The Customer Circle of 5ths

We all know CX will likely become the main key competitive differentiator at some point. It already has in some sectors. To help drive this home, I recently created what I am calling the 'Customer Circle of 5ths', to help Marketing, Sales, Service and PR/Brand Departments visualize how each contributes to this, and what the cause/effect relationships between them are, from the customer's POV. 

This also turned out to be a simple visual that identifies and delivers the core criteria almost every customer needs in order to say 'yes'.

In music theory, the circle of fifths is the relationship among the 12 tones of the chromatic scale. In this article we'll explore the choreographed relationships between marketing, customer experience and branding, using my own version of the Circle of 5ths.

The goal of the Circle of 5ths is to quickly understand how CX, Marketing and Branding each contribute to delivering the most important criteria customers need in order to say 'yes'. So what are the most important criteria?
Think about any purchase decision you've ever made. There were 3 things that likely had to be in place before you said 'yes':

1. Relevance
2. Trust
3. An Emotional Connection

Lets take the example of booking a flight. You had to first find an airline that went to your destination (relevance). Then you had to have confidence that their planes were safe (trust). But those two things alone usually aren't enough to say yes, all other things being equal. There had to be an emotional connection. So, in our example if you had established relevance and trust with 2 airlines, but you only had a positive emotional connection with one of them, that's who you'd very likely have chosen.

So how does marketing, CX and branding all contribute to providing relevance and trust, while fostering a positive emotional connection? In short, CX drives an emotional connection to brand, which drives acceptance/engagement in further marketing, fueled by a CTA that contributes to a positive interaction, which starts the cycle all over again.

Let's look at a B2B example:

A lead might enter the Circle of 5ths at any part of the cycle, but the flow is always the same. Each time they complete the circle, ever increasing levels of relevance, trust and emotional connections are (hopefully) established.

So what actions can you take from this? You see the dependencies these have on each other. If one falls short, the entire circle suffers.

Stating the obvious - whether you are in marketing, sales or customer service, you have to be ruthless about creating a positive interaction. Every activity you are involved in that the customer either sees, reads or hears will impact the whole circle.

• For marketers that means having a full view of all interactions (both positive and negative) and adjusting messaging accordingly. Insist that CTAs are relevant and easy to act on. The adage, help, not hype fully applies here.
• For marketing automation, that means enabling technology that delivers a different message to everyone, based on certain rules related to the latest achieved levels within the circle of 5ths.
• For sales and service that means having a full view of all interactions (both positive and negative) throughout the customer journey and adjusting responses accordingly.

So if you're looking for a simple way of explaining how marketing, branding and CX all support each other and/or visualizing the impact of a single positive interaction, see if this helps.

Steve Kellogg
Crowds2Crowds

Email Deliverability Causes and Solutions

We work hard to protect, nurture and grow our email DBs. For many, its our most effective marketing channel. Yet, according to Return Path, 20% of our emails never make it to the Inbox. Why? Only a small percentage of email deliverability issues are the result of bounces. The rest are being driven by 2 significant factors:

1. Increased protection by ISPs against malware attacks and other malicious activities.
2. Growing complaints by email recipients about unwanted/irrelevant emails, causing ISPs to implement their own mitigation strategies and solutions.

Below is a comprehensive summary on the subject, both from my own learnings and from other experts.

What affects email deliverability?

ISPs (such as Gmail, Hotmail, or Yahoo) decide which emails land in the inbox and which are blocked or bulked, all based on your overall email sender reputation.

• Blocked: The ISP takes action against poor IP reputation and refuses to accept your emails altogether. It doesn't get worse than this.
• Bulked: The ISP accepts your email but routes the message to BULK or SPAM folders vs. Inbox. This is also determined by your overall sender reputation.

How is sender reputation measured?

Each ISP measures your IP/domain reputation separately based on several different metrics. Repeated issues with one or more of the red flags below will increase the chances that an ISP will block or bulk your messages.  

