DM Magazine September 2020

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VOL. 33 • NO. 7 • SEPTEMBER 2020

In Depth:

THE AUTHORITY ON DATA-DRIVEN ENGAGEMENT & OPERATIONS

Competing on Insight The Right Way

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Plus

Interview With Ann Handley on Content That Matters

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Vol. 33 | No. 7 | September 2020 EDITOR Brendan Read - brendan@dmn.ca PRESIDENT Steve Lloyd - steve@dmn.ca DESIGN / PRODUCTION Jennifer O’Neill - jennifer@dmn.ca ADVERTISING SALES Steve Lloyd - steve@dmn.ca CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Janine Allen Allan Davidov Stephen Shaw

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Why Marketers Need PR

INSIGHT & ANALYTICS

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Competing on Insight FEATURE

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Content That Matters: An Interview with Ann Handley, Chief Content Officer, MarketingProfs

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Time to Rely on Marketing, Not Cut It

SEPTEMBER 2020

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Why Marketers Need PR

BY JANINE ALLEN

T JANINE ALLEN is President of Kaiser

Lachance Communications in Toronto.

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he long-held view of marketing is that it includes the 5 “Ps” — product, place, price, promotion and people. The case can also be made for a 6th “P” — public relations.

The interaction between public relations and marketing is a symbiotic and mutually beneficial relationship. As brands today look for increased authenticity, a greater purpose and trusted connections with buyers, the role of PR is to communicate key messages, principles and benefits to stakeholders, internal audiences and communities at large.

This narrative approach helps increase thought leadership while strengthening brand reputation.

Building awareness, influencing perceptions and changing behaviours are shared goals of public relations and marketing. This ability to spark conversations creates a common ground and an effective way to achieve strategic goals.

As the voice of the marketing profession in Canada, the Canadian Marketing Association (CMA) is on the frontline of the changing marketing landscape. New tools and technology are creating new ways to promote products. Amid all the sizzle of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Augmented Reality (AR), bots and big data, to name a few, it is easy to overlook the “steak” of these six “Ps.” The CMA recognizes the impact of public relations as a critical business driver and has made a commitment to develop strong PR to support industry leadership in advocacy, learning initiatives and business development.

Kaiser Lachance Communications (KLC) started working with the CMA in 2018 as its media relations partner to raise awareness of the marketing profession, and of the CMA’s role as a trusted resource for insights, and best practices.

More recently, KLC has supported and contributed to the CMA’s strategic communications programs to amplify awareness of initiatives, such as the Chartered Marketer program, Canada’s professional marketing designation. The partnership helps keep industry members and broader national audiences informed on the latest trends and innovations impacting the sector through media support of ongoing events and education opportunities. And when the CMA updated the Canadian Marketing Code of Ethics and Standards, helped marketers navigate the way forward in the emerging cannabis market and addressed the age-old challenge of agency search protocols, KLC was there to provide counsel and communications support.

The leadership role taken by the CMA to support and educate the marketing community has been a critical part of this partnership.

Effectively communicating an organization’s core principles and ethics is a constant two-way conversation between agency and client. Building

relationships with members of the media, major stakeholders, members and partners is crucial to enhancing reputation and trust. As part of this, staying nimble in challenging times while continuing this discussion and staying focused on the partnership’s mutual goals is always important.

This year alone, marketers are operating in the shadow of a pandemic, reconsidering their brands’ diversity strategies, and weighing the pros and cons of advertising on platforms like Facebook. The transition to digital communications has been amplified.

The importance of re-thinking and re-building communications strategies has required a number of changes in how companies and organizations approach their key messages, principles and benefits for their target audiences. New technologies and tactics suddenly became more relevant, and the new expectation is that marketers will be able to use these to continue driving results as soon as possible.

Recognizing that many organizations and marketers have struggled as a result of the pandemic, the CMA pivoted to support the marketing community during turbulent times. For example, it extended the focus of CMA NXT — its career development platform — beyond students and young professionals to help all marketers navigate the next steps in their careers.

