The key to RMN’s success is how interactions with brands can enhance the shopper experience. Digital media experts at Kroger and The Home Depot have spent years developing media networks keeping this key point in mind. If a branded ad interrupts the customer’s journey, it doesn’t help the brand, the retailer or, most importantly, the customer.

Helping when customers research products

Where can brands get involved in the customer journey? At The Home Depot, a supplier approached the retailer about retargeting customers on social media. Soon, the company created opportunities for other suppliers to deliver ads that drove customers to the retailer’s product pages.

This was back in 2018. In 2019, The Home Depot’s Retail Media+ (known as RM+) was launched. Brands now have opportunities to show ads on company owned properties, including homedepot.com, the retailer’s app, in-store and email, as well as offsite media channels like social and video.

“We didn’t want it to disrupt the customer experience,” said Melanie Babcock, vice president, Retail Media+ and monetization for The Home Depot. “Our customer spends a lot of time researching on our site before making a decision. They’re thinking about if they have the right tools, skills, time and capabilities for a project. You have a light to install, should you do it on your own? The consideration time is much less for traditional retailers.”

Because of this longer, more involved customer journey, the retailer decided  decided to let suppliers have the lion’s share of the RMN ad inventory. That means that most of the ads served to customers during their journey are endemic products, ones that can be bought at Home Depot.

“Onsight and in-store are very connected,” said Babcock. “We see that in our customers’ behaviors, and we wanted to be additive to that by keeping the customer in mind and not just monetizing the website. We’re bringing the supplier into the customer journey.”

Personalized precision with customers

Supermarket chain Kroger is another major retailer with a robust RMN, called Kroger Precision Marketing (KPM). KPM is managed under a wholly-owned subsidiary, 84.51˚.

“The common denominator is data science,” said Brian Spencer, KPM’s marketing director. “We have a legion of data scientists available under 84.51˚. There’s shelf assortment and other areas of personalization in our stores. That same talent base is what fuels the personalization behind Kroger Precision Marketing as well.”

Prior to starting its retail media business, Kroger built digital experiences for customers to search products, create grocery lists and receive digital coupons. These tools made it possible for KPM to introduce brands in a relevant way.

Unbranded search terms are 90% of the top 500 searches in Kroger digital touchpoints, Spencer said. That means many customers are looking for products without a specific brand in mind. Directing those customers to a specific brand or product is a logical next step in their journeys.

And, because digital customers are multi-taskers, they aren’t only looking for products available at a Kroger store. For instance, you could be planning a Super Bowl party and need to buy snacks. But what if you also are considering a new TV? Cases like that, but also many others, are where non-endemic brands fit in.

“As we explore non-endemic opportunities, top of mind is that this is activated in a way that isn’t intrusive or obnoxious to our consumers,” said Spencer. “If it’s something that makes sense for our shoppers, we’ll take a look.”

Expanding to offsite journeys

“Retail media data is very advantageous to all kinds of brands, particularly in the grocery category,” said Spencer. Grocery shoppers make purchases several times a month, and often multiple times per week. And these purchases cut across many categories. 

“That kind of information is obviously necessary for consumer packaged goods, but outside of CPG there’s greater interest because some of these non-endemic brands are looking for relevant ways to reach audiences,” he said. “Automotive brands or fast food brands, they may think of our data set as another way to activate across the open web.”

Offsite RMN opportunities are the fastest-growing area for KPM. Kroger has been a partner with streaming service platform Roku for three years. And this week, Disney Advertising announced a partnership with KPM for some Disney media properties, beginning with Hulu.

Dig deeper: CTV added to Kroger’s retail media network business

“Brands, but more typically agencies, are able to go in and activate programmatic display and CTV through a DSP of their choice, and set their own safety standards and activate through a self-service portal — and see sales results and optimize against in-store and online sales,” said Spencer.

“Retail media is more and more being considered as just media,” he added. “It’s more and more part of the total touchpoint consideration set that agencies are looking at. The traditional lines between shopper marketing and brand marketing are becoming more blurred.”

The Home Depot is also looking at how to expand RM+ offsite into CTV. It’s also piloting in-store video screens at 50 locations, currently, to see how shoppers’ digital journeys can be enhanced when they get to the store.

“We’re the last mile in advertising, which is always the most expensive part of the journey,” said Babcock. “There’s huge value to our supplier to connect to that customer and also to know more about that customer.”

The post How Home Depot and Kroger use RMN to improve shoppers’ ad experience appeared first on MarTech.

There are ways to use additional solutions, notably artificial intelligence and journey orchestration, to take your existing marketing automation approaches to the next level. 

Challenges with legacy marketing automation

Marketers have achieved amazing results with marketing automation in the past. But customers’ shifting expectations and behaviors are pushing traditional approaches to their limits. Brands that rely on marketing automation alone find engaging with active customers on multiple channels difficult. 

Personalization in most marketing automation platforms (MAPs) is limited to simple rules-based instructions (“if this, then that”). For example, if a customer abandons their shopping cart, send them a reminder email. Or, if a customer signed up for an email list, send them a welcome message. 

This approach doesn’t allow for complex variations based on the segment a customer might be in, their propensity to buy, their past individual behavior, or other factors. While some MAPs can technically achieve this, building all rule sets can make ongoing management nearly impossible and fraught with errors based on cascading dependencies. 

As customers demand more dynamic experiences, your marketing automation approach must be augmented. This is where customer journey orchestration and artificial intelligence (AI) come in. 

How journey orchestration augments marketing automation

Traditional marketing automation can still work well in providing timely and relevant communications when dealing with a single response channel such as email. But your customers don’t rely on a single channel to interact. Instead, they are channel-switching and expect brands to keep up. 

Additionally, most marketing automation workflows are generally simple and rarely incorporate complex branching, particularly across multiple channels. 

This is where customer journey orchestration (CJO) can save the day. CJO was built for multi-channel communication. Thus, emails, SMS messages, mobile app push notifications, website landing pages and social advertising can be hyper-targeted.

Through branching, a series of actions can result in vast differences for one customer versus another, even if they are enrolled in the same journey. 

This way, CJO boosts your marketing automation, aligning with your customers’ growing expectations about receiving content, offers and experiences when, where and how they want them. 