•  Bounces
• Complaints
• Engagement
• Authentication
• Volume and Frequency
• Blacklists and Spam Traps

Bounces

There are two main types of bounces: soft bounces (temporary failures) and hard bounces (permanent failures).

• Soft bounces technically have made it to the email server, however they did not reach the sender. This can happen because:
• You’re sending to someone who’s mailbox is full
• You’re sending to someone who’s account has been temporarily suspended
• There’s been an error or outage at the receiving mail server
• There is a problem with authenticating you as a sender, or you have a high degree of other reputation issues
• BTW, an out-of-office reply is technically not a soft bounce, as it did make it to the inbox.
• Hard bounces happen when the domain does not exist, is invalid, or the mailbox has become inactive. It is a permanent failure.

According to Oracle deliverability expert Pradeep Mangalapalli, bounce rates up to 3% for hard bounces and up to 5% for soft bounces are considered acceptable thresholds.

Complaints

ISPs track every time a subscriber flags an email as spam. In some cases, ISPs share this information with email senders through feedback loops (a process by which certain email senders may be able to receive notification when recipients report emails as spam).
There’s a lot more to sender reputation than a spam complaint; however, a recipient marking an email as spam is the strongest negative signal to ISPs about an email. Spam complaint rates above 0.2% are considered high, and may result in poor deliverability. At ISPs, like Gmail, a spam rate as low as .08% can “start to affect” your deliverability.

Engagement

ISPs track how subscribers engage with your emails through: opens, clicks, scrolling through a full email, deleting without opening and marking as read without opening. 

Authentication

Spammers will spoof legitimate domains to send their emails, so it's important to adhere to all the latest security standards to protect your subscribers and your brand. ISPs will block messages that don't pass these authentication protocols:

•  Sender Policy Framework (SPF): ISPs cross check the domain in your From address against the IP address listed in the public record in the Domain Name System (DNS). ISPs generally don’t block email solely because of a missing SPF record. However, it is one more data point that contributes to a sender’s reputation and it helps protect your brand.
• Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM): Email senders generate public and private key pairs. ISPs lookup the public key in the public DNS record, and verify the matching private key in the email header. These days, messages not signed with a DKIM signature are very unlikely to see the inbox.
• Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance (DMARC): The purpose of a DMARC record is to tell inbox providers WHAT you want them to do with email that doesn’t pass SPF and DKIM: allow it, filter it, or reject it. Soon, publishing a DMARC record will be necessary to ensure good deliverability to reputable inbox providers.

Volume and Frequency

When spammers spoof a domain, they take the opportunity to send extremely high volumes of email all at once. ISPs look at the history of your email volume and frequency. If there's a spike, this can affect your reputation. Sending higher volumes of emails is okay as long as you are consistent. ISPs are more concerned with past trends and spikes rather than overall volume.

Blacklists and Spam Traps

Spam traps are email addresses that either belong to an ISP or belong to an inactive user. Often ISPs will monitor email addresses that have been inactive for a long period of time, and convert these dormant email addresses to spam traps.
There are two main types of spam traps:

• Pristine: Email addresses that are created and published online but never register for any marketing emails. If a spammer crawls web pages to harvest published email addresses, they may pick up a pristine spam trap.
• Recycled: If a mailbox goes inactive for a long time, the ISP will convert it to a spam trap to identify senders that mail to inactive subscribers. It's not known for sure how long an email address remains inactive before it is converted, but anything over 12 months is generally suspect.

The net impact of a spam trap is that you get blacklisted. Landing on a blacklist can have various effects on your deliverability. In some cases its not a big deal, however getting on some blacklists, like SpamCop, can be severe and can take significant time to correct.

Email Setup

Emails that have HTML errors, such as image references or links that are dead can cause deliverability issues.