CMA took a leadership role in addressing racism and diversity in the marketing community by creating a Talent Council. CMA leadership also took a stand on the need to eliminate hate speech on social media.

While the last few months have been exceptional, marketers and organizations have always had to adapt to ever-changing conditions. The unique situations that marketers find themselves in as a result of the pandemic have required unique, innovative solutions to stay ahead of the newest trends, topics of discussion and audience perceptions.

KLC will continue to identify opportunities, work at the speed of change and focus on strategies and tactics to support CMA’s commitment to expanded offerings and benefits, advocacy, education and business development for its more than 400 members in the corporate, not-for-profit, public and post-secondary sectors. Thought leadership, professional development, consumer protection and the commercial success of marketers and their organizations has never been more important to the CMA. We recognize the wide array of people, businesses and organizations that are affected by words and actions. Cooperation between Canadian marketers and public relations will continue to be an important part of organizational and business communications moving forward. Our partnership with the CMA is demonstrating the value of adding that 6th “P” to the marketing mix and we are excited for what this means for all marketing professionals.

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INSIGHTS & ANALYTICS

Competing on Insight

Marketers have more customer data to work with than ever before — so why are they still struggling to convert numbers into meaningful insight? Getting answers that lead to breakthrough strategy starts with knowing the right questions to ask.

BY STEPHEN SHAW

A

few years ago, one of this country’s leading car manufacturers assembled all of its marketers in one room for a first-ever look at a profile analysis of its owner base.

These marketers were used to looking at consumer profiles from automotive research companies like J. D. Power and Maritz — never one based on actual vehicle purchases from their own database records.

What could this analysis tell them that they didn’t already know?

Plenty, as it turned out. But as the presentation wore on, their interest waned. As far as they were concerned, their job was to drive sales by pumping up consumer demand, largely through advertising. They were used to obsessing over Gross Ratings Points, Share of Voice and Market Penetration. Now they were hearing alien terms like “customer lifetime value” and “churn” along with charts showing average purchase intervals and vehicle migration patterns. Numbed by the numerical onslaught of facts and figures, they stared in silence.

The purpose of the meeting had been to provoke thought — instead ❱ DMN.CA

it ended just as it had begun, with a mildly curious but disengaged audience anxious to get back to looking at sales reports.

It had taken nearly a year to build a consolidated database of vehicle owner records to conduct the analysis. Automotive data is notoriously dirty and unreliable, mainly due to the challenge of tracking owner vehicle records past the initial sale, as people sell or trade their cars in later years. A lot of effort had gone into matching and merging records to identify half a million “active” owners with their complete vehicle purchase and service history. The analysis was rigorous and thorough, covering everything from repurchase rates by cohort groups, to expected in-market buyers by year, to projected service revenue by owner segment. And there were enough provocative insights to spur discussion — for instance, the actual owner retention rate was far below what they thought — and a majority of owners had bought their next car within the

surprisingly short span of four years. Yet all of these meaningful statistics sailed over the heads of the audience. The analysis should have convinced them to redirect more of their marketing budget toward retention of existing owners. Instead, the financially struggling car maker continued to spend heavily on conquest marketing to attract new buyers.

This story is not an unusual one.

In fact, it is commonplace in most companies: the struggle to convert data-driven insight into customer strategy.

Information synthesis According to a recent Gartner Research forecast, 60% of CMOs are expected to cut their marketing analytics investment by half in the next three years, a mystifying retreat considering the amount of data now available to mine for insight. The main reason, according to Gartner, is a “failure to realize promised improvements”. In other words, the time spent on analytics has not paid off in tangible gains

for the business. Most marketers struggle to incorporate customer data into their strategic planning.

They recognize its advantages for targeting purposes. For campaign planning. For web tracking. But what ultimately undermines their use of customer analytics is a lack of data fluency. They are content with superficial analysis that supports their main goal: to build brand awareness and drive sales.

Which explains marketing’s fading influence on corporate strategy: they rarely have anything new to say.

The answer is not simply to hone the analytical skills of marketers.