Dig deeper: What is customer journey orchestration and how does it work?

The impact of AI on marketing automation

Since most marketing automation relies on a simpler, rules-based approach, AI plays a key role in augmenting these decisions in coordination with or separate from customer journey orchestration. 

Below are some ways AI can take your marketing efforts beyond your current marketing automation methods. 

Dynamic segmentation

Finding patterns in vast amounts of structured and unstructured data is cumbersome for humans. AI, on the other hand, can do this well. AI-based machine learning algorithms help you glean audience insights, turning formerly static audience segments into more dynamic ones.

These dynamic segments can group customers based on buying patterns or behavior that enable personalized content, offers and experiences to reach the right person at the right time on the right channel. That’s marketing gold. 

Propensity calculation and predictive analytics 

Adding AI capabilities can significantly enhance your performance if your MAP uses fairly simple if/then logic to send messages and take action. You can use propensity scoring and predictive analytics to route the next best action or offer to an individual. 

Personalized content generation 

The promise of generative AI tools is that content, including text and imagery, can be tailored on a one-to-one basis for the individual rather than everyone in a large audience segment receiving the same thing.

While there are hurdles to be overcome in this area, truly personalized content and images can lead to greater relevance, loyalty and lifetime value.

Dig deeper: How AI can help your marketing right now

What needs to change to be successful 

To successfully augment marketing automation with customer journey orchestration and AI, marketers must remember these three impactful points. 

Personalized journeys

Ensure your approach is customer-centric. Consider the experience an individual may want versus a one-size-fits-all approach that lumps many customers into the same buckets.

While a segmented approach is better than sending the same message on the same channel to everyone, it still doesn’t individualize the timing, channel, content and offers nearly enough to meet rising consumer expectations. 

Integrations

Better integrations can have a positive impact when using journey orchestration and AI to augment your marketing automation. 

Platform integrations

To take advantage of a true multi-channel customer journey orchestration approach, you will need to integrate several platforms in ways they most likely have not been integrated. Fortunately, because this is a core functionality of CJO tools, this can be straightforward in most instances. But, as with any integration, there can always be unexpected hitches. 

A common way to start is to use an iterative approach that builds toward an omnichannel setup, one system and platform integration at a time. This makes it easier and quicker to implement the first integration, letting your teams learn more quickly to become more efficient and produce effective results as time progresses. 

Data integrations

Platform integrations will also require your data sources to be more unified. You must ensure you are:

• Reaching the right customer on their platform of choice.
• Informed by the relevant purchase and behavioral data across multiple internal systems and platforms.
• Augmented by other demographic or psychographic information that may be beneficial. 

As you may well know, integrating all these data sources can be daunting for even the most sophisticated organizations. 

Team integrations 

Just as platforms and data can be siloed, your marketing teams can often be just as disconnected. Your email marketing team needs to coordinate with your mobile app team and SMS team and so forth throughout the organization. 

Doing CJO well and using AI to the fullest means that teams work together from the initial campaign and content creation to the measurement and optimization of your collective efforts. 

Omnichannel approach 

Finally, it is time to evolve your customer experience approach toward omnichannel and customer-centric instead of reactive and marketing-driven. Customer journey orchestration was built to be multichannel, and AI applications thrive in processing structured and unstructured data sources.

Improving upon your marketing automation means keeping these approaches in mind as you find more effective ways to provide tailored customer experiences. 

Conclusion

Using customer journey orchestration and artificial intelligence-based approaches to augment your current marketing automation efforts can dramatically impact your ability to deliver valuable experiences for your customers and your brand. 

The post Using AI and journey orchestration to boost your marketing automation appeared first on MarTech.

He continued, “If we simply were able to renew 10% of our customer base, we would drive $40 million in incremental revenue this year.” He had done his homework and got the attention of everyone in the room.

Data disaster

While he was right in his analysis, the biggest obstacle to focusing on the customer base was the state of their customer data. To put it nicely, and by their admission, it was disastrous. However, his point was well taken. They could focus on new customer acquisition, which is essential, but they had a more significant opportunity if they focused their marketing efforts on their current customer base.

And this is where I see many marketers struggle — engaging customers across the full customer lifecycle. So often, when I speak with CMOs, they focus on demand generation solely in the context of new customer acquisition.

What they are missing is maximizing customer lifetime value (CLV) which can only be done if you build the relationship at every stage of the customer journey and continue to nurture that relationship after the initial purchase. (Note: Engaging customers throughout the entirety of their lifecycle actually begins before they buy anything.)

Defining the customer lifecycle 

Much has been written about the customer lifecycle, and many marketers have documented the various stages that are a part of that lifecycle. I use my own (represented by the image below) with clients.

To engage, nurture, convert, retain and grow your customers, there has to be a concentrated effort at every stage, which requires a unification of marketing, sales and customer success/support. 

Orchestrating the customer journey 

I have spent a lot of time working with clients to develop and implement their customer journey orchestration approaches. (I prefer the term “journey” over “lifecycle.” Lifecycles indicate that there is an end, which is not something you want for your customers.) Whenever I talk with a prospect or client about orchestrating the journey, they immediately discuss the technology.

I am a big fan of technology, but it is not a strategy and will not get you any closer to end-to-end customer engagement. Technology’s role is to enable your orchestration strategy — that’s it. You should not invest in any more technology until your customer journey engagement strategy is defined. 

So if customer journey orchestration is not a set of technology, what is it? Here’s the definition I use: 

• “Customer journey orchestration is a carefully defined strategy that delivers meaningful customer engagement at every stage of the customer journey. This strategy is then enabled by technology.”

Dig deeper: Customer journey orchestration: What it is and why marketers should care

This time with feeling

The keyword in my definition above is “meaningful.” In B2B, it is often easy to lose sight of the fact that we do not market, sell and support accounts. We work with people, and people want a great experience at every stage of their journey. We demand this in our consumer lives, and that human desire for a great experience does not disappear just because it is in a B2B context. 

Organizations must understand what customers want to feel and experience at each stage. This becomes all the more challenging in B2B, where you typically have multiple roles engaged at various parts of the journey, all with different perspectives, motivations and behaviors. This is why marketing should lead the way in developing buyer insights to inform the strategy for every stage of the customer journey. 

