Agile Marketing

How can you improve the odds that customers choose your product or service over the competition? At one time, it may have been enough to create great advertising, make sure your product is available in the right distribution channels, build a great online presence, and provide customers with a great initial experience with your product or service. But today, as Google points out in their under-promoted Zero Moment of Truth campaign, you must go a step further: you must ensure that as customers research alternatives, your product or service stands out clearly as the best choice.

Background

 In 2005, Procter & Gamble appointed Dina Howell to the newly created position of Director of the First Moment of Truth. P&G had determined that the 3-7 seconds before a shopper chose an item from the store shelf were absolutely critical to determining which product they purchased, and they wanted to make sure they had someone focused on the factors that influenced this First Moment of Truth.  As their CEO at the time, A.G. Lafley put it:

The best brands consistently win two moments of truth. The first moment occurs at the store shelf, when a consumer decides whether to buy one brand or another. The second occurs at home, when she uses the brand — and is delighted, or isn’t.

Visually, it looks like this:

Although not shown in the diagram, there is an implicit feedback loop, where the Second Moment of Truth influences repeat purchases.

Although this concept originally applied to offline retail purchases, I think it can be extended to any purchase:

• A customer on Amazon.com searches for HDTV and is presented with a list of choices. The image of one TV is a non-descript black rectangle with the brand’s logo in a barely readable typefont; the second image shows a tiger literally leaping off the screen. Which image do you think tends to draw the click?
• A customer searching for financial services first encounters your brand by coming to the homepage of your site; what kind of experience do they have, especially compared to the competition?

Zero Moment of Truth

Google has identified a new moment of truth, the Zero Moment of Truth (ZMOT), in which the consumer researches the product or service before they come to the store or visit the point-of-purchase website. It probably won’t surprise you that 84% of shoppers research a purchase online before they make a purchase, whether online or offline. And they don’t just do cursory research. Google’s data showed that “the average shopper used 10.4 sources of information to make a decision in 2011, up from 5.3 sources in 2010.”

The new model looks like this:

Here, the feedback loop is made explicit.

Winning the Zero Moment of Truth in Software and Services

The impact of the Zero Moment of Truth varies by product and by industry.  I can’t begin to draw out the implications for consumer product goods or large appliance purchases, for example.  If you want to know more about these product areas, read Google’s excellent E-Book.

But for software and services, here are three keys to winning the Zero Moment of Truth:

Get Found

The Internet has an infinite number of shelves, but if the consumer can’t find you on the shelf where they’re looking, you can’t possibly win the Zero Moment of Truth. Sure, this is about search engine optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM), but it’s also about understanding the questions that users ask when they’re researching your product or service.

Everyone in your industry is trying to secure the 1^st or 2^nd organic search ranking for your product category.  While that’s important, what about the customers who either don’t know your product category or search based on their problem, not on your category?

Here are some concrete steps you can take to improve your chances of being found when prospects are researching your product category:

• Research related keywords. You can do this in several ways. Start typing your product category into a search engine box, and notice the auto fill terms that appear as you type. Both Google and Bing also have a function to the left of their main search results to show related searches. You can also use Google and Bing’s keyword research tools as well.
• Research how people find you today.  Google Analytics, among other tools, can tell you the top keywords that bring traffic to your web site today. When looking at this data, it’s important to ask two questions 1) which keywords are people using to find you that are unexpected? 2) Which keywords are “missing”, i.e. you were expecting that people would use to find you, but they aren’t.
• What questions do people ask where you have the answer? In their E-Book on ZMOT, Google tells a story about President Obama’s staff using this technique. They had determined that the #1 searched question during the health care debate was “What’s in the health care bill?”  They then wrote a blog post with that question, exactly as written, as the title, and soon, they were the number one organic search result for that question in the major search engines. Brainstorm questions that your prospects may have, and then determine from Google’s traffic estimator which queries get the most traffic. Write content that addresses these questions, and promote it.

Thought Leadership

When selecting a software product, particularly in business-to-business transactions, prospects will typically do some research before contacting vendors in order to whittle down the number of candidates.  If you are eliminated during this phase, obviously you have no chance of winning the business. How do you make sure that you are chosen to participate in a high percentage of the evaluations?

In addition to getting found (covered above), prospects often choose vendors who they perceive to be thought leaders in their field. No one wants to choose the fading star – someone who has high market share today, but through poor customer service or old technology, is losing customers to more agile competitors.

What are you doing to establish thought leadership? Are your blog posts informative and innovative? Do you have a successful analyst relations program? Are your executives invited to speak at key conferences in your industry?

Reputation Management

When customers research during the Zero Moment of Truth, one of the things they are looking for are recommendations, for or against. All companies today need to have a real-time response team tasked with responding to complaints or negative reviews.

Even worse than negative reviews online are no reviews.  This is particularly true, for example, in products sold through the Apple or Google Android app stores. Don’t be afraid of negative comments or reviews; these are a chance for you to engage with someone, and potentially turn them around.

Insight or irrelevant?

What do you think? How does the Zero Moment of Truth apply to your business? Does it? What say ye?

Newsjacking is the practice of hijacking or drafting behind breaking news to get coverage for your brand or message. David Meerman Scott’s newest book does a great job explaining the concept and recounting numerous examples:

• Rick Perry newsjacked the Iowa Ames Straw Poll this year by officially announcing his candidacy on the same day. Even though Michelle Bachman spent weeks in Iowa and won the poll, Rick Perry got most of the news coverage that day.
• Anthony Weiner resigned from Congress following his idiotic decision to send a sexually explicit picture of himself to a young woman via Twitter and lying about it. Larry Flynt newsjacked the story by offering Weiner employment at his Flynt Management Group.  Hundreds of news stories mention Flynt’s employment offer.
• The CEO of Eloqua, a marketing automation company, learned that Oracle had quietly acquired one of his competitors. He immediately got online to write a blog titled “Oracle Joins the Party,” describing how Oracle’s acquisition validates the market and represents a huge opportunity for Eloqua. Many of the news stories quoted his blog post.

The newsjacker’s goal is to own the second paragraph: the part of the news article where the reporter explains the “why” and the implications of the story. In some cases, like the Rick Perry example described above, the newsjack can become the main story. But in most cases, the newsjacker drafts behind the peloton of the breaking news, in some cases spinning it to their advantage.

Newsjacking requires real-time responsiveness to the market – when a story is breaking, you can’t wait until you have some free time to write a response, or look for approval from five layers of management. For this reason, newsjacking often favors the smaller company competing with the corporate giant.

Newsjacking also requires good judgement and a tasteful response.  Scott describes the backlash against designer Kenneth Cole when he tweeted “Millions are in uproar in #Cairo. Rumor is they heard our new spring collection is now available online”. His cuteness was seen as inappropriate when people were dying in the Egypt uprising as well as a crass attempt to cash in on the protests.  If the news is tragedy (and so often it is), your response has to help. If the news is less emotionally laden, the response needs to provide a new insight or perspective.

Scott outlines pragmatic and useful approaches to finding opportunities to newsjack, developing a strategy for providing an appropriate and insightful viewpoint, and getting your message into the market.

Highly recommended.

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post titled “User Stories in Agile Marketing“. I intended to write a follow on post the next week, but travel and work and a few other blog posts came in between. Here is the long promised follow on, which covers how development user stories and agile marketing user stories differ, and how to implement user stories in agile marketing.

Here is a table of some of the differences between user stories used for development, compared to those used for agile marketing:

Because development user stories focus on relatively low level details and functionality, there tend to be lots of them in any given project: at least 20-30, and sometimes hundreds. Agile marketing user stories are higher level, and typically, there are fewer of them: generally under 10 per persona, and often only 3-4 per persona. Development user stories tend to focus on left brain oriented processes and functionality, “I want to login so that I can access subscriber content”.  Marketing user stories tend to focus on right brain outcomes which have emotions associated with them.  “As a mom, I want to take and share videos of the kids so that I can share important moments with grandparents, aunts, uncles and friends.”  As marketers, we sometimes focus too much on function/feature, rather than outcomes.  Good marketers and salespeople have learned this lesson.  How does the Nordstrom saleslady sell a dress? Not based on feature/functions (it has spaghetti straps, a street length hem and six buttons), but based on outcomes (You look great in that dress.  Your husband is going to love it).

The back of the card containing a development user story outlines the test cases for the implementation of the user story. When documenting marketing user stories, I use the back of the card for a different purpose.  In one column, I list the SEO keywords associated with the user story.  This reminds me, if I’m generating a piece of content to address the user story, of the keywords and phrases that I need to incorporate in to my text.  In the second column, I list the alternatives that the user has to address this user story, starting with how they address it at present.  This column represents the competition, but it’s important to list more than just formal competitors (other companies in your market). How does the user achieve the outcome at present? In the example above, perhaps the mom uses a traditional camcorder to record videos of the kids, or perhaps she doesn’t record video at all, but uses a digital camera and shares stills.

So how to get started using Agile Marketing user stories? Begin by documenting the personas relevant to your product or service. I use a template like the one pictured above (this is a slight modification of a template used by Todd Warren and his NUvention class; thanks, Todd). After I document my personas, I begin writing down user stories for each one of my personas.  At times, there is overlap – multiple personas want the same outcomes. But often, different personas in a market or a sales cycle want different outcomes. By documenting these user stories as a team, including the SEO keywords and the alternative solutions, we can be more consistent and more effective.

What’s your experience? Have you tried user stories in marketing? If you’re interested in doing so, and you’d like to start with my templates, leave me a comment and I’ll send them to you.

Photo courtesy of SD Dirk

Lance Armstrong had a coach; actually, two coaches (Johan Bruyneel and Chris Carmichael).  So does Rafael Nadal (his uncle Toni).  So do the world’s top opera singers. Tony La Russa’s masterful coaching of the St. Louis Cardinals was a critical factor in this year’s World Series.  Coaching can also benefit a top performing surgeon, according to a fascinating article by Atul Gawande in last month’s New Yorker magazine.

But how about mid-career, top performing marketers? Can they benefit from coaching, from an outside set of eyes and ears? I think the answer is clearly yes.

Great marketing requires great implementation of the basics – positioning, understanding the customer, engagement.  As we advance in our careers and we get engaged in projects, sometimes we forget or don’t pay enough attention to these fundamentals. The effectiveness of a marketing campaign can also be determined by the most minute of details: details that we may be too close to see. A coach’s perspective, encouragement and discipline can help even the best marketer improve their performance by tweaking the details and covering all the fundamentals.

I have a coach.  He’s not a marketing coach, but a business coach. I find talking to him once a week tremendously helpful. He provides me with that outside observer’s perspective. He reminds me to focus on particular details and to prepare thoroughly for a meeting, making sure I understand my objectives going in and thinking about the perspectives of other players. He sends me inspirational materials, including the above mentioned New Yorker magazine article. Without his coaching, I’m sure that I wouldn’t continue to grow as much as I have or enjoy my work as much as I do.

What about you? Could you use a coach? Where could you benefit the most from an outside set of eyes and ears, as well as the encouragement and discipline of a coach?

It seems contradictory, doesn’t it? How can you teach something that you yourself don’t know well? The truth is, for anything that is an extension of your existing expertise or where you have a reasonable aptitude, the best way to learn something is to teach it.

Back in early September, I received an email from the University of Washington, Bothell campus, asking if I would be interested in teaching a course in E-Marketing. The person slotted to teach the course had dropped out, and I had a previous relationship with the school. I took the opportunity, although I didn’t then consider myself an expert in E-Marketing.

The last time my job title contained the word Marketing in the title was back at Microsoft, in the late 90′s up to early 2001.  At that time, Microsoft barely got the internet, and Mark Zuckerberg was still in prep school. No one at Microsoft talked about social media marketing, content marketing, search engine optimization or a host of other e-marketing techniques.

As CEO of a couple of startups, and then through my consulting practice, I had kept up with most of the new concepts in e-marketing, but I was hardly an expert. Here’s what I learned and some tips if you decide to use teaching as a method of learning a new skill or subject.

• Read everything relevant to the topic and synthesize it – One of my best decisions early on was to use David Meerman Scott’s The New Rules of Marketing & PR as a textbook, rather than a traditional college textbook.  I read it cover to cover before starting on the syllabus, and as I read, I investigated many of the links and sources that David referenced in the book.  David led me to another book, Content Rules, by Ann Handley and C.C. Chapman, which in turn led me to sites like MarketingProfs, Junta42 and The Content Marketing Insitute. The synthesizing generally takes place as I prepare the lectures. I also take notes as I read using EverNote.
• Call on the expertise of others – Where I don’t have deep expertise, I bring in people who do.  Cal McAllister of The Wexley School for Girls spoke this week on viral marketing, Todd Warren spoke on the creation and use of personas.  Later in the course, I have Matt Youngquist of Career Horizons coming in to talk about E-Marketing in the job search, and Tom Barr coming in to talk about E-Marketing at Starbucks.
• Learn by doing – Before I teach something, I apply it in my consulting practice. I’ve built Facebook pages, created social media strategies, run webinars, worked on SEO and SEM, and created Content Marketing strategies for clients in my consulting business as I’ve taught these techniques in my class.  This allows me to enliven the discussion by bringing in my own experiences and challenges.
• Let students learn by doing – I think the academic term for this is experiential learning, but I prefer the simpler “learn by doing”. My students must practice e-marketing either within the confines of an existing business, or by creating a blog or web site, and apply e-marketing techniques to increase their traffic and viewership.

What do you think? Have you ever learned something by teaching it? What new skill could you learn by teaching?