Or to expect data analysts to do their thinking for them. It is to elevate the role of marketing analytics in the business. Confined to their swim lane, marketers are fixated on their own narrow goals like customer acquisition. Who can blame them? The same is true of every business unit: the answers that interest them the most are the ones directly related to their accountabilities. Whereas deep

Figure 1 — To have a greater influence on corporate strategy, marketers must become “customer-obsessed”, focused on moving customers up the loyalty pyramid.

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INSIGHT & ANALYTICS insight — the kind that leads to new ideas and product innovation, to game-changing strategies, to accelerated growth — emerges out of information synthesis: distilling everything known about customers from all sources into a holistic understanding of their needs, actions and motivations.

The siloed structure of most companies is not conducive to an omnibus analysis. The analytical work is always divvied up according to the planning needs of the different business units. Customer Care is mainly concerned with service satisfaction and call volume levels — Sales Support only cares about pipeline velocity and lead conversion — Product Management keeps a watchful eye on distribution

Figure 2 — The role of marketing analytics is to yield insights that lead to growth of the customer portfolio.

“Deprived of access to all of the information, marketers fall back on what they believe to be true instead of what they know to be true” channel shipments — the Digital Marketing specialists just want to see web traffic and social media data — the Demand Creation group is mostly interested in digital advertising results. Usually, each business unit is assigned its own purpose-built data mart, reporting system and analytical workbench, pulling the source data from a data lake, enterprise warehouse or directly from operational systems of record.

Independent of these analytical nodes is the market research group whose knowledge source is primarily survey-based, drawn from consumer panels or direct customer feedback. Their work typically includes usage and attitude studies, market segmentation profiling, brand health tracking, concept testing and consumer trend analysis.

Researchers live in the world of representative population samples. They are less comfortable with transactional analysis, web analytics and data mining.

Attitudinal research remains their SEPTEMBER 2020

sole field of expertise, amounting to just another knowledge fiefdom, disconnected from other sources of insight.

A new analytical framework Without a broader mandate, marketing analytics is doomed to remain just another parochial function, serving a single constituency. Deprived of access to all of the information, marketers fall back on what they believe to be true instead of what they know to be true. But simply building a single view of the customer, or forming an analytical “centre of excellence”, or finding some “unicorn” data scientist to serve as a “business translator” is not going to make marketers any wiser about what customers want.

The solution is not more data or more reports or more algorithms — businesses are awash in enough of that already. Instead, it lies in training marketers to be insight-driven. That means basing decisions on facts, not intuition; on knowing the right questions to

Figure 3 — An Analytical Centre of Excellence is structured to deliver the analytical expertise and data engineering support that marketers need

ask; and on expanding their field of vision beyond the point-of-sale.

As Forrester Research notes, “To be customer-obsessed, marketers need to embrace analytics across the entire customer lifecycle rather than myopically focus on phases that cover awareness and purchase.”1 Yet most businesses today are stuck in a time warp when data was frugally shared with marketers.

The business intelligence systems that grew out of the transition to data warehousing technology in the 1990s were intended to support basic financial and operational analysis. They allowed decision makers to closely monitor and streamline the internal workings of the company.

Marketers were begrudgingly given access to sales data from internal CRM and ERP systems through batch reporting and dashboards — otherwise they had to seek help from external analytics providers or adopt marketing automation technology on their own.

That all began to change in the mid-2000s when the era of Big Data dawned. A vast new universe of online data exploded into view.

Database technology was forced to evolve, as NoSQL database management systems and data lakes were developed to store the torrent of web data.

Today the leading insight-driven businesses are mainly the directto-consumer giants — Amazon, eBay, Netflix, Etsy, Uber and so DMN.CA ❰

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INSIGHTS & ANALYTICS on. All of them have thrived by embedding analytics into every facet of their business, every decision they make, every action they take. As Thomas Davenport, the author of Competing on Analytics, has observed, “The common thread in these examples is the resolve by a company’s management to compete on analytics not only in the traditional sense (by improving internal business decisions) but also by creating more valuable products and services.”2 Amazon is a textbook example, using their massive transactional database to deliver the right products to customers in the shortest period of time at the lowest cost. They boost repeat purchasing through recommendation algorithms; calculate how much of each product SKU should be available at a local fulfillment centre; calibrate merchandise selection and pricing; plan the best delivery routes; and match packages and destinations to fleet availability.3 No wonder Amazon accounts for almost 40% of U.S. online sales.