These insights should include personality traits and an understanding of what customers expect and desire from the brands they engage with. How do you collect these insights?

• Talk to your customers and ask them. If this is not a continual practice in your organization, I highly recommend you make it one. 
• Sales and customer success have a treasure trove of insights that they can share to help shape your strategy. 
• Research into the industries in which your customers operate will provide additional information. Keep in mind that this is not a one-time exercise, it is a continual process.

Making the case for full lifecycle (meaningful) engagement 

One thing I often hear from executives is how to justify the cost of full journey engagement. The first step is changing the language from cost to investment. And the investment in delivering meaningful engagement will certainly pay off. A Harvard Business Review study revealed the following for both transaction-based and subscription-based businesses: 

• Transaction-based: Customers with the best past experiences spend 140% more than those with the poorest past experiences.
• Subscription-based: Customers with the best past experiences have a 74% chance of remaining a member for at least another year; customers with the worst experiences have a 43% chance of being a member one year later. In fact, those who gave the highest CX scores were likely to remain members for another six years.

This significant ROI proves engaging and delivering a world-class experience at every stage of the journey is now a bigger competitive advantage than price or product. 

To begin this process, start with: 

• Mapping out the full customer journey (use the graphic above if needed).
• Identifying the customer roles that are active at each stage.
• Defining the experience they expect.
• Aligning their expectations to the roles in your organization responsible for the delivery of that engagement and experience. 
• Identifying technologies that will be needed to enable the engagement strategy. 

In 2015, I wrote a book titled “Driving Demand.” While plenty from the book still applies, I realize that it is not enough for organizations to simply drive demand for their product or services. To achieve growth, they must look across the full spectrum of their customer lifecycle and drive meaningful engagement. This is when organizations win and have customers that become advocates.

Next month, I will write more about the challenge of retention and how organizations can improve retention by focusing on a key segment of the journey. 

The post Why B2B brands must focus on orchestrating meaningful customer engagement appeared first on MarTech.

Two years after the Covid-19 hit, the customer split between online and offline channels was at 61% and 39% respectively versus 56% and 44% in 2020, according to Salesforce’s 5th State of the Connected Customer Report.

Providing a seamless customer experience across the many variables inherent with a multichannel customer journey requires a significant pivot in how businesses deal with customers. Customer Journey Orchestration (CJO) is designed to help you leverage customer data to deliver personalized experiences regardless of when, where, or how a customer interacts with your business.

What is customer journey orchestration?

Customer journey orchestration uses data and technology to determine the best way to interact with each customer across the customer buying journey. It leverages powerful data analysis and automation to understand each customer’s behavior, preferences, and purchase history. It spans online and offline channels, ensuring a good experience no matter how or where a customer interacts with you.

The goal with CJO is to recognize a customer’s needs at every stage of the buying journey and deliver the most relevant content, messaging, and service to move the customer further along in their buying cycle.

The Customer Data Platform (CDP) Resource defines CJO as: “The process of delivering personalized experiences along the customer journey that lead to an optimal next step.”

Gartner defines the “customer journey” as “a tool that helps marketers understand the series of connected experiences that customers desire and needs — whether that be completing a desired task or traversing the end-to-end journey from prospect to customer to loyal advocate.”

Why marketers should care

Today’s customer journeys are undergoing a major transformation as experiences become more hybrid and digital becomes more embedded into how customers purchase products or services. 

Customers jump from device to device and channel to channel which makes the journey hard to predict. To keep these journeys seamless, marketers must be able to gather and interpret customer data from across channels.

Customer journey mapping is a part of this process. It helps marketers predict, visualize and optimize the customer buying journey for the various channels.

Who uses CJO tools?

CJO tools benefit many customer-facing teams within an organization, but it’s not just your marketing and sales teams that will work with (or be impacted) by this technology. Here’s a breakdown of how different departments use and work with CJO tools:

• Marketing/Experience: CMOs, CXMs, marketing directors, analysts and planners use CJO platforms and tools to develop and execute customer-centric campaigns, engage with customers in real-time, analyze data and performance metrics, and measure the impact of each interaction.

• Sales: Sales teams, particularly in B2B, use CJO tech to connect with prospects across a multifaceted buying journey, coordinate messaging with marketing teams, optimize the sales approach, and keep messaging and communication consistent across channels and interactions. 

• Customer Service: Customer service teams use CJO tools for responding to customer queries, closing service gaps, capturing valuable feedback and providing appropriate self-service options for customers who want to solve issues on their own. 
• IT/Development: IT and development teams work on the back end to create seamless integrations with other systems, implement and optimize software, align the CJO infrastructure with business objectives, and ensure there’s adequate compliance and security procedures in place to protect customer data.
• Executive/Leadership: Achieving seamless customer journey orchestration is a big endeavor both in terms of technology and company philosophy. You need leadership to steer the ship by aligning  CJO initiatives with short and long-term objectives, understanding the potential of the technology, making the appropriate investments in budget and staffing, and providing ongoing support as the technology is onboarded and implemented.  

What technology enables CJO?

CJO is a data-driven approach to marketing, so it makes sense that the tools and tech that enable it focus on capturing, unifying, processing, and analyzing data. But there’s more to providing a seamless customer journey than just data. Here are some of the tools involved

• Customer data platforms: Platforms like Segment and Optimove provide an aggregated view of customer data and help marketers create integrated customer profiles that can be used for personalization and segmentation.
• Marketing automation tools: Customer journeys require automated communication. Tools like HubSpot and Marketo are used to create personalized messaging based on customer behavior, preferences and other data points.
• Customer relationship management (CRM) software: The relationship between customer and brand continues even after the buying journey has ended. CRM platforms like Salesforce and SugarCRM can manage relationships, track customer interactions and activity, and foster ongoing engagement. 
• Analytics platforms: Data analysis, reports, and insights are typically baked into marketing automation tools, but standalone analytics and software like Google Analytics, Mixpanel, and Adobe Analytics can dig deeper, providing insights for every team involved in the CJO process.
• Journey mapping tools: Customer journey mapping tools like Lucidchart and Smaply help you visualize the customer experience with templates, diagrams, and graphics that produce a visual representation of the customer journey.  
• Customer Journey Orchestration Platforms: Enterprise CJO platforms like Alterian and Cheetah Digital bundle many of the capabilities from the above tools into one tool. Typical CJO platform capabilities include data gathering across channels/touchpoints, AI/ML-driven analysis and testing, customer journey visualization (e.g., journey mapping), and real-time campaign/journey activation (e.g., initiating chats, serving ads, etc.)