A Word About 'Sender Scores'

As you can see, deliverability issues are caused by many factors and can be difficult to accurately analyze. In the past, as spam decisions shifted towards sender reputation, the concept of an overall Sender Score emerged as a simple benchmark to help us quickly spot trouble. Because of increased complexity however, this simple sender score is no longer accurate or valid and should not be used as a KPI. As Kevin Senne, Sr. Director of Deliverability for Oracle states: “Senders were desperate for some kind of measure to explain email deliverability, and this number was something that they could look to as a guide”. Again, according to Mr. Senne, the problem is:

• No major ISP uses the Sender Score metric to determine delivery or inbox placement.
• The score doesn’t reflect the reality of deliverability success or failure.
• It is mainly a US based system; the scoring does not accurately reflect performance for senders in EMEA, APAC, or Latin America.

 The best method of measuring deliverability currently is by monitoring the percentage of inbox placement across each ISP/domain separately, as well as monitoring open rates. For those that don't have access to Deliverability Tools, Oracle deliverability expert Pradeep Mangalapalli recommends using a unique open rate of around 10% as a general indicator of deliverability health. The best way to prevent deliverability issues is to follow the best practices below:

Best Practices to help mitigate deliverability issues:

1. Avoid using third party lists to acquire new leads or grow your email database
2. Obtain consent from contacts before sending them emails
3. Regularly monitor bounce back rates and bounce back messages
4. Regularly monitor and run reports to check spam complaints
5. Review engagement metrics to help refine email programs
6. Adhere to local and international email regulations
7. Send targeted emails based on interests and contact preferences
8. Regularly segment out inactive contacts (users who have not engaged with your emails in about 12 months). Repeatedly emailing recipients who aren’t engaging with your emails can be bad for your reputation for several reasons: 
9. Addresses that don’t open or click on your messages are much more likely to mark messages as spam. 
10. Unengaged addresses may have been repurposed into spam traps. 
11. Unengaged recipients can make your traffic look unwanted by lowering your open rate percentages. 
12. Stick to a consistent volume of email sends from month to month. 
13. Consider email design best practices, such as using preheader text, alt text, and image-to-text ratios.

Other recommendations:

Manage Your Inactives. Suppressing all email records with no activity in the last 12 months is a scary thought for most of us, as it could greatly reduce our list size. There are email scrubbing services that will try and determine which specific email addresses have been converted to spam traps, honeypots, etc. so you don't have to suppress all inactives, just those that have been identified as harmful. Vendors include FreshAddress, Informatica and BriteVerify, among others.

Make it easy to unsubscribe. This sounds counter intuitive, but making the unsubscribe process as easy as possible is a really good idea. The truth is, if someone doesn’t want to receive your messages and they don’t see an easy way to unsubscribe, they always know where the “report spam” button is. Remember, someone who opts out can always opt back in, but even a small number of spam complaints can really hurt your reputation, not to mention your ongoing ability to deliver messages to those who want to receive them.

Be conscious of your sending frequency. If you feel like you’re doing all the right things with your email program, but you’re still landing in the spam folder, it may be a good idea to examine your sending frequency. Between your regular newsletter, special offers, and other announcements, you could be sending your recipients more email than you think. Exactly how much email is “too much” differs for every sender, but if your reputation is suffering, even moderately reducing the amount of email your recipients receive from you is a good idea and a great place to start.

Summary. Imagine if you were to gain access to 20% more of your DB! Those in charge of marketing automation platforms are making this possible by learning the causes, solutions and tools, as we become email deliverability experts.
Yet managing inbox placement is only half the battle. You still have to focus on level of engagement in order to keep your overall sender reputation in good health. A solid mix of good email data management, relevant content and continuous real-time deliverability monitoring is what currently works in keeping the inbox door wide open.

Steve Kellogg
Crowds2Crowds

Sources used for this post: Oracle Deliverability Plus, Litmus, Return Path

 

When Would NOW be a Good Time?