Etsy, on the other hand, has developed a sophisticated in-house research capability fully integrated with e-commerce analytics to help product and user experience teams understand the habits and needs of millions of sellers and buyers. No product decisions get made without a factual base of evidence based on exhaustive user research and customer analysis.4 Figuring out ways to create new value for customers is the highest order of analysis, where the purpose is to flag everyday problems that need to be solved. For marketers, this is an opportunity to steer the business forward, not by chasing after brand awareness, or worrying about media efficiency, or fussing over fluctuations in web traffic, but by devising novel ways of pleasing customers.

The starting point to become more insight-driven is to come up ❱ DMN.CA

“The Insight team must be able to put their findings in context — tell a story that starts with a customer challenge and builds logically to a clear conclusion.” with a new marketing analytics framework. That means linking patterns in how people behave to their motivations, beliefs and drivers; using measurement data to continually improve marketing and sales performance; analyzing the lifecycle progression of customers in order to provide the right assistance, offers and treatment across touchpoints; and

knowing which new products to offer, or adjacent markets to enter, in the quest for growth.

By organizing all of the marketing analytical functions and decision making processes around these four strategic pillars, marketers can start to have a greater impact on corporate strategy. The priority is certainly to move customers up the loyalty

Figure 4 — A Systems of Insight Architecture makes it easy for data analysts and data scientists to access all of the data they need on demand.

Figure 5 — Meaningful marketing insight connects how customers feel about the brand with how they actually behave.

pyramid, turning them into brand advocates. But the way marketers will earn their keep — and be seen as heroes by executive management — is to increase the value of existing customers.

Hearts and minds Once the analytical model has been agreed upon, the next step on the path to becoming insight-driven is to put the right governance structure in place.

An “Analytics Charter” is helpful, positioning the Customer Insight function as the bridge between data and innovation. The analytical group should be treated as business partners, not simply data jockeys, providing strategic counsel based on their reading of the findings.

More than anything, decision makers are looking for the most sensible and least risky choice to make given all of the facts available. They are less interested in the path to get there — even less in the statistical jargon.

The Insight team must be able to put their findings in context - tell a story that starts with a customer challenge and builds logically to a clear conclusion. Facts and figures left dangling out of context are just “nice to know” and easily forgotten. To have any lasting impression, they must have unmistakably positive or negative consequences.

As Nancy Duarte, a communications expert and author of Data Story, advises, “Stories frame data so decisions can be made faster and inspire others to take action by changing their hearts and minds”.

Think about those automotive marketers who struggled to grasp the revelations that surfaced in the owner profile analysis. Was that lack of comprehension their fault — or due to the density of the information? Unaccustomed to seeing owner-level detail, they got lost in the maze of graphs and charts, failing to see what it all meant and why they should care.

No wonder their collective reaction was: “So what?”.

When it comes to presenting SEPTEMBER 2020

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INSIGHT & ANALYTICS

“The role of research is to put a human face on the data and explain how customers feel as much as how they think and behave.” the results of their analysis, most data scientists fare poorly, more at ease describing the statistical hoops they went through than creating a narrative arc. They simply lack the theatrical skills to bring a data story to life. And no wonder. Look at the full scope of their technical work: fetching the data — cleaning it - preparing it for analysis — running the machine learning algorithms — validating them — and then figuring out how to visualize the results. Expecting them to be equally gifted at storytelling is merely wishful thinking.

Data “wrangling”– pulling the raw data and refining it for analysis — soaks up much of their time. If the data lake has been hurriedly built without a lot of forethought, it can look more like a “swamp”, polluted by duplicate records, invalid or missing values, inconsistent formats, and much more, all of which have to be cleaned up before any of it is usable. Data scientists will typically spend 60% or more of their time on that stage alone.