How does CJO help marketers?

Good experience matters to customers, often more than the products you sell or the services you provide. Forty-four percent of U.S. consumers said there was no excuse for a poor customer experience, according to a survey by Telus International. 

Respondents were unforgiving about this, noting that price, convenience and brand loyalty won’t get you off the hook if they have a bad interaction. In fact, 60% of respondents said they would rather sit in traffic than deal with poor service.

That’s why these CJO benefits are particularly important:

• It enables businesses to create a single view of the customer. This the only reliable way to provide a good customer experience across an increasingly multifaceted buying journey. 
• It puts customers first, looking at the whole buying journey rather than pieces of it. You can provide customers with personalized information, connect them with people and resources, and make their lives easier by offering the right solutions in real time.
• It empowers customers to find the information they need or want in the way: and on the channel: that works best for them.
• It improves efficiency by keeping your entire organization focused on the same business objectives, eliminating data silos, streamlining processes, and reducing repetitive or redundant tasks.

What’s next for CJO?

Customer journey orchestration is evolving and growing more popular among businesses, with the market projected to reach over $46 billion by 2030. It’s an approach that promises significant benefits for businesses and customers alike. Organizations implementing customer journey orchestration have achieved revenue gains of 10-20%, cost reductions of 15-25%, and customer advocacy score improvements of 20-40 points.

But making it work often entails big changes—and investments—in data, decisioning, and delivery capabilities. You need the right tools in place before you can deliver cross-channel, real-time personalized experiences, consistently across all consumer touchpoints.

Meeting customer expectations for great experiences is no longer optional. It’s a critical aspect of how businesses operate. Orchestrating seamless multichannel customer interactions is the best way to build good, lasting relationships with your customers. A strong customer journey orchestration approach also makes it easier to scale: and pivot: when customer behaviors and demands inevitably change. 

Additional reading:

• What marketers should know about customer journey analytics
• How to prepare teams for customer journey orchestration
• 4 critical platforms to support customer journey orchestration: Getting started on CJO
• Preparing people for Customer Journey Orchestration: Getting started on CJO
• How customer journey orchestration affects process: Getting started on CJO
• How to decide if you’re ready for a customer journey orchestration solution

The post Customer journey orchestration: What it is and why marketers should care appeared first on MarTech.

Marketers understand the concept and importance of the customer journey. You must know how customers find you and do business with you if you want to succeed. 

The more you can improve the customer journey, the better customer experience you can deliver and the more effective your marketing will be.

But there’s one big problem — the customer journey is incredibly complex.

Today we have more channels, creatives, messages and touchpoints than ever. How can we possibly understand, measure and optimize the customer journey when it has outgrown our limitations?

The answer is simpler than you might think, but it’s something that most marketers completely overlook.

The customer journey cornerstone

The Pareto principle (a.k.a., the 80/20 rule) states that 80% of the outcomes come from 20% of the efforts. Whenever I assess a marketing team, I find this principle in full effect.

Most of the revenue and results of your marketing are the product of 20% of your efforts. And the same is true for your customer journey. You may have many different paths and touchpoints, but not all of them are contributing equally.

The key to marketing success and scale is to refine your customer journey down to the essentials — the critical path. Then you can optimize and expand it to maximize your impact.

Too often, marketers become complacent and give every channel and every touchpoint the same resources and priority. In practice, very few are actually contributing to the majority of your marketing performance.

Here are three steps to take control of your customer journey and accelerate your growth:

• Analyze and understand the 20% of your customer journey that drives 80% of your performance (your critical path).
• Optimize your critical path to boost results with leverage.
• Maximize your results by connecting the other paths of the customer journey to your critical path.

Let’s explore each of these steps.

Finding your critical path

There’s always a critical path. The first step is to find it.

The easiest way to find the critical path of your customer journey is to imagine turning off all of your marketing, one by one. Which pieces, when turned off, would cause the biggest impact on your business?

This will vary greatly from one business to the next, but here’s an example.

One of my clients sells dog fences that are seasonal (people don’t install a fence in the winter) and, for the most part, a transactional purchase. People search on Google when they are ready to invest in installing a fence for their dog.

As a result, Google Ads are part of their critical path. If they turned off their Google Ads, the business would come to a screeching halt. 

Conversely, they also do email marketing, but the impact from that is minimal and would be hardly noticed if it was stopped.

However, a single channel isn’t the entirety of their critical path. When people click their Google Ads, they are taken to a landing page and then pushed through an appointment funnel, where they are routed to the right distributor. 

All of these parts — the Google Ads, the landing page and the appointment funnel — make up their critical path.

Are they investing in other marketing efforts and channels? Absolutely. But they recognize that this is the “heartbeat” of their marketing, their critical path.

And as such, it must be finely tuned and maintained to drive revenue and results consistently.

Paying off debt

Before thinking about scaling and growth, we have some cleanup to do. When you let your customer journey run amuck without pruning, it can easily get out of hand. It becomes confusing, complex and convoluted.

Once you know your critical path, you must cut away everything that’s either a bottleneck or not contributing. Cut ruthlessly and without regret.

The goal at this stage is to reduce friction, optimize the critical path and improve performance. To do so:

• Consider every touch point and interaction and analyze how it can be made more seamless and direct.
• Ask how the clarity of the message can be improved.
• Identify anything nonessential that can be removed.

If you’re struggling with this step, I recommend bringing in some real users for a usability test and asking them to complete certain goals, like finding your product online and attempting to purchase based on specific criteria. 

By watching how they behave and what they do, you’ll instantly realize how many assumptions marketers make versus how people actually think and act.

Dig deeper: How to guarantee your marketing wins every time

All roads lead to Rome

Congratulations! At this point, you’ve found your critical path and refined it to the point of peak performance. Many marketers never make it this far, but there’s still more work to be done.

“All roads lead to Rome” is an old proverb that illustrates how, no matter what path you take, you always end up at the same destination. This is exactly how you should think about your customer journey and the critical path. 