While this "I want everything now" mentality completely matches the expectations of my kids and their friends, it isn’t just Millennials who expect this. According to a recent Salesforce report titled, “State of the Connected Customer”:

• 64% of consumers expect companies to respond to them and interact with them in real time.
• Millennials: 66%
• GenXers: 63%
• Baby Boomers: 62%

And in case you thought this was just for B2C, it’s even higher for B2B:

• 84% of business buyers expect companies to respond to them and interact with them in real time (according to the same survey).

This is not just about customer support response times either. “Instant” seems to be the new expectation across all interactions.

Now, I know it’s easy to summarily dismiss this. I can hear some of the reactions, “Customers may expect this, but it’s not necessarily what they are getting. And even if they are, it’s just not possible for our company to deliver this.” We don’t have the:

• Infrastructure
• Resources
• Technology
• Processes
• Time
• All the Above

Response time improvements have historically been focused on customer support. But TIME also fosters and helps drive the 3 things required for any sale:

• Relevancy
• Trust
• Empathy

The truth is, customers don’t care about your constraints. And while those experiencing your brand might cut you some slack in certain response-time scenarios, it is safe to say that TIME plays a major role in the success of your:

• Marketing Effectiveness
• Sales Conversions
• Customer Support Satisfaction
• Overall Customer Experience Perceptions

Time has now become ubiquitous with connectivity. The more connected you are with someone/something, the higher your expectation of timely interactions, no matter where you are in the relationship, or in the sales cycle. And once the brand has achieved an interaction response benchmark, the expectation is that it will be achieved EVERY SINGLE TIME, regardless of channel or device. So, big peaks and valleys within your interaction response times may likely do your brand more harm than delivering consistency, even if the timing is less than ideal. Inconsistency breeds uncertainty, which erodes trust.

The concept of Agile Marketing has surfaced, in part as a methodology in addressing the Now Economy. It is an iterative approach to marketing taken from Agile software development. The core tenants include:

• A focus on change vs. a focus on a plan
• Quantifiable testing vs. opinions
• Rapid iterations over larger, longer, complex campaigns
• A “fail fast” approach due to small experiments
• Collaboration vs. business unit silos

The goals of Agile Marketing are to improve the speed, adaptability and predictability of change.

While Agile marketing lays the foundation of delivering greater speed, innovation, and faster pivot vs. persevere decisions, it will not inherently deliver NOW. One of the biggest barriers to achieving “real-time” interactions is – you guessed it – data, along with the infrastructure that supports it. The foundation of any digital transformation, data, and especially the speed in acquiring, integrating and interacting with data, often becomes the weakest link in meeting time-based customer expectations. How many times have you been exposed to retargeting ads long after you’ve already bought the product or service? Those that are fast eat those that are slow in today’s NOW economy.

Many companies still have a long way to go before even considering speed, as they continue to juggle connecting siloed data sources, aggregating and standardizing online and offline data acquisition points while focusing on improving customer experiences.

As companies continue to make progress towards their own digital transformations, it’s easy to get distracted by all the strategies and technologies available. And while things like relevancy, intuitive interfaces, cohesive communications and ubiquitous personalized experiences across channels and devices are all important customer expectations, a significant focus on improving timing throughout every interaction with your brand can generate a systemic lift in the improvement of other customer expectations, even if you improve other areas only marginally.

I buy groceries from the same store, not because they have the best variety or prices, but because they always have the shortest lines. When evaluating business goods and services online, whoever consistently responds to me the fastest throughout the entire sales cycle often gets the business.

As buyers, we can only give companies moments of our time, literally. There are just too many distractions and disruptions. As marketers, our best chance of success is to react and respond during those brief moments that customers graciously give us. As Dr. Paul Marsden, consumer psychologist and Head of digital Insight for the SYZYGY Group argues, “In the Now Economy, content is no longer king, convenience is king.” And convenience is typically driven by time.

So, as you determine Business Requirements for marketing, sales and service hardware, software and tools, as well as other internal processes and systems, consider adding more weighted value to the impact interaction timing improvements can provide throughout the entire customer lifecycle.

BTW: What could possibly be better than achieving real-time interactions? Achieving predictive interactions, where the brand knows what you want and need, even before you do.

Steve Kellogg
Digital Transformation 9-Year Veteran. 

Let's connect on LinkedIn

 

Meet the New Digital CX Gatekeeper

Me: “Hey Siri, delete all emails that aren’t relevant to what I’m interested in.”

Siri: “OK Steve, I have deleted all irrelevant emails and will prevent them from showing up in your inbox from now on. Would you like me to also block ALL future irrelevant content, from any source, on all your devices?

Me: “Yes, and make sure you block irrelevant web content while you’re at it."

Siri: I’m here to protect you, Steve.”

And this is only the beginning. At some point we won’t even have to ask.
Siri and other available AI personal assistants will “auto-magically" manage this for us. If you are a digital marketer, a chill may have just gone up your spine.

The amount of irrelevant content we receive on a daily basis is already overwhelming enough, but when you consider the scale at which IoT connected devices is growing, (estimates of 1 trillion connected devices by 2030 compared to about 20 billion connected devices today, up from a mere 500 million in 2010), we’ll all soon be bombarded with constant alerts, warnings, notifications, announcements, etc. from the things we own and use.

As I mentioned in my last blog, it's likely that at some point virtually every product we own will have a digital component to it (and inherent connection). From wearables to appliances to pets to consumables to car parts to tennis racquets -- virtually everything we have and use in our lives. More connection points means more inbound communications, all clamoring for our immediate attention.

The need for full-time support in managing and prioritizing this continuous deluge of alerts, messages, notifications (and yes, even marketing messages) will skyrocket. And that full-time support will likely reside within our mobile phone. It makes sense. It’s with us at all times, it’s always connected and,  has in fact become the first screen.

Our phone already collects data, behaviors, locations, purchase history, etc., so an AI personal assistant would already have the real-time details of what we're focused on at any given moment. This along with historical information would help guide the decisioning to delete, hold or pass thru prioritized content, constantly learning, improving and adjusting the hierarchies based on our behaviors.

There are  currently 3 flavors of AI personal assistant services:

• Technology-enabled artificial intelligence – (Siri, Google Now, Cortana, and soon to be released Viv.)

• Human enabled, where people respond to your concierge requests (Magic, Operator, TaskRabbit)

• Hybrids –  some combination of the two (Facebook M)

There’s little doubt these AI personal assistants will become an integral part of our lives, especially as connection points continue to increase and the technology gets more intelligent and useful.

Steve Kellogg
Digital Marketing Leader,  Strategist and Technologist

Marketing Technology Leadership

With the astonishing growth of mar-tech and ad-tech technologies, a new set of marketing skills are required, led by a champion who spearheads, defines and drives marketing technology initiatives, strategies, governance and adoption.

While the sheer volume of available marketing technologies is overwhelming enough, the future looks even more daunting, especially when you consider the scale at which connected devices are growing. (Estimates of 1 trillion connected devices by 2030. We're at about 20 billion connected devices today, up from a mere 500 million in 2010). Yikes!

What's really scary is that at some point virtually every product we own will have a digital component to it (and inherent connection). From wearables to appliances to pets to consumables to car parts to tennis racquets -- virtually everything we have and use in our lives. More connection points means more complexity as we address our ability to listen, adjust and respond to customer interactions, across entire customer life-cycles.

BTW: As these connection points increase, consumer attention span will invariably decrease across devices and channels. Quick moments of interaction will be the norm, which means we'll need to be lightening fast in leveraging these “moments" in our marketing.

So now that dreams of your job getting easier down the road have been squashed, lets focus on who you'll need to bring in to champion the good fight and act as your company's GPS guide in navigating the marketing technology landscape, as it is now and as it will be.

Many have already adopted at least some marketing technologies. And you may have already seen the 2016 Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic, created by chiefmartec.com  to give us a current view of vendorland.