And then they have to explore the data for statistical patterns and anomalies; calculate new variables to enhance the explanatory power; and re-structure it to suit the purpose of the analysis before the data crunching can even begin.

To master this complexity, the CI function must be a team sport, staffed with data engineers, business analysts, data scientists, research specialists and software developers, working together in a hub-and-spoke model. A central leadership team is charged with governance while field emissaries are embedded within the different lines of business, expected to become subject matter experts.

This matrix model makes it easier to standardize best practices; exchange learning; pool resources; and collaborate on cross-divisional analytical projects. At the same time, it gives the business units a dedicated analytical resource SEPTEMBER 2020

conversant with their domain, their data aptitude and their tolerance for complexity.

In setting up this “centre of excellence”, the market research function should be merged with customer analytics, eliminating the historical segregation of qualitative work and data analysis.

The job of research remains

health. And that requires them to work closely with the data analysts. If customer repurchase rates are off target — if churn is higher — if NPS scores have fallen — if any of those vital signs are fluttering and alarm bells are ringing — they need to find out why. The role of research is to put a human face on the data

of the originating systems and external data sources; the Storage Tier is where the data is held in an intermediary state, directly accessible by all analysts; the Analytical Tier represents the workbench used to conduct the analysis; and the Access Tier gives the various business analysts and decision makers a view of the data which conforms to their planning needs.

While a data lake (like Hadoop, Amazon S3 or Azure) ingests all of the originating data in its raw form through a data pipeline — everything from billing data to web log files to XML extracts from various 3rd party providers — a

Figure 6 — For marketers to get the insights they need, a New Analytical Framework is required which places greater emphasis on the health of the customer relationship.

essential, of course, responsible for inserting the “so what” into the story. The advantage of consolidation is that only one story needs to be told, backed by all of the information available, connecting what customers say with what they actually do.

The research specialists still own the voice of customer; they still have point on scouting the market for opportunities; they still monitor brand health. But on top of all that, they should be responsible for tracking customer

and explain how customers feel as much as how they think and behave.

Systems of insight To support this expanded remit, the CI group is reliant on a systems architecture that not only makes ad hoc reporting and modelling easier but gives decision makers the tools they need to integrate the right set of data into their planning process. This “system of insight” is made up of four tiers: the Source Tier encompasses all

data warehouse (like Amazon Redshift, Oracle or Snowflake) stores it in a more familiar column and row format for analysts to query directly. Marketing analysts and data scientists only need to work with a sub-set of data which can be extracted using their preferred programming language (like Python or R). That way they can structure and format the data to suit the objectives of any bespoke analysis. Alternatively, the analyst might work with a data mart designed to serve DMN.CA ❰

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INSIGHTS & ANALYTICS the routine reporting needs of a specialized analytical function like product sales, product profitability analysis, e-commerce analytics or market forecasting.

Marketing planners are usually given direct access to a data mart through a self-serve business intelligence tool of some kind (such as Power BI, Looker or Tableau) which allow them to view data visualizations and tabular reports, set up for them by a data analyst. For example, the data analyst might structure the data to show purchase activity by customer segment and then set up a standard report or dashboard in the BI tool with filters (e.g. data range, segment type, product category) for drill-down exploration by the planner.

CDPs also come packaged with analytical reporting and modelbuilding capabilities, saving the work involved in shunting the data to a different platform.

The other big challenge is for marketers to connect all of the disparate sources of customer knowledge. A Knowledge Library is required (like Dovetail) where marketing planners can find everything they need to know about customers — one central, searchable repository of past research studies, customer profiles, personas, performance reports and more, with direct links to the underlying summary data, all tagged in ways that make the information easily discoverable and sharable.

“Making the brand a more integral part of people’s lives calls for a deeper understanding of customer needs.”