Don’t build multiple customer journeys or try to expand the critical path. Instead, connect all other paths to the critical path.

This way, the critical path is now consciously and strategically identified as paramount and of utmost priority. All other efforts will benefit from the optimizations you’ve made to the critical path.

In some cases, this happens naturally. For example, for ecommerce companies, every user may ultimately end up in the checkout experience of your website. 

But your critical path isn’t always your checkout experience. It may be the most profitable path before that step.

Splitting up the customer journey into little pieces, or micro-journeys, is a good way to map them out and visualize how each of them connects and leads to the critical path.

Dig deeper: 3 ways to deliver better marketing experiences

Fixing your customer journey is critical

The customer journey has become overly complicated. Marketers love talking about the customer journey in abstract terms, but few invest the time and effort to understand it, let alone improve it.

If you don’t know your critical path, it’s paramount that you find it. Understand what it is and spend time refining and improving it. That alone will deliver a better customer experience and boost your performance.

After dissecting your customer journey, reconfigure it and reconnect the pieces to form a strategic, thoughtful and high-performing journey that delights your customers and your stakeholders.

The post 3 steps to navigating the complex customer journey appeared first on MarTech.

In doing so, marketers need to deliver the experiences and content that are appropriate depending on how advanced the prospect is in the buyer’s journey. This means organizing a strategy around the various levels of engagement that your marketing team reaches with their target.

“It’s our job to make the connections with buyers in the channels that they’re in, and that now requires more digital touchpoints and involves more individuals in the decision-making buying group,” said Stephanie Swinyer, precision marketing company Integrate’s head of revenue marketing, at The MarTech Conference.

First, you need to know how many individuals within the organization that you plan to communicate with for a given message or experience. Then, line these strategies up with actual companies in your target market or region.

3 levels of targeted engagement

Here are three basic levels or flavors of engagement around which you can organize your ABM strategy. Depending on how engaged the prospect is, you will be serving up experiences that are one-to-many, one-to-few, or one-to-one.

Account (one-to-many). Anybody within the organization can be engaged with these experiences. This is early in the organization’s buyer journey, when individuals might be doing their own research on your company’s offerings. They also might be researching your competitors or reading reviews posted by industry peers.

Based on the intent signals generated by these interactions, your team can determine if the account is in-market and looking to buy. They might be searching for prices or showing they’re interested in other ways.

Demand Unit (one-to-few). This is a smaller group within the organization tasked with making key decisions around buying.

“When we’ve determined that an account is in-market, that is the impetus for us to go into that demand unit or buying committee,” said Swinyer.

Instead of passively showing ads on a peer review site, you’ll message these demand unit members on more personalized channels like social media, or invite them to a webinar that gives them more information about your company’s offerings.

Individual (one-to-one). Further down the funnel, your ABM strategy will lead you to key executives with buying authority. The sales team will also be involved with personal calls or meetings. For marketing communications, these messages will be personalized to mirror the one-to-one attention that a live agent provides.

Dig deeper: Why we care about B2B marketing: A guide for marketers

Delivering the right experiences to key accounts

The levels of engagement are shaped like a pyramid, with many experiences delivered one-to-many, and only a handful of one-to-one messages delivered to the key individuals at the very top.

At the bottom of the pyramid, your one-to-many experiences include paid media, display ads, retargeting and emails designed to nurture all prospects within your target market.

“Think of this as your ongoing effort across marketing and sales to qualify, discover and nurture those that fit your ideal customer profile,” said Swinyer.

From these initial engagements across all target accounts, new experiences higher up in the pyramid will be introduced. Because it’s a smaller pot of contacts, more attention and resources will be paid to the way your team engages these higher-value individuals. That’s why one-to-few is the best approach.

“When you get to one-to-few, this is really the account-level,” Swinyer said. “So you’re thinking about the account story you’re telling.”

At this point, marketing is delivering more targeted campaigns and also aligning with sales and their actions, which might include a product demo or call blitz on these key people.

This leads to the key executives at the top of the pyramid, where more data and intelligence will be used to fuel personalization. More paid media can also target these individuals one-to-one.

When your ABM strategy is organized with these distinct tiers of engagement, all of your marketing resources can be spread out efficiently to move buyers through their journey.

The post How to sharpen your B2B marketing experience strategy appeared first on MarTech.

Bad stack features to avoid

But first, what does a bad stack look like?

“Number one, an ineffective martech stack is incomplete,” said Darrell Alfonso, global marketing operations for Amazon Web Services  at The MarTech Conference. ”You don’t have the tools and you don’t have the services to actually achieve the objectives that you’re trying to hit.”

Or, you have several tools that are used for the same task, making your martech stack cluttered.

“A martech stack that has multiple tools that do the exact same thing is ineffective,” said Alfonso. “It’s extremely costly, and to be honest, can cause chaos within the marketing organization.”

Lastly, a bad martech stack has tools in it that are underutilized. They might have been acquired by well-intentioned executives but were never fully implemented in marketing processes and strategies.

“Organizations all over the world buy tools and they sit on the shelf,” Alfonso explained. “It’s sometimes called shelf wear because these tools are not being properly utilized, again causing waste and chaos.”

1: Start with the customer journey

So how does your organization get on the right path? Start with who matters most — the customer. Begin to think about all the important actions that the customer takes when interacting with your company.

“Start with the customer journey,” Alfonso said. “What does their experience look like? What are the different types of touchpoints that they’re experiencing with your business? 

Dig deeper: What is digital transformation?

He added, “And then from there, map it out to the specific solutions that you need to support the customer experience that you want. That’s why starting with the customer journey and the overall customer experience is the most important part.”

2: Identify core business needs

The martech stack needs to conform to the specific needs of your business. It shouldn’t include solutions that look good on paper but don’t support core business operations.

“Many marketers make the mistake of building their martech stack like they’re building a set of golf clubs,” said Alfonso. You don’t need to add a putter or a driver just for the sake of checking off those boxes.

Instead, map out your core business needs and make sure you have platforms that fit.

“For any marketing team, there are some jobs that really need to be done,” said Alfonso. “We need to engage the customer, we need to get in alignment with sales, whether that’s from a B2B perspective, or whether that’s capturing their credit card information.”

