Dan Galante

www.interaction-design.org

The Customer Experience and Customer Journey is being disrupted by technology. The technology comes in the form of social channels such as the internet, mobile, social media, publishing platforms, audio books and video on demand. All of these channels have the effect of giving consumers instant access to information about products and services. Mobile is becoming the biggest channel with 6.2 Billion Devices projected globally by 2020 According to Ericsson’s Annual Mobility report.

The way customers request information is changing. They may approach Sales, Marketing and Customer Service or an independent source for information and help choosing a product.

Competition in every product and service category has never been higher. This marks a significant shift from the days of Mad Men where brands controlled information and the conversation. This marketing shift is known as information marketing through content or simply content marketing. As a result, Marketers and brands have to become the educators or teachers of consumers. To become the educators of consumers, brands have to become the industry resource to consumers; showing how their products can solve problems and improve the lives of consumers.

Content Marketing needs to be used in Sales, Marketing and Customer Service because customers expect a consistent experience through out their journey.

2017 State of Marketing Report Key Findings

The 2017 Salesforce State of Marketing report focuses on four emerging trends:

• Marketing is undergoing an AI revolution. The marketers surveyed anticipate their AI use will grow more than 50 percent over the next two years, helping them deliver more targeted campaigns, smarter personalization and higher ROI.
• Marketers realize the importance of delivering customer journeys, but are having a hard time breaking down silos between sales, service and marketing, and bringing customer data together to deliver on this vision.
• Marketers are making significant organizational changes, within their own departments and in how they collaborate with others, such as sales and customer service.
• Over the next two years, marketers expect to see unprecedented growth in their marketing technology usage. 

“According to a recent research study by Forrester, 71 percent of consumers begin their journeys by using a search engine to discover new products and services (initiation), and 74 percent reported using a search engine for consideration and purchasing (research, comparison, transaction).”

https://searchengineland.com/value-search-across-modern-consumer-decision-journey-270021

Once brands convert prospects into customers, they still need to focus on and support customers post sale. Here is where Content Marketing can help. Brands can use Content Marketing for customer retention, cross-selling and up-selling. To take advantage of this, brands need to involve their Marketing, Sales and Customer service teams in their Content Marketing strategy.

Sales Teams

Sales teams can provide a lot of information about customers, product concerns or issues and objections they face. They are front line soldiers that have a direct line to customer intelligence.

Including the Sales Team in your content marketing strategy

Meet with the sales team and encourage them to compile a list of customer complaints, objections and questions about products that they face. Ask the team to create materials that address these concern that customers can access. This could take form of blog posts, Power-points FAQ’s, product demonstrations and tutorials.

If the sales team feels uncomfortable creating content, they could be interviewed by the marketing department. The marketing department could take content /basic materials, emails from the sales team and polish it up into visually appealing content that customers can access.

Customer Service

Similar to the sales team, your customer service teams are front line soldiers to help customers with issues they face at call centers or through social media. Ask them to write down complaints they get from customers with the answers. These complaints of FAQ’s could be put up on a web site via a PowerPoint presentation, blog etc… If this is not possible for the team, interview them, collect basic materials, emails, notes and create the content yourself.

Customer Retention

Sales and Customer service team are an important part to using a Content Marketing Strategy for customer retention. The more products a customer uses from a brand, the less likely they will switch to a competitor. Remember it costs more to obtain new customers that it does to keep existing ones.

Cross-Selling & Up-Selling

Sales and Customer service teams can also help with cross and up-selling by sharing promotion and new offerings with customers. The Sales and customer service functions of brands are essential to creating a great experience for customers.

Marketing Automation and AI

Salesforce is rolling out a Customer Success cloud where Sales, Marketing and Customer Success can track the Customer Journey across the organization. Each function of the organization can create tasks for the other to make sure the customer does not fall through the cracks. I saw a demonstration at Salesforce World Tour.

https://youtu.be/WOyGF7Ua8hY

This is how brands can integrate sales and customer service teams into their Content Marketing and automation strategy. How are you using content from sales and customer service teams to help your brand retain customers? What are the goals of your brands content marketing efforts?

Feel free to comment and share.

Additional Resources

https://www.salesforce.com/blog/2017/06/fourth-annual-state-of-marketing-report.html

Salesforce 2017 State of Marketing overview

About the Author

Dan is passionate about using Marketing to help businesses drive sales. He has worked on various marketing assignments that include Start Ups, Political Campaign and a Digital Marketing Conference.

Prior to Teaching, Dan served customers as an Outside Sales & Marketing Representative in the Dental industry. In this role, he taught and trained Dentists on the company’s products and services using a consultative selling approach. He also supported the company’s marketing efforts at industry trade shows & in the field through lead generation of Digital Technology along with large Dental Equipment.

He writes and publishes a business blog on the topics of Sales, Marketing and Social Media entitled Sales, Marketing & Social Media Today.

Dan is seeking a full-time marketing role. He is interested in roles in Direct, Digital, Content and Social Media Marketing. If your company is hiring for roles in these areas, contact him directly via a free LinkedIn Message or email him at Dan@DanGalante.com to set up interviews.

Last week, I covered the Search Marketing Expo in New York City. Search Marketing Expo has is a great event for SEO, SEM, and Digital Marketing professionals. SMX provides attendees with an opportunity to learn actionable techniques in conference sessions and training workshops. Google and Microsoft provided seminars on various SEM topics.

Here is a video of the event.

I enjoyed Moz founder Rand Fishkin’s keynote.

The key insights of the presentation were:

1. Organic traffic has reached its peak and will decline.
2. To keep traffic coming to their sites, Marketers will need to find ways to nudge consumers as Zero click queries continue to grow.
3. Organizations need to shift their investments in product, content, and brand. Decisions on how to redeploy these resources need to be a company-wide effort. 

Here is the link to the presentation.

Google in 2020: From Everyone’s Search Engine to Everyone’s Competitor | SparkToro
I’ve written a lot this year about the shifts we’re seeing from Google — moving from search engine to answer to engine…sparktoro.com

At the end of the keynote, I met Rand and received a signed copy of his new book entitled Lost and Found.

In Google’s Keynote, I learned how businesses can get an edge during the holidays. I also learned of Google’s plan to use Google Images and YouTube for eCommerce. Google is also allowing businesses to use location-based Ads in Google Maps.

The key insights of the presentation were:

1. According to Google most shopping visits start online.

2.When diners search for a great place to eat the searches are probably happening on a smartphone.

3.  When people are online in cars, more than half of them are searching for information on a mobile device making localization and targeting important.

4. . 2/3′s of shoppers say that online video has given them insight and inspiration to make purchases.

5. Shoppers use at least 3 channels or more when shopping.

6. Brands need to provide an omnichannel channel experience all year, especially during the holidays.

7. Sales are happening online and offline. As a result of this shift, Brands need to serve customers on the channels of their choice.

What is the hardest part of Product Marketing?

LinkedIn poll of my audience

Marketers need to develop and deploy a buyer-centric go-to-market strategy. It is time for marketers to ask better questions about buyers.

What is the role of a Product Marketer?

I covered the Product Marketing Community workshop to find out.

Workshop Topics included how to:

1. Build and execute go-to-market plans
2. Develop actionable buyer insights
3. Create effective Messaging and Content for buyers
4. Enable Sales and Product Teams

Businesses should identify their ideal customer.

Only certain target customers will buy due to internal and external factors.

To grow revenue, businesses need to develop and use better competitive insights. Developing these insights entails examining everything about the competition to identify: strengths, weaknesses, competitor priorities, growing, and under-served markets.

Product Marketing involves more than Marketing and Product Team support. Product Marketers serve Marketing, Sales, and Product teams. Each team has different needs and responsibilities. However, they all grow the business and serve customers.

Product Marketers serve as market experts and translators for teams from across the organization.

What is Product Marketing?

Product Marketing is the discipline of bringing a product to market and nurturing its success. Businesses need to create and market products people want to buy. To do that, they need to use the Pragmatic Framework.

Product Marketers are taking on some Product Manager responsibilities

Product Marketing needs a separate brief.

Just as Marketing has a plan or brief, Product Marketing does.

SmartSheet.com Product Marketing Template

Here are nine things to address in a Product Marketing Brief.

1. What does your company do? Does your product offering align with your business goals?
2. What are the features of your product? Do others understand what you are building and why?
3. Does this Product address gaps in the Market? Include an overview of a Competitive, win-loss and, SWOT analysis.
4. Who is your ideal customer or target market? Include an overview of findings of demographic, psychographic, and buyer persona research. Does your product solve customer pain points?
5. How will you measure product success?
6. What are can go wrong? Can failure be anticipated and corrected?
7. What is the roadmap and schedule of the product? Who’s responsible and in charge?
8. Who needs to be included in the project and who needs to approve deliverables?
9. How will goals be tracked? How often will they be monitored? What insights are you trying to glean from the data?

Johnathan Hinz of Seismeic shares his insights on sales enablement and its role in marketing.

The lack of Sales and Marketing alignment is due in part to the inadequate amount of customer value mapping relating to the number of buyer types.

Product Marketers, what’s the hardest part of your job?

How do you know if you are successful?

Share your thoughts.