A complementary approach to a multi-tier analytical architecture is to opt for an all-in-one data management solution known as a Customer Data Platform (like Tealium or Adobe Experience Platform). CDPs offer out-ofthe-box functionality to create a unified profile of customers with all of their browsing activity, purchase transactional data, channel usage, personal attributes, modelling scores, engagement history and much more. Some

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A vivid portrait By plugging into these “systems of insight”, while relying on the CI group to serve up the insights they need, marketing can make customers the central focus of their strategic planning versus the brand. They will be able to ask the strategic questions about customers that really matter, starting with how to earn more of their business. Instead of obsessing over buyers’ path to purchase, they can educate themselves as

much as possible about the people they serve: Who are our best customers? How can we make the brand indispensable in their lives?

What can be done to enrich their experience and seal their loyalty?

How do we encourage them to stay continuously connected?

The combination of behavioural and needs-based segmentation is critical to knowing who customers are and their expected lifetime value. It helps to figure out how much future growth is likely to come from existing customers compared to new buyers — to calculate share of wallet and the growth potential of customers — to estimate the degree of flight risk amongst high value customers — to know the size and potential value of adjacent markets based on the estimated population of “lookalikes”.

Making the brand a more integral part of people’s lives calls for a deeper understanding of customer needs. It means using direct feedback to learn more about potential product and service gaps. But it is also where predictive analytics comes into play, combing the data for product affinities and purchase propensities, leading to more relevant cross-sell and upsell offers.

Marketers succeed when customers choose to stick with their brand even in the face of a tempting competitive offer. But that means knowing the specific factors that drive customer loyalty.

It also means using journey mapping to minimize pain points and identify ways the current experience can be improved; contacting recent defectors to determine what caused them

to abandon the brand; and monitoring the level of customer loyalty, whether through NPS or some form of composite score that incorporates behavioural proxies (such as tenure, spending velocity and relationship depth).

Finally, a sure sign of a committed customer is a willingness to hear from the brand regularly and be an active participant in the user community. Here is where social listening can reveal the level of brand enthusiasm — or where engagement analysis can track content popularity and degree of involvement in brand-sponsored events and activities.

Together these various methods of insight add up to a vivid portrait of customers which should become a catalyst for innovation and the foundation of corporate strategy.

By “transforming numbers into narratives”, marketers can envision alternate paths, exert greater influence over the direction of the business and reclaim their status as strategic leaders. But that can only happen if marketers first learn to ask the right questions.

STEPHEN SHAW is the chief strategy officer

of Kenna, a marketing solutions provider specializing in delivering more unified customer experiences. Stephen can be reached via e-mail at sshaw@kenna.ca.

1. “Seven Steps to Kick Off a Customer-Obsessed Insights Program”, Forrester Research, February 2018.

2. “Analytics 3.0”, Thomas H. Davenport, Harvard Business Review, December 2013.

3. “Amazon is a logistics beast - A detailed teardown”, Sangeet Paul Choudary, Platforms, AI and The Economics of Big Tech 4. “Case Study: Etsy Invests in Customer Understanding to Steer Growth”, Forrester Research, June 21, 2016

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FEATURE

Content That Matters: An Interview with Ann Handley, Chief Content Officer, MarketingProfs Ann Handley is the Chief Content Officer of MarketingProfs and the best-selling author of two books on content marketing.

BY STEPHEN SHAW

A STEPHEN SHAW is the Chief Strategy Officer

of Kenna, a marketing solutions provider specializing in delivering more unified customer experiences. Stephen can be reached via e-mail at sshaw@kenna.ca.

t a time of crisis brands usually prefer to play it safe. Which is why their expressions of solidarity rarely rise above the level of greeting card sentiment. They feel they have to say something — even though it means nothing. Just another instance of marketers failing to create content that matters.

Staying relevant involves more than jumping on the social media bandwagon with platitudes and hashtags.

Every brand should be on a mission to change minds, unafraid to proclaim its convictions. By creating content that matters, brands can be heard above the street noise. They can help to build consensus and accelerate social progress. And they can be the catalyst that turns a cause into a movement.

The idea of using branded content to empathize, inform and inspire is one that Ann Handley fully endorses. After all, she has been in the forefront of content marketing from the very beginning, before it even came to be recognized as a discipline of its own.