Dig deeper: More than 60% of B2B marketers say martech stack is too complex

Often these core functions are carried out by a marketing automation platform (MAP) or email service provider, in addition to some kind of customer relationship management (CRM) system. A work management platform will help teams collaborate and carry out marketing-related projects.

Then, to serve business intelligence functions, the stack should include an analytics platform. Data visualization tools also help team members gain insights and make informed business decisions.

Understanding the core needs behind these tools is a top priority before picking out the right solution for your company.

3: Make sure data is unified

As your organization assembles the stack make sure that marketing data is accessible by all these different tools.

This goes back to customer experience. If different parts of a campaign help move a customer smoothly through their journey, that’s because data like customer preferences and personalization are also unified to help power the experience.

“In order to send you that perfect email, we first need to know who you are, what your preferences are,” said Alfonso. “This is where demographic and behavioral information comes in…We can make better decisions, update our segments and then improve the process once again in a sort of cyclical fashion.”

Alfonso added, “Great marketing feels like magic, but in reality it’s great martech and great marketing operations.”

Mapping out core customer and business needs, while making sure your data is unified, will help you build out an effective martech stack, and closer to making your own marketing magic.

The post 3 steps to building an effective martech stack appeared first on MarTech.

“The multi-channel marketing approach the customer journey orchestration utilizes also means that things can get more complicated,” said Greg Kihlstrom, principal and chief strategist at GK5A, at The MarTech Conference.

Here are the key teams that will be involved in the process and what to do to prepare them.

Dig deeper: How to decide if you’re ready for a CJO tool

Leadership

“Customer journey orchestration often requires big changes in process resources and expected outcomes,” said Kihlstrom. “Leadership support is needed to make these big changes happen.”

There must be a C-suite sponsor for the project to prove how important it is to the company. She or he needs to be regularly updated about any resulting changes in organizational structure or processes.

“Ensure you’re on the same page as your executive leadership and keep that leader in the loop so that they can report to other stakeholders,” Kihlstrom explained.

Marketing and experience teams

“Customer journey orchestration often requires closer collaboration among teams, even if they’re used to working with each other on a regular basis,” said Kihlstrom. “Who is designing and managing the journey? Is it marketing? Is it customer experience? Is it a combination of both?”

The business should take a full inventory of the tools and methods these teams are already using. This way, changes to marketing and customer experience processes can be anticipated ahead of the implementation.

Kihlstrom also recommends these teams consider a flexible work method, like an agile or sprint-based approach.

Dig deeper: A new way to navigate agile marketing

Data and engineering teams

It’s important to give careful consideration to the data that will power the new CJO platform. Therefore, data and engineering teams need to be included in the implementation.

“How frequently will new data need to be requested from either from these teams or from the systems that these teams support?” Kihlstrom asked. “What are both short- and long-term engineering needs for customer journey orchestration?”

He added, “You might already be working with your data engineering teams on other efforts, but make sure you share the big picture of customer journey orchestration with these data and engineering teams.”

Having data and engineering on board helps get stakeholder buy-in across the organization.

“Make sure everybody understands where you’re going, and make sure that you understand resource availability,” said Kihlstrom.

Will data requests from the new CJO-related processes stretch data and engineering too thin? Will these needs be filled in-house or will they be outsourced? These kinds of questions can be answered by including them in the process, and they can also help in coming up with solutions.

Customer service and support

The customer service and support team will be able to answer questions about how the new platform can move customers along in the customer journey. For one thing, they can report how interactions with customer service and support affects people’s propensity to buy.

“Obviously if someone just complained about your product or service they may not be as likely to buy more, so you want to take that into account with your customer journeys,” said Kihlstrom. 

This team can also suggest ways the platform can help anticipate customer service issues and proactively solve them.

“They know a lot, they interact a lot with your customers, they have a lot to share on this,” Kihlstrom said. “So make sure you discuss some common issues and potential problem areas when you start orchestrating things.” not talk about opportunities. It’s not just about solving problems, it’s also about opening up new opportunities like proactively. Solving some challenges.

Sales

Like customer service, sales teams know a lot about customer journeys and automated flows. They can give insights into when a personal touch is preferred over an automated or orchestrated response.

Also, remember that teams might have different needs in supporting customer interactions with the CJO platform.

“A large sales team focused, perhaps, on B2B or larger sales, may have a high-touch sales environment, and therefore journey orchestration and the automation that’s involved in it, may not be the best approach for every single communication,” Kihlstrom explained. “Make sure you understand the cadence that your sales team uses for one-to-one more personal touches and make sure you coordinate that.”

Building consistency

A CJO platform helps an organization become more customer-centric and content plays a big role in this. As customers move through their journeys, they are often engaging with tailored to their specific place in it.

Content must be relevant and consistent. This requires coordination with the content team, as well as with marketing and other teams.

“Right now, if you’re not doing journey orchestration, you might be doing a lot of single-channel orchestration or automation and therefore there may not be quite as much of a need for consistency,” said Kihlstrom.

The more channels involved in customer journey orchestration, the more you need to focus on consistency and internal communication. Kihlstrom said this requires understanding how different systems are used to create, manage and publish content.

“Start to understand where and how you can start standardizing content creation and creating efficiencies,” Kihlstrom said. “If you’re orchestrating content across multiple channels, chances are there’s some opportunities to create similar content using similar language across those channels.”

He added, “Even though customer journey orchestration involves plenty of technology and integrations, anyone that has implemented it knows that there are team members or people behind the important work of both implementing it.”

The post How to prepare teams for customer journey orchestration appeared first on MarTech.

Why?

Because it can deliver everything traditional media ad buying can’t and more.

Traditional media ads can’t measure the true ROI of media campaigns in real-time. They don’t let you pinpoint what makes an ad and a campaign successful. Was it the creative? The copy? Where it ran? When it ran? Who saw it? Without this there’s no way to optimize the ad and try out different iterations. 

Traditional media ad buying is a time- and labor-intensive process. It requires RFPs, tenders, quotes and negotiations. It requires creating and distributing physical versions of materials. All of this drives the price up.

Programmatic advertising gives you all those good, actionable insights into campaign performance. It does this while letting you target your ads to exactly the audience you’re looking for. And it does this in a more efficient, automated marketplace with far lower costs.

