Let me introduce Tom, a middle-level marketer, who works for a middle-sized company. He is responsible for a company’s brand, he knows the brand, knows the environment, analyses the competitors’ strengths and weaknesses, builds the plans, executes them and monitors the progress, he tries to make the correct decisions, he does all the stuff that his role requires. Year-in, year-out. Tom, however, has a small problem; he works for a ‘traditional’ company which prefers to work with traditional channels, and which believes that their digital presence is just a ‘nice to have’ thing, if not a pure waste of money. So Tom’s tactical plan is restricted to the use of ‘traditional’ channels, such as printed sales aids, face-to-face calls, phone calls, and –occasionally- some printed ads in selected business press. He is smart enough, however, to see that he inevitably has to ‘go digital’ at some point, since his (existing, but also future) customers live in the digital era already, and expect him and his brand to be there as well. And he understands that if he doesn’t go there, he will start losing customers, and his brand (and the company) will suffer. Therefore Tom decides to alert his boss about the need to expand the plan to include the integration of traditional and ‘new’ channels, but he has to suggest it in a way that his boss will see the benefit and will endorse it.
So Tom starts to search the ‘digital world’, to see what other options for customer interactions are out there, and soon he faces a bigger problem: this place is a mere labyrinth! (picture below) How could he decide what is best for his brand?
I will try to give Tom some quick and practical hints:
- Marketing principles stay the same, regardless of the channels used to communicate! This means that you have to start with your customers’ profile. Do not start with what you can do, leave this for later. Study carefully, analyse, design and picture your customers’ journeys, and spot the opportunities for your brand in there.
- Segment your customers. Different customers may have different journeys. Design the different journeys. What are your customers trying to achieve? What are their ‘pains’ in these journeys? How could your brand convert these ‘pains’ to ‘gains’?
- Then, design your strategy: what is the desired state? How would you wish your customers to behave? How could you make this happen for each segment?
- When you’re done with your analysis, it’s time to ask for help! Check your analysis, your strategy with others (not necessarily marketers). Present your work to them and ask for a brainstorming session to get ideas on how to build our tactical plan: generate as many ideas as possible; encourage even ‘crazy’ ideas; do not debate ideas; group ideas together. Next, evaluate the ideas: get rid of non-value adding ones and perform an effort-effect analysis to narrow down to few achievable ideas. Then prioritise. (By the way, the only tools you will need up to that point are not so… sophisticated: pens, paper, paints, post-its, flipcharts, etc.)
- Now you select the channels! Do not be afraid to try new channels. Do not be afraid to mix them, if the mix looks better than the parts. Do not be afraid to kill them, if they don’t produce the desired outcome. And keep an eye on how other brands, or even industries, use the same channels. Never say ‘email campaigns are good for banks, but not for pharma’ for example. Be open to possibilities! (In 1973, a famous politician said ‘I don’t think there will be a woman Prime Minister in my lifetime’. That politician was Margaret Thatcher! Six years later, she became PM, the first woman ever). So try, mix, kill, and keep your options open.
- Identify the customers you are going to target with a specific channel mix. You may decide that not all channels will be available for everyone. And that is absolutely normal. In almost every industry, the most important customers are more likely to receive premium and personalised service. Take the banking sector for example: there are branches and ATMs, there is online banking, and there is personal banking and premium services. Not everyone has a premium account, or a personal banker available all the time.
- Last but not least, find a way to measure the performance of what you are implementing! That’s the most important and (to my experience) the most neglected step! I don’t want to get into theoretical discussion on how to use measures and performance indicators, there is plenty of free literature in the web. In order to keep it simple and practical, I will suggest one measure only: the Net Promoter Score (NPS)1. NPS is a questionnaire with just one question: ‘How likely are you to recommend [brand/service/company] to a colleague or friend?’, on a scale from 1 (not at all likely) to 10 (extremely likely). You calculate the score by adding the percentage of those who responded 9 & 10 (the so-called ‘promoters’) and then you remove the percentage of those who responded from 1 to 6 (the ‘detractors’). You do not count those who responded 7 & 8 (the ‘passives’). If the result is positive (the more positive, the better), keep what you are doing, it works. If it is negative, you better stop what you’re doing, it is damaging your business, because chances are you’re losing customers!
1″https://www.netpromoter.com/know”
