchdown. This is the 5 yard pass that gets you to first down.

The Perfect Storm of Digital Mediocrity

This is the situation that most organisations are finding themselves in. Let me re-phrase that. This is the situation that most organisations that are behind the curve find themselves in.

In the old world, the product teams were the decision makers. The big kahunas. They owned the vision, the features, the data, and channel implementation strategy. Marketing's job was to be the creative force behind content and execute that vision on the channels. And Digital was a footnote.

In the new world, Digital sales are overtaking physical sales. Customers are researching and making their decisions with the use of social media. Digital marketing and digital products bring delivery costs to zero which means more time has to be spent on the experience rather than the sale.

In this new digital landscape, there is a tremendous overlap between what Products, Digital and Marketing do.

All three believe they own the digital experience. 

All three believe they own the customer contact strategy. 

All three believe they own the packaging of the message. 

And that creates inconsistent customer engagement.

Any organisation stuck in this loop has to define the boundaries for digital media. And that can be done by defining categories of "work":

By defining where parts of your customer journey fall in the above, an organisation can start tackling the confusion and create consistent customer treatment. I look forward to your feedback and hearing if your organisation has found a way to remove the noise.

Claims for the digital future.

In the battle to become a great digital organisation, the fight is currently taking place on two fronts - capture as much data as you can and secondly, build a fantastic user experience.

The challenge with data is that most organisations end up becoming data junkyards - where mountains of data is waiting for a superhero analyst to come and make sense of it all. Most companies have started to tackle this in a "Wall-E"-esque way, where relevant insights about customers is pieced together, one product at a time. A few organisations tackle this by customer, piecing together insight on their most valuable segments and providing an awesome experience for those customers.

One thing still remains true: business intelligence is hard. Bloody hard.

Looking ahead at how technology and the market are moving, it is probable that business intelligence will become a lot easier. Three reasons come to mind:

1. Companies will provide Omni-channel customer experiences. Once you stop caring about what channel the customer is in, and you start linking the journey across channels, you take away the headache of building custom channel experiences. Your channels will be controlled in one place. Awesome.

2. Companies will become Device Agnostic. Once wearable technology becomes mainstream, you will no longer be able to keep up with individually tailored solutions for each type of device. Mobile, Desktop and Tablet - will all merge and eventually all you will care about is whether your one common user interface provides an jaw dropping experience or not. Double Awesome.

3. Companies will finally care about privacy and user preferences. The Internet is going the same route as the TV, mainly because it is a targeted media being used in an un-targeted fashion. We're only just realising that. And therefore, by providing the control to users, on customising their experience with your brand,  you will create more loyal followers. This makes it easy for you to send targeted messages to customers - when they want, how they want, and where they want.


The one question that remains is how quickly can you get to a state where channel, device or targeted messaging no longer matters? And what are the obstacles in your industry that are preventing you from getting there? Are you winning the battle today, but losing the war tomorrow?