1. Content Marketing

Content marketing is coming to life, and 2012 will see an understanding an explosion of content strategies for brands, beyond simple blogs they will start to leverage the value in owned media by creating real content for customers to engage with. More than just advertising messages this will be content that brings a brand into a consumers life and makes a difference. Content will be channel neutral and heavily driven by video as barriers to production are now almost nil.

2. Social Design

Coined by our colleagues at Facebook, the integration of social components in almost everything we do will become prevalent in 2012. Whether it is a marketing conversation, a product launch or the way we cook food at home for our kids – everything will be amplified through the social graph.

3. Mobile (& Tablets)

The desktop will loose out as the de facto connection to the web, and this means additional functionality in terms of location/mobility but also different screen real estate for web marketers to work with, and different types of engagement as users are on the move.

4. Big Data & Analytics

Finally, 2012 will see the coming of age of data and analytics in the marketing world – adding more science to the art of communication and forcing marketers to look at ROI. Check out my post on ‘Learning to love big data‘.

In an ever changing communications landscape the role of customer communications or CRM has become more important than ever; the ability for customers to express themselves both positively and negatively now has both reach and impact that far outweigh any marketing programmes that a brand or organisation could run.

For brands this means understanding and managing their customers and leveraging their content to drive business – but to do this means finally moving to a customer-centric organisation and making the products and services the tools to drive satisfaction, loyalty and retention. The digital and social world has put the consumer in the driving seat and brands must now work hard to influence them.

(Infographic from GetSatisfaction here)

To really get to grips with this, there are three questions that we need to answer, the first is whether we really understand why the dynamic is changing, the second is about knowing what it is that we have to do in this new marketplace and the third how we get to success and if we are ready for it.

Much as this topic is enormous, laying out the new foundation for CRM and marketing strategy, this paper attempts to answer these questions and construct the basis for understanding how to proceed.

Do we really understand why the dynamic has changed?

In days gone by CRM practitioners would often role out the phrase that “a satisfied customer tells one person, a dissatisfied customer tells eight to sixteen others” to drive the importance of communicating and managing the experience of customers and not solely prospects. We know that the growth of organic business has always been easier per dollar through cross-sell and up-sell than new customer acquisition and hence the development of this practice.

Today the market dynamic has changed, digital, social and mobile have created a paradigm shift that changes our leading line, today a happy customer tells one friend, an unhappy customer tells everybody. So what has really happened? The web has shifted the power balance from brands that controlled paid media to the consumer whose voice is now louder and present on more channels than a brand could ever hope to be – blogs, websites, reviews, social networks – the conversation (see The Conversation Prism) is larger and more prevalent than any marketing campaign could ever hope to be.

Beyond this, the explosion of channels and marketing messages has made the consumer more sceptical and suspicious, the 50s housewife who watched Ariel on TV and then went out to the store to buy it is gone; today she wants to see customer reviews and recommendations above marketing messages and actively seeks these out before making any purchase decisions.

The market structure is also different, the so-called ‘long tail’ of the web has proven how barriers to entry for new products are now much lower and anyone can be a seller of anything (look at eBay), this plethora of choice makes customers more fickle, turns every product very quickly into a commodity and makes retention critical to business success.

The cost of recruiting new customers has increased dramatically and today can be estimated at anywhere between 4 and 100 times that of selling to an existing customer – when you look at the business costs and the potential impact of abandoning your customers it is clear that they must be the number one priority.

Do we know what to do in this new marketplace?

It isn’t enough to understand the dynamics of the market, we now need to know our customers inside out – to really communicate on a 1-to-1 basis we have to deliver a personalised message of value, and this takes knowledge and insight. Simple socio-demographic segmentation is rapidly losing its ability to drive this insight (even it is still very important) and more detailed insider knowledge based around psychographic, behavioural and usage of specific products is no necessary to understand and be able to respond to the needs of the consumer.

Beyond understanding a customer, communicating with them has also evolved; customer service is now an expectation at every touch point, not solely through a call centre whose number is hidden on the base of the packaging. As a consumer I want assistance online, in the store, on the phone and with the explosion of mobile, wherever I might be when a question arises.