A journalist by training, Ann was a co-founder of the digital marketing news site ClickZ before selling it and moving to the online marketing training company MarketingProfs in 2002. Today that company has grown to 600 thousand subscribers. Ann is now the Chief Content Officer, overseeing all educational content.

As a long-time advocate of content marketing, Ann is a popular guest on the speaking circuit, known for her plainspoken advice and humour. She is also the bestselling author of “Everybody Writes,” and the co-author of “Content Rules”, both essential reading for content marketing professionals.

Stephen Shaw: Content marketing still seems like an immature discipline. Is it a marketing discipline in need of more discipline?

Ann Handley: There’s a lot of people doing great things with content marketing, who are pushing the boundaries. But there’s also a whole lot of people who aren’t there yet. There’s a pretty big gap between the content “haves” and the content “have-nots”.

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Ann Handley.

Most people do understand the benefits of content marketing. They’re just not sure where to start, or what to do. And it’s funny, because content marketing has been around, at least in its modern inception, for at least 10 years. It’s not rocket science.

Shaw: There’s no real playbook yet, is there? Is that because the subject of content marketing hasn’t worked its way into the classroom yet?

Handley: I actually think it has. I just got a text yesterday from a friend of mine whose wife teaches at the University of Iowa and she’s using “Content Rules” in her classroom. “Everybody Writes” has been adopted in a number of marketing classrooms. I’ve actually spoken at the University of Toronto here.

Now that said, every professor is going to think about content marketing a little differently. My daughter goes to Northeastern University in Boston and in her marketing class the professor barely talks about content — not even about social media.

Shaw: I guess a generational turnover is required.

Handley: Yeah, sadly I think that’s probably true. But she kept saying to me, “Mom, you should talk to the class.” However, in her business writing course, they talked about content. A lot of the concepts they talked about were in my book, “Everybody Writes.”.

Shaw: Forrester Research reports that 86% of marketers feel their content marketing efforts DMN.CA ❰

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FEATURE aren’t generating business value. Why do you think that is?

Handley: At MarketingProfs we do a content marketing study every year in association with the Content Marketing Institute. That research shows there’s a pretty big gap between the people who are most successful at content marketing and the people who are less successful at it. What does that most successful group do?

They develop content that maps to the buyer journey. They measure the impact in measurable ways.

They have a business goal behind everything they do. Now I think we’re at an inflection point where we’re past the experimental phase.

We need to start connecting our strategy to business outcomes.

Shaw: Do we need to think about content more strategically? Where the emphasis is on producing quality content?

Handley: Yeah. It’s silly to think about content marketing as a tactic. Content marketing is marketing. It’s not something that should exist in its own silo. It should always map to what your customer needs from you.

Shaw: Forrester claims that just 4% of marketers today can be classified as “content masters”. Is that because marketers struggle to become publishers?

Handley: Because they’re viewing it as a tactic when in fact it’s a strategy. Content is not a shortterm tactic. And so, if your boss, your CEO, your client, whoever it may be, is looking for a quick hit, they’re going to be disappointed. I believe it delivers results over time.

Shaw: Let’s talk about strategy.

I read where only 30% of companies have a formal content marketing strategy.

Another 24% aren’t really committed. Fifty-six percent — this is a head-scratcher — don’t even have an ROI plan.

Are businesses still looking at content marketing as an experiment? A fad, even?

Handley: Maybe. People are ❱ DMN.CA

looking at it as “We need a YouTube channel. We need a video strategy.”

That’s not a strategy. There’s still very much this mindset to talk about what we do. People don’t care about that. Marketers should be thinking about the story they want to tell. How does it map to their brand purpose? Why does the brand exist? How can we engage customers emotionally?

Shaw: We’ve gone from about 50 million blogs in 2006 to a billion. And 73% of marketers are planning to produce even more content. Have we reached peak content? How on earth do you break through that clutter?

Handley: My solution is to slow down. Be strategic and then “do less and obsess”. Create less content but obsess about the quality and value of that content.

And when I say quality, I don’t mean hiring William Shakespeare to write a blog post for you. That’s not what I mean by quality. Quality to me means, does it have value in the mind of your consumer, your customer, or your prospect? