Customer Engagement

Welcome to our Executive White Paper workshop! We have two publications under development. In the days and weeks to come, you will see these two publications take shape and grow into fully-developed Executive White Papers.

Building Operational Capabilities of Customer Engagement:

How enterprise marketing-operations integrate traditional and online marketing processes with social media, networked supply chains, and the Web ecosystem.

OUTLINE

I. Marketing Trends

• North Star for marketing: How does this benefit the customer?
• Customers experience time-to-value as time-to-satisfaction with greater certainty and trust.
• Marketers focus on time to market and use operational capabilities to speed products and messaging to the market
• Three large trends now drive customer engagement:
  • Integrated multi-channel marketing
  • Process innovation
  • Web ecosystem strategy
• CRM systems do not yet connect to four critical accountabilities of marketing operations:
  • Multi-channel marketing analytics that include Web analytics and social media monitoring.
  • Messaging in newsletters, catalogs, direct mail, and web sites
  • Content management systems and workflows
  • Execution systems such as e-marketing, e-newsletters, and promotional platforms.
• Pivotal insights:
  • Market realities now demand that firms execute breakthrough engagement strategies that satisfy consumer requirements and their desire to interact, collaborate, and share their insights, wins, and expectations with other consumers.
  • Engagement means picking up where advertising and search engine marketing leave off.
  • Successful execution of engagement strategies will enable mid-level marketers to rise quickly through their organizational ranks, or find even more lucrative opportunities and creative challenges elsewhere.

II. Breakthrough Engagement Strategies

• Engagement must address needs and expectations of:
  • New buyers, returning buyers, and premium-profit customers — customers at key phases of the customer lifecycle model
  • Communities and social networks that intercept, interpret, and alter corporate and brand marketing communications for other members of the community and markets at large.
  • Partners of a business ecosystem that support or provide critical services to an engagement strategy.
• Effective engagement requires mastery of analytics, messaging, content management, and execution systems.
• Development of a breatkthrough engagement begins with three process or lifecycle models:
  • Integrated buying funnel that depicts the accountabilities in five phases of the customer-making process:
    • Targeting and segmentation of addressable markets
    • Prospecting and lead generation
    • Nurturing of decision influence teams
    • Closing the sale
    • Servicing accounts for success and profit maximization
  • Customer-brand interaction model that depicts phases and contexts for engagement, inducing participation, trust, and the sharing of truthful information.
  • Engagement cycle that depicts the seven phases:
    • Engagement theaters that present web content within a context relevant and users
    • User reactions that include reading, clicking through to the next page, exiting, or, worst of all, bouncing off without doing anything.
    • Behavioral data that includes IP addess and whatever information gleaned from cookies (site-installed or those provided by advertising networks)
    • Analytic insights tracking named users, page-consumption patterns, and individual subscriber preferences
    • Content-user requirements defining required changes and additions including new answers to failed search requests for content or answers.
    • Content optimization that includes text mining, symantic tagging, facetted taxonomies, and incentives for progressive, opt-in disclosures of personal information.
    • Contextualized content including faceted search, dynamic navigation, and contextual presentation of page content, related topical pages by category, and personal histories of page visits from prior sessions.
• Successful execution of engagement embraces the following principles:
  • Get, keep, grow (mantra from Peppers and Rogers)
  • Systems-based approach not mash-ups of point solutions and labor-intensive workflows
  • Marketing operations must evolve into IT service management
  • Customer lifetime value entails hundreds of engagement cycles