Between understanding and then communicating with consumers there is a need for a whole new toolkit, one that works in real-time across different channels and connects the data (now big data) together to drive knowledge. Within social media the first phase of this process is listening – tapping into the conversation about your brand and understanding where the issues are and those customers who are speaking loudly.

After listening, engaging with the consumer is the next step and it is no surprise that the large listening tools are now integrating the ability to connect directly with Twitter or Facebook for their messaging platforms or the acquisition by Salesforce.com of the Radian6 platform to integrate the listening and engagement component into their much larger CRM systems.

Don’t be mistaken into thinking that direct mail and email are dead, because these channels still have immediate impact and relevance (email is still one of the most cost effective direct channels), but we need to use and understand them in the context of our consumers’ lives and figure out how they fit into a plan that includes real-time, direct messaging as part of a broader conversation.

How do we achieve success and are we ready?

It is true that effective CRM has never been a simple implementation – from the setup of the infrastructure and database to the collection and segmentation of the data needs a multitude of suppliers, applications and skillsets; but changes in technology should be making this easier, the web provides outsourced, out-of-the-box solutions that can help the functional side of CRM be implemented more easily.

On the flip side, we need to adjust organisationally too. The impact of CRM is so great that it can no longer be siloed into a corner and left alone, the growth of consumer power and social media have roles to play across the whole organisation (see Building a Company with Social Media) and we need to educate our businesses about what this means, what approach we should take and how we integrate it into our existing processes.

Becoming a consumer-centric organisation is easier for certain service-based industries and much harder for CPG and hard goods; but even these are starting to see the importance of putting their customers first.

There is no doubt that businesses succeed by going out and winning customers, and that taking a larger market share than last year drives the bottom line – what we need to understand better is the role that existing customers play in the market and how they could in fact be the secret weapon for future success.

What is digital strategy? Where does it start and finish? How is this different from business strategy or communications strategy? Invariably, when I start to try and answer these questions, I end up talking about the tasks I cover, or what I deliver, or how a typical day looks – but really this doesn’t get to the heart of the matter, and it usually leaves people looking even more vacant since if they didn’t understand at the start, it doesn’t really help that much to see what the output is.

So as I try to find a better way to explain, here is an interim solution – my job is about change, and really this comes down to two things: I’m an agitator and an activator.

Agitator

When I say that I agitate, I think I probably cover many different meanings of the word. Not only do I try and shake up the work and the projects that I’m involved in, but also the people – trying to make them see things differently, move out of their comfort zones and generally ‘disturb’ them enough to make them understand that the world around us is changing, and we need to change with it (if you look at another Wikipedia definition than the above, this has a very political connotation, but that still says the same thing “a person who actively supports some ideology or movement with speeches and especially actions“). Sometimes this is a painful process, too much change can be hard to take on board, moving into the unknown can create different reactions including fear and aggression, but hopefully the end justifies the means. As I engage with people and projects, the outputs of this part of my work tend to be more organisational and process focussed as we change the way we work and the people we work with.

Activator

On the flip side, I also activate the work that I come into contact with (much like the enzyme approach, binding to the existing and making it evolve), by this I mean that I act as a catalyst to drive the most out of any ideas that we come up, either as teams on specific projects, or as an organisation in terms of how we evolve. This is the core of my work and where I can use my experience and knowledge to make things bigger, better and more exciting – at an agency product level it helps me input in terms of how we should be using technology (much like a creative technologist) and tools (like an experience planner) to deliver the maximum effect for the end consumer; higher up the value chain it means driving the presence of the organisation in social media and newPR, but overall it means getting the best and most out of everything we do.

So when it comes down to it, my role is a change agent, nothing more and nothing less – sometimes I work higher up the value chain and it gets a little fluffy to explain, and sometimes it’s on the front lines, but wherever I input it’s about doing things differently, about changing what we do and how we do it – and above all, about bringing the new digital world into our lives.

Please don’t be agitated with me.

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Before understanding Social CRM, we have to be clear on what we mean by CRM in isolation, since this is an acronym that gets thrown around quite a bit, and very often confused with direct marketing in it’s simplest form. So I turn as usual to Wikipedia for a succint, but accurate description:

Customer relationship management (CRM) is a broadly recognized, widely-implemented strategy for managing a company’s interactions with customers, clients and sales prospects. It involves using technology to organize, automate, and synchronize business processes—principally sales activities, but also those for marketing, customer service, and technical support. The overall goals are to find, attract, and win new clients, nurture and retain those the company already has, entice former clients back into the fold, and reduce the costs of marketing and client service.^[1] Customer relationship management denotes a company-wide business strategy embracing all client-facing departments and even beyond. When an implementation is effective, people, processes, and technology work together to increase profitability, and reduce operational costs.^[2]

This gives us a very clear idea of what we mean by CRM, with a focus on the interaction using technology to build business. So once the concept of CRM is firmly under control we can begin to understand what the benefits and pitfalls of the addition of this social component really mean. The social web is still very much in its infancy, but the prominent players emerging are Twitter and Facebook, so what does CRM look like on these platforms?

Facebook: CRM within Facebook is really now beginning to take off, it covers a number of different areas from messaging within the platform to users who are either friends, fans or likes – to interaction on the wall of the brand (interaction on a users’ own wall needs to come from an individual). Certain brands who have found limitations within the Facebook model, or who are uncomfortable with it, use the CRM functionalities to continue the acquisition process to convert an individual to their own proprietary database and hence into their legacy CRM models; with the growth of Facebook connect, we are also seeing brands that use the Facebook platform on the their own sites and can start to build user information from outside the Facebook environment but still use it in the same way.

Twitter: Here we see a messaging platform that can work in a number of different ways from simply quoting someone’s username (mention) to interacting with them via Direct Messages (DM); depending on the extent to which a user has engaged with the brand. Much like TV and print have trained us on scarce media resources, the 140 characters of Twitter force communicators to be brief and to the point – hence however commercial a message might be, it is sure to be brief! Beyond mentions and DM we are now also moving into more advanced functionality using hashtags (#) which allow us to collect multiple tweets around a similar subject and using certain tools (eg. TweetChat) to make Twitter into an ongoing chatroom conversation.

As we move into an era where communications between brands and between individuals is growing dramatically online, the differences between traditional advertising, direct marketing and CRM are beginning to disappear, we also realise that we are applying CRM strategies and tactics without really knowing it. Where we once thought of CRM as communicating with users of our own database (ie our customers) we can now expand this to anywhere we can create a list of individuals who express an interest in the brand, be it on a blog, within a Facebook group or on Twitter and hence as we launch activities on these platforms we include direct tactics. The challenge becomes integrating the information from each of these distinct pieces of the puzzle to enrich our overall customer knowledge and deliver the right message. The chart here shows how we need to integrate these external components into our overall CRM systems to have a holistic view of the individual (regardless of what platform we interact on) and be able to deliver the most targeted message.

The video below with Paul Greenberg (@PGreenBe) gives us some insight into where we are in moving from a ‘baby industry’ into a real marketing tool.

^{Social CRM is already here and chances are you are already participating or even doing it – what is key now is to understand how to control and make the best use of it.}

So what is happening, and how is this driving change?

1. Strategy is taking a stronger role in the product of the agency, and this means that more work is happening before the development of the creative brief, much like a consulting firm, hours are being spent analysing the positioning and competitive framework of an organisation along with reserach and focus groups on consumers and customers. This has seen the rise of the strategic planner from a back-room research guy to someone up front interfacing with the client. But this isn’t solely pre-brief since the panner is the person working with the client to develop the business challenge, they are also then working with creative to translate this challenge into a communications product. So from a team POV, the traditional account exec is losing ground to the strategic guy (see article the death of the account exec) or being forced to evolve to become a real business partner to the client.
2. Technology is key to execution; we have suddenely jumped into the digital and internet era and now any campaign isn’t worth its name without some sort of banner, website, mobile app or location based service, and when you start to try and integrate these with the functionalities of Facebook and Twitter, you are very quickly faced with some technical challenges. So suddenly the other back-room guy, the developer, the coder, the geek is being brought into the mix at a much early stage to ensure that ideas are really feasible.

So what do these changes mean to the teams themselves?

These changes mean a change in the structure of agencies and in those agency teams that are what we call ‘client facing’. The traditional creative duo still exists but is sometimes becoming merged into one individual as they are accompanied by a strategist and sometimes a technologist too. The account exec either has the skills to become this strategist, or is simply being pushed back into the agency into a project management role, where he finds that he is also under pressure by those professional (PMP, Agile, etc.) project managers who are bringing structure, efficiency and organisation to the agency.

The new team doesn’t need the account exec unless he has the skills to add real value, and so we are seeing a change in agencies from the Mad Men relationship guys to real strategists and real creatives – maybe finally the agency is becoming less about booze and cigarettes and reaching its maturity in a real skillset…

So when we think about learning to unlearn in the context of communications planning, we need to bring to the top of the list that it is not simply a question of teaching people about new media, about showing them how the consumer landscape has evolved, but we also need to help them unlearn everything they know about building marketing and media plans and start asking some critical questions to build our strategy from the ground up.

Too many media plans today remain stuck with the stable of TV and print media as the core of their channel strategy – but if we simply apply some basic principles of ROI and consumer engagement to these two channels we quickly come up with doubts as to their relevance. How much does the average TV spot cost to produce, and where do we have accurate data on the consumer results that are delivered by mass broadcast; Print executions may come a little closer when we can apply direct response techniques and connect real business results to consumer interaction, but still the existing media gives us slow time to market and sometimes mediocre response as we try to cut through the clutter.

Looking simply through these two filters (a still very basic approach), we might possibly want to bring social media and direct marketing to the top of our list, but who has seen a plan recently where the core strategy is based on these media? Regardless of the amount of strategic planners and media consultants that we apply to new briefs and new product launches it seems like the knee jerk reaction of campaigns from 10 years ago is still the norm – we may know how media is changing but we still haven’t learnt how this should change our approach today.

Justin Basini’s article on The Future of Marketing highlights this point as he looks at what CEO’s think about the role marketing will play in the future of their businesses; they aren’t looking forward and evolving – they are simply regurgitating what we hear every day…

A lot of “consumer is boss”, a truck load of “digital”, some “it’s all about growth” and shockingly little on sustainability (apart from good old Unilever).

He takes another approach relating to how marketing and consumption interact and proposes that the future is about a “complete reversal of the current paradigm”, moving towards selling less, making things last and finding value in our lives – if this is the case, it seems highly unlikely that it is through television and print that we will achieve these objectives.

Agencies are trying to say that they have evolved, trying to show that the ‘big idea’ is now media neutral – but this just isn’t enough, this is just like those 50 CEOs in ‘The Future of Marketing‘ book talking about how they see the future about content and letting the customer take charge.

So how should we be tackling this? If it isn’t about unlearning and learning to think again, then maybe we need to create a new template for campaign planning – an approach that determines what our message and USP really is, more than just whiter, cleaner, softer and more fashionable but making a change in peoples’ lives and then where this message can actually connect with them, rather than just another TV spot in the commercial break of their favourite show or another page of advertising that keeps the business model turning in their weekly magazine.

Show me an idea that a customer can act on, engage with, feel good about – and then tell me what mechanism we can put in place to let them do that, then maybe we’ll have communication planning that works…

Please don’t tell me that this is email marketing, because the majority of the 270 million hits I get on google with these two words relates to technology suppliers who are getting better at delivering you a message and also (thankfully) giving you some analysis as to how well (or badly) the consumer interacted with it.

But who and where are the specialists in email design, the craftsmen (and women) of direct mail and the experts of SMS and bluetooth? We seem to have forgotten that these skills are far more important than the words digital and interactive.

My previous employer, RMG Connect in Paris, was a specialist in DM – but only because they were a specialist in the charity fund raising business, which is still by and large a paper business. There are experts there of how much text vs images on a letter, what the call to action should say, the cost and type of goodies to put in the envelope and even what the envelope design should be.

But this is a dying art – so little talked about and yet so key to the future of communications.