Here’s a summary of the marketing technologies you're likely considering:

• Advertising and Promotional Technologies

  Mobile Marketing
  SEO/SEM
  Native Advertising
  Video
  Print
  PR
  Paid, Earned Owned

• Content and Experience Technologies

  Mobile Apps
  Interactive
  Optimization/Personalization
  DAM (Digital Asset Management) and MRM (Marketing Resource Management)
  Marketing Automation Platforms
  CMS

• Social Platforms

  Listening
  Campaign
  Community
  Advocates/Raving Fans

• Commerce and Sales Platforms

  Proximity
  Channel/Partner
  Sales Enablement
  Affiliate Marketing
  eCommerce
  CRM

• Data Platforms

  Data Enrichment
  Data Standardization
  Data Science
  Data Integrations
  SaaS
  PaaS
  DMP

• Analytics Platforms

  ROI Attribution
  Mobile
  Data Visualization
  Predictive BI

The Marketing Technology Leader will need the following skillets to be successful in guiding your technology transformation:

Marketing Technology Strategist: Defines the internal marketing technology ecosystems required to support continuous and cohesive marketing conversations across your customer’s current and future lifecycle experiences.

Customer Experience Advocate: Many strategic marketing technology initiatives fail because they were never aligned to the expectations and benefits of customers.  Some were driven by shiny new capabilities announced by technology vendors, or by strategic decisioning anchored to flawed processes. So this person will need to act as the Voice of the Customer, providing ongoing confirmation that systems and technologies are meeting customer expectations and improving customer experiences.

Business Requirements Leader: Defines and documents business requirements and expected outcomes, connecting these to a list of applicable technologies vetted through a vendor and solution internal approval process, in order to ultimately support buy vs. build decisioning.

Data Wrangler: Act as liaison with other internal/external data platform owners in defining which siloed data sources should be integrated and how.

Integration Juggler: Manages and/or supports the marketing technology applications integration projects, including the integration of SaaS, PaaS, internal/external systems, liaising with IT staff in managing and directing resources and capabilities.

Data Analyst: Visualizes data and uncovers the stories they tell, answering questions such as whether to pivot or persevere.

Change Management Evangelist: Manages and advocates the transformational change management and global adoption of the marketing tech stack.

Protector of the Realm: Manages internal training and protection of systems, connections and process. Identifies opportunities for automation and scalable improvements.

Opportunist: Looks ahead and identifies emerging technology and CX opportunities that aren’t quite obvious yet.

So, can you find someone who can wear all these hats? Maybe. More likely you'll find someone who can compliment your existing team’s strengths and support their weaknesses.

Of course the other option is to outsource some or all of this to those in the business of delivering these services.

Either way, the sooner you get started the sooner you'll be delighting your customers with indispensable value, leading to increased revenues, which will lead to increased budget to purchase the next set of marketing technologies.

 Steve Kellogg
Digital Marketing Strategist and Technologist

What is a DMP? Watch this short DMP Primer Video

 

What's all the fuss about DMPs (Data Management Platforms)? They have been the hottest digital marketing technology trend for the last several years.

And its no wonder. The average DMP payback is within 4 months. the average ad savings: 30%. The ability to connect customer IDs across channel and device: Priceless.

Watch this short DMP Primer video and learn:

• What is a DMP?
• What's in it for you?
• What resources do you need to manage one?

Enjoy.

Steve Kellogg
Digital Marketing Strategies and Technologies Consultant
steve@crowds2crowds.com

2016 Digital Marketing Trends, Strategies and Tactics

Here are, what I consider to be 3 key transformational digital marketing strategies for 2016. I believe they are key because they align to 3 of the most talked about and most impactful digital marketing trends that many analysts, tech vendors and thought leaders are predicting. They are designed to help lay the foundations for long-term success in our ever-evolving digital marketing world. I’m also including 3 actionable tactics for each strategy to help foster additional 2016 planning.

Trend/Prediction: Marketing Will Ultimately Own the Customer Experience. We’ve all heard this from multiple vendors, analysts and thought leaders. So what has to be fundamentally in place to make this happen?

• 2016 Transformational Strategy #1: Make love, not war with IT. You will never be able to improve the customer experience without data. And you will never be able to fully integrate, leverage and improve data without IT. So lay the foundation for a long, successful partnership with them. Digital marketing success ultimately hinges on your ability to acquire, standardize and integrate data, regardless of channel or device. You WILL need IT support. And as we all know, they tend to be very circumspect and extremely protective of their systems, their processes and their data security practices. And who can blame them. So the better the relationship, the better the odds are that both teams can work through disparate challenges in meeting common CX  goals.

• Tactic #1: Start by first getting aligned and in sync with the common goal of addressing full ownership of CX. It will certainly help if the CEO has already mandated this, but you may not have that luxury. If not, IT may need to fully understand and embrace the long-term importance of CX ownership. Alignment can be facilitated by first identifying the benefits of CX ownership, chief among them, a shared success in reaching the company's revenue goals.
  
  
• Tactic 2: Once alignment and conceptual agreement is established, next evaluate the current relationship. Define the commonalities and differences that might prevent a successful CX joint partnership and work through the high level challenges, frustrations and concerns of both teams. One of the best ways to facilitate this is to over-communicate. Increase meeting frequency until all relationship challenges are ironed out and consensus is reached. Also, it doesn’t hurt to spend time building personal relationships. You may want to buy them each Apple TVs , or take them bowling, or some other group activity. Hey why not. To succeed in CX, marketing and IT are not allowed to get a divorce. That option is off the table. So you might as well commit to a blissful and meaningful relationship.
  
  
• Tactic 3: Once a shared vision and a fully cooperative working relationship is established and strengthened, (and IT is bowling in the mid 200’s and thoroughly enjoying their Apple TVs :) begin to analyze the initial data connections that will be required in order to meet customer CX expectations. Start with integrating your own internal CX data points, including customer service, tech support, eCommerce, customer portals, etc. This may be easier said then done, but remember, customers already expect us to have a consistent, cohesive conversation with them. They expect us to know their entire history aligned with every new engagement, no matter where they are in their relationship with your brand. So start by integrating the customer data that your company already owns and controls, but that may reside within disconnected departments/systems.

Trend/Prediction #2: Content Marketing - The Age of “Me” is Upon Us. The days of creating self serving content are all but over. The focus is now on help, not hype.  Of course this is what customers have responded to all along, but it is now more formalized and socialized. So how do we move forward?

• 2016 Transformational Strategy #2: Make a fundamental shift in content development that moves from hype to help. In Jay Baer’s book, "Youtility, Why Smart Marketing is About Help, Not Hype", Jay outlines the impact of creating marketing that is so useful, that people would actually pay for it. In the B2B world especially, potential customers are looking for solutions. No one really looks for marketing collateral, they look for solutions collateral. They have no interest in hearing how great you think you are. They are only interested in authentic content that is the most useful in helping them solve their problem. So begin with that. Answer the question, “What’s in it for me” right up top. It’s really your only hope of getting through the clutter. I’ve written about this many times.

• Tactic #1: Conduct a complete asset audit and analysis.  Identify all your existing assets and categorize them as either self-serving hype or useful and helpful. Be honest here. Look at each piece of content through the lens of a potential customer. Get past any psychological need to explain why your company is so great. At the end of the day is the content really about you (the company or the product/service) or about me (the customer). Will it enable me to be more knowledgeable, more effective and more valuable?
  
  
• Tactic #2: Once you’ve completed the audit and you have your list of content “keepers”, overlay the content you keep to broad buyer personas and stages. This will help you identify where you are asset rich and asset poor. It will also help you focus 2016 budget and resources on filing the most important content gaps first.
  
  
• Tactic #3: Whether you produce all your content in-house, or outsource some or all of it, making a successful transition from hype to help will ultimately depend on the relationship Marketing has with Creative. As in the IT relationship above, marketers and creatives need to work in lockstep in order to deliver fully executable useful, authentic content. So evaluate the existing relationship. Chances are there are some challenges and frustrations that need to be addressed and resolved. Marketing is sometimes challenged with off-target creative deliverables, while Creatives complain of incomplete or vague Creative Briefs, for example. Easily fixed with better, more consistent communication, along with an aligned understanding of the need to shift from hype to help. Again, gifts and group activities can go a long way here as well.Maybe you can all go skydiving together?

Trend/Prediction #3: A Blend of Marketing Mix Modeling and Attribution Modeling is likely the future of Digital Marketing Measurement. The advantages of measuring “natural” revenue drivers, such as seasonal spikes, global economic factors and competitive pressures/pricing together with attribution modeling is very powerful. While CPGs first adopted Mix Modeling, B2B digital marketing in particular lends itself to Revenue Attribution Modeling, mainly due to the additional inherent data and insights that digital channels and nurturing assets bring to the analysis. So for the sake of this post, let’s focus on B2B  getting a firm handle on marketing’s return on investment.

• 2016 Transformational Strategy #3: Its time to get serious about implementing ROMI (Return on Marketing Investment), whether the CEO is asking for it or not. If the goal of the CEO is revenue growth (99.9% likely) then we must begin to finalize and fully implement the tools and processes by which marketing will use to evaluate which channels and assets are contributing to revenue, in a holistic way. Especially if we consider the first 2 strategies above surrounding CX and content development shifts. We'll want to also evolve our current measurements to fully capture our overall strategic success.
  

• Tactic #1: If you haven’t already, decide whether to adopt basic or advanced revenue attribution. Basic meaning you attribute all the revenue to either the first marketing touch or the last marketing touch. Advanced meaning you spread the revenue across all touch-points, either linearly or weighted. I did a video blog about this back in 2012 that goes into further detail. I vote Advanced revenue attribution for several reasons. First it gives you insights into the effectiveness of ALL your campaigns and assets. Second it begins to expose patterns of content consumption, especially if you focus on the digestion of assets by your best customers, in terms of revenue. Third, this helps create a CX roadmap, and begins to define the strategies and tactics of where to begin. I recently wrote a blog about CX strategy vs technology that goes into more detail about this.
  

• Tactic #2: Once you've decided on Advanced Revenue Attribution :) work with IT  and your systems admins to establish the tools and connections that will need to be made in order to tie the revenue with the investment. Typically MA tools provide the investment data and CRM provides the revenue data. These connections may already be productized or may need to be fully customized, depending on your tech stacks. There are also a number of 3rd party tech point-solution tools that address revenue attribution.
  

• Tactic #3: Establish a timeline and roadmap for piloting, evaluating, measuring and adjusting the reporting. It’s very likely that the initial outputs aren’t exactly what you expected, so there is almost always an adjustment period. In fact this adjustment period may never end, as technologies, processes and people change. Its critical to start with a pilot. It is sheer suicide if you launch this to the entire organization without first invoking this critical pilot process. And finally, as we consultants like to say, don’t try and boil the ocean. Adopt a crawl, walk, run methodology. It can sometimes take several years to fully refine ROMI.

While this is not an exhaustive list of 2016 digital marketing strategies, use these 3 key strategies and supporting tactics to lay the groundwork that should get you ahead of some of the most impactful trends coming your way. You will very likely reap the benefits long-term and springboard past competitors who aren't ready to make the adjustments in 2016, required to leverage these and other trends.

In keeping with my own conviction to provide help, not hype, I hope you found this useful.

Steve Kellogg is a Digital Marketing Leader, Strategist and Technologist. He is currently Sr. Director of Global Marketing Strategies, Technologies and Partnerships at Astadia, Inc.