So here’s what you need to know about programmatic advertising.

What is programmatic advertising?

Simply put, it’s the automated buying and selling of digital advertising space. 

It uses algorithms and AI to run real-time auctions where ads are bought and placed at the same time as a visitor loads a website. Any and all digital formats and channels are available through these automated marketplaces. Programmatic advertising is now being used to sell ad space for CTV, digital radio and digital out of home (DOOH). 

How does programmatic advertising work?

1. When a person clicks on a website, the site’s owner uses a Supply-Side Platform (SSP) to notify one or multiple Ad-Exchanges to put the ad space up for auction.
2. Advertisers use a Demand-Side Platform (DSP) — either via an agency or directly — to offer bids. The DSP is connected to a data management platform (DMP) which ensures the placement targets the right audience. It does this by taking a variety of factors into account, including location, demographics, user behavior and online activity. There is also contextual targeting, which uses website content — including text, keywords, images and categories — to trigger an ad purchase.
3. The winning bidder’s ad is served on the site. 

All this takes place in hundredths of a second.

Programmatic ad buying is also used for CTV, digital radio and out-of-home (OOH) advertising.

Programmatic is a bit different for OOH, which doesn’t have online’s one-to-one targeting capability. Instead, an OOH campaign can arrange it so ad space is programmatically purchased whenever certain conditions are met. For example, a soup company will set a buy order for when the temperature drops below a certain level. Or an allergy medicine can have a buy order set for when pollen levels rose in certain geographic areas.

Ad network vs. ad exchange

• An ad network is a platform connected to a certain number of websites, offering inventory for advertisers on those sites.
• An ad exchange is a trading floor where advertisers go to buy ad space from multiple ad networks.

Types of programmatic advertising

Because of the speed of the entire process it is referred to as Real-Time Bidding (RTB). Although the overwhelming majority of automated ad buying is RTB, there are other methods. 

• Programmatic direct is buying a guaranteed number of ad impressions on specific websites or from selected publishers. While this assures ad space on specific publisher sites, it isn’t as good when it comes to audience targeting. Programmatic direct is usually used for premium, large format ads like full-page takeovers. It is more often a fixed-price agreement rather than an auction.
• Private marketplaces are invitation-only markets where a set number of publishers invite specific advertisers to bid on their ad inventory. This allows the advertiser to bypass ad exchanges and have their buying platform plugged directly into the publisher’s inventory.
• Preferred deal is a one-on-one programmatic auction where publishers sell premium inventory at a set CPM price to a selected number of advertisers. These advertisers bid in real-time at or above the fixed CPM price. 

How big is the programmatic advertising market?

Huge.

In 2021, US marketers alone spent $167 billion on all types of programmatic advertising, according to Statista. The world-wide spending on programmatic advertising is projected to hit $314 billion by 2026, per Technavio.  

In the U.S., programmatic digital display ad spending is projected to account for $115.23 billion in ad dollars in 2022, making up 90.2% of the digital display ad market, according to eMarketer.

• By 2026, 86% of overall digital advertising revenue will come from programmatic ads (Statista).
• Next year programmatic digital display will make up 91% of all US digital display ad spend (InsiderIntelligence).
• In 2023, programmatic video advertising spend will be more than double what it was in 2020 (InsiderIntelligence).
• US connected TV programmatic display ad spend will reach a record $8.88 billion in 2022 (Statista).
• US programmatic digital radio ad spend will surpass $1 billion for the first time ever in 2022 (Statista).
• US programmatic digital out of home ad spending is set to reach $533.8 million in this year. (InsiderIntelligence).

What are the advantages of programmatic advertising?

Traditional media buying is a labor and time intensive process requiring everything from requests-for-proposals to negotiations to manual insertions of the orders. Programmatic is automated and efficient.

Other benefits include:

• Scale. Advertisers can reach large audiences by purchasing ad space from any ad inventory available programmatically. Publishers have access to a huge pool of buyers.
• Insights. Provides real-time data and advanced reporting about ad placements and performance, making it easy to quickly optimize campaigns.
• Targeting. An advertiser’s budget can be put to better use and spent more efficiently by targeting the people most likely to buy their product.‍
• Efficiency. The process is faster and less expensive than older methods. Access to a large pool of publishers means advertisers can get a better ROI.
• Revenue. Optimizes the bidding process, so publishers and advertisers get the best price possible. 
• Ease of use. Automation makes buying ads and selling ad inventory a simple process with low overhead.

How much does it cost?

Programmatic advertising costs can vary because they are priced by cost per 1,000 ad impressions. This is called CPM — cost per mille (mille is French for thousand).

The more specific the targeting, the higher the cost. Other things influencing the price include: 

• Type of industry. 
• Targeted device.
• Ad format.
• Ad placement on the page.

On average, programmatic CPMs tend to be less expensive than social media advertising and can offer significantly better value than offline advertising. 

What is a retail media network?

Retail media networks are networks owned by a specific retailer where brands can buy programmatic advertising for inventory on their website, apps and other digital properties, including in-store. It also lets them run ads on the open web. Retailers can partner with media companies and give brands expanded reach and improved targeting with the use of in-depth shopper data.

The nine largest U.S. brick-and-mortar retail media networks are (in order) Walmart, Target, Kroger, Best Buy, Home Depot, Macy’s, Ulta, CVS and Walgreens. 

One-quarter of retailers are generating more than $100 million in revenue from their media networks, according to Forrester. That’s made these networks a game changer for many retailers — and a potential lifeline in a worsening economy. Retail profit margins tend to be slim — in the 3% to 4% range. The margin on ad sales is usually 70% to 90%, according to BCG. And sales are very good.

Dig deeper: Lowe’s and Yahoo team up for retail media partnership

According to MediaRadar:

• In the eight months from May 1, 2021 to the end of January in 2022, more than 23,500 companies bought ads on retail media networks. 
• 14% bought ads every month; the retention rate from December to January was 59%.
• 24% of the companies advertising in January 2022 were first-time buyers. 

Furthermore, the retail media market will grow by 25% per year to $100 billion over the next five years and will account for over 25% of total digital media spending by 2026, according to BCG. Also important: This is new revenue for retailers. Per BCG: 60% to 70% of the projected $100 billion in 2026 retail media revenue will be net new spending over and above historical trade dollars. 

What are the problems with programmatic advertising?

While programmatic may seem to be a miracle cure for all marketing needs, it isn’t. There are very real problems with it, including data accuracy, collusion by ad sellers and buyers, and click fraud.

Third-party cookie depreciation

Programmatic ad targeting is only as good as the data it’s based on. For now, much of that data is collected via third-party cookies. How much longer that will be the case is anyone’s guess. There are strict restrictions on them in the EU, and Apple users must take the step of approving their use. Their death knell will come when and if Google ever decides to restrict their use. While they’ve talked about doing this, any action keeps getting kicked down the road.

There are a lot of workarounds if it does come to pass, but they are expected to make data and ads that depend on data more expensive.

Dig deeper: Digital out-of-home branches out with programmatic

Collusion 

Ten states have filed a lawsuit against Google and Facebook parent company Meta charging them with colluding to force out competition in the online advertising sector. Google is also under investigation by the Department of Justice over another set of antitrust issues. That investigation focuses on allegations the company is exploiting its position as broker and auctioneer of digital advertising. 

“The conflicts of interest are so glaring that one Google employee described Google’s ad business as being like ‘if Goldman or Citibank owned the NYSE,’” said Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT). Lee is co-sponsor of a bill to force the company to divest its adtech business.

Fraud

Programmatic ad fraud is a big, well-known problem that no one seems interested in fixing. Just look at these numbers:

• $23 billion: Expected U.S. ad spend lost to fraud this year. (Juniper Research)
• $100 million: Amount per day U.S. companies are expected to be losing to advertising fraud in 2024, an increase of 125% since 2018. (TrafficGuard)
• 38%: Amount of web traffic that is automated/bots. (Imperva)
• 24%: Amount of web traffic that bots used for fraud and theft. (Imperva)
• 14%: Average clicks from fake sources in each paid search campaign. (ClickCease)
• $1: Amount lost to fraud out of every $3 spent by advertisers. (Interceptd)
• $5: Amount a botnet owner is charging per 1000 clicks. (ClickCease)
• 73%: Number of U.S. businesses saying ad fraud is a problem for them. (Netacea)

You would think that, given these costs, someone would try to clean up the situation. In an interview with MarTech, cybersecurity and anti-ad fraud consultant Augustine Fou, explained why this is unlikely to happen. 

“The advertisers who are paying the money, they want to buy hundreds of billions of ad impressions,” Fou said. “You can’t buy that much quantity without the fraud. Most humans visit a small quantity of sites repeatedly. That’s where you get the large quantities of human audiences.  When you get into the long tail, there’s just not enough humans to generate that many ad impressions. The only way to do that is by using bot activity to repeatedly load the web pages and cause ads to load. As a result, basically every middleman, every ad exchange, every publisher has incentives to use more fraud. So that’s why I said ad fraud has not been solved because nobody wants to solve it. Even the advertisers, even the middle men. Everyone wants it to continue because they’re making money.”

Five keys to programmatic advertising success

1: Targeting and segmentation

Programmatic advertising is designed to get your message in front of the right people at the right time. However, it needs you to determine who and when that is. Strong audience targeting is the most important piece of a successful programmatic ad campaign. 

Targeting lets you reach high-value prospects and exclude non-performing ones, thereby getting the most out of your ad buy. You do this by segmenting users into specific audiences based on predefined criteria. 

This means you have to do a lot of deep research into your target audience before doing any planning for your campaign. 

2: Personalization

Programmatic lets you be very specific about who you reach, so your ads need to be designed specifically for those people. They must be highly relevant and customized with the right creative and messaging specific to your target audience. This will get you the higher conversion rates and better ROI which define success.

Data-driven or data-responsive creatives can help you do this. They use machine learning to find out which variations of an ad will have the most appeal for a specific user. 

Don’t forget about contextual targeting! You should use a variety of ad types for your contextual targeting campaign. Video ads, native ads and behavioral ads have been found to be top performers..

3: Essential metrics

• Cost per Click (CPC): Look for ad suppliers whose price is in your ideal CPC range. Make a preferred list of those sites and an exclusion list of those vendors outside your CPC range.
• Click-through Rate (CTR): Put the sites delivering good CTR on a preferred list and increase the amount you are willing to bid for their inventory. Either block lower performing sites or determine if there’s a low enough price to justify using them.
• Cost per Completed View (CPCV): Again, create a list of sites that are meeting your desired CPCV and block those outside that range. 

4: Making it multi-channel 

Your ads are going to run on many different channels and many different devices. Use attribution models to measure the performance on each of those. 

Setting up an attribution model — last touch, multi-touch or linear — for your campaign means this will be measured on all platforms, even outside programmatic. This will help you assess performance on each separate platform and for the entire campaign.

Correctly attributing conversion credit lets you see which campaigns are doing well and which aren’t. That, in turn, lets you know which campaigns you should run more and which ones need to be reworked or ended. 

Also, be sure all creatives are optimized for all channels and devices. What looks great on YouTube on a tablet may be a mess to someone using TikTok on their phone.

5: Frequency caps

Repetition gets old fast. Seeing the same ads over and over can cause even the best creative to become annoying. The solution is analyzing performance and implementing frequency caps.  

These let you control the number of impressions for specific users on a monthly, weekly or hourly basis. By analyzing this data you can identify different users cross-channel and then prevent them from being hit with the same ad everywhere they look.

This also helps you budget more efficiently by redirecting impressions from one user to another. When one user hits the impression limit on a particular ad, you can redirect to a different user. 

This gets your ad in front of more of your target audience without increasing ad spend. 

The post What every marketer needs to know about programmatic advertising appeared first on MarTech.

To achieve the most ROI from your customer data, you need a strong foundation. Creating a precise golden record for each consumer with enriched data, a full contact graph and a full identity graph provides the context your brand needs to differentiate based on CX. Precise data includes both first-party data as well as third-party data to enrich your total understanding of each consumer.

If your brand lacks a pristine golden record for each customer, join John Nash, chief marketing and strategy officer at Redpoint, as he discusses the best steps to get started.

Register today for “Steps to Deliver Highly Personalized Experiences With Quality Data,” presented by Redpoint Global.

Click here to view more MarTech webinars.

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