By Navin Nagiah, CEO of DNN.
Originally published at Wired.
As a consumer pondering a buying decision, you need two fundamental things: sufficient information about the product that makes you comfortable, and some kind of social confirmation or proof that you are making the right decision. How do you go about getting these in today’s world?
My wife’s experience booking a recent Hawaiian vacation is as good as any example. Here is how her process worked:
Initial trigger for my wife was viewing some Facebook photos of friends who had been to Hawaii (Big Island) recently, break of 3 days, preliminary discussion with family, Google search hotels and resorts for the Big Island; Break of 5 days, research on hotels.com, another brief discussion; Break for 4 days, ask a friend on Facebook a few questions about the place and hotels, visit web sites of resorts X, Y and Z, and look at community activity on sites; visit Facebook fan pages, online chat with 2 of them; Break for 2 days, download brochures, discussion with family again; Break for 1 day, get up the next day, call place X and make the booking.
My wife is not atypical. She made her decision by consuming information, content and conversations, seven to eight different times -- from six or seven different channels (Facebook, websites, Twitter, YouTube etc.), throughout a month. And over the course of that month, each interaction probably lasted from 40 seconds to 10 minutes.
Her actions were discrete, not continuous. Her actions happened in many different places, not one place. Her methods were different each time -- email, Facebook posts, website, brochure download, phone calls, etc.
The need for engaging customers, is not new. The concept is as old as business itself. But, what exactly is customer engagement?
We have all heard somebody say, “I just had a terrific conversation with X.” A conversation is terrific only if it is engaging. What makes the conversation engaging?
Engagement fundamentally happens when two or more people have a conversation that keeps both parties interested in what the other is saying. It is a back and forth that takes the interests of both parties into account; in that the conversation is meaningful and relevant to both of them.
This was a lot easier to accomplish in a much simpler world -- a world that was primarily offline; a world where people were patient and had more time; a world where people paid attention. In that simpler world, good sales people were phenomenal at putting the interests of the customer first, understanding their business context and needs, and having a conversation that was focused on making a difference to the customer’s life. This was primarily done face-to-face, which meant that the salesperson apart from listening, could also watch body language, listen to voice intonations, and observe changes in facial expressions. This allowed them to tailor the conversation to the customer.
In that simpler world, even advertisements were perceived more as entertainment even if not completely informative, rather than the irritable interruptions they are perceived as today.
Today’s world is different. It is more complex. Everybody and everything is connected -- making the job for marketers even more difficult. People spend an inordinate amount of time online, and almost all their time connected. They jump from one online destination to another. People have less time, and even less patience. As a result, the customer’s buying process has undergone a dramatic transformation.
From a vendor’s perspective, the challenge is to take the customer on a “buying journey” -- to move them from curiosity to interest to evaluation to purchase even though the interactions are at different online and offline places, disparately. In addition, the vendor has no idea of the context OR mind-frame of the customer at those different instants of time. Also, there are no facial expressions, no body language, no voice intonation (or lack of it) to make real-time assessments and morph the content. What does this mean?
The good news is that advances in technology and software, big data analysis, and natural language processing have made it possible for marketers at these organizations to “engage” with customers in this buying journey even in this new world. The not so good news is that “possible” doesn’t necessarily mean simple or easy.
Today’s vendor has to be an avowed expert in personalization, content marketing and targeting, and big data. They must know the answers to the following, among other, questions:
Who is the person we are about to talk to, or display content to?
- How much do we know about this person?
- Have we communicated with this person in the past? To what extent? What was his/her response?
- What can we glean about this person from our past communication?
- Can we make an educated assessment of where this person is in his/her buying journey?
- Can we look at our content repository and share content related to this specific phase of this individual’s buying journey?
In effect, customer engagement today means engaging with your customers on their terms, and on their turf, not yours.
Being able to engage effectively is where the world is headed. It means having a clear marketing vision for your organization -- a deeper understanding of the channels and places your customers frequent the most, the nature of interactions they like, their buying and decision processes and their profiles/personas. You must have a content and marketing strategy to interact and engage or you won’t be successful.
Executing this vision in its entirety is difficult and will take time. It will involve:
- Using numerous specialized software products
- Ensuring that the products talk easily to each other
- Having an effective content generation, content marketing and content targeting strategy
- Identifying clear discrete solutions that can give you clear and distinct successes in the short term (marketing automation, CRM, CMS, social web sites, etc.).
As you execute, it will be critical to keep the big picture in mind. Eventually, you will have to tie the different pieces together to create a holistic, effective customer engagement strategy. This will require both great vision and disciplined execution.
There has never been a more exciting time that today to be a CMO, and yet it’s never been harder. Learn. Execute. Enjoy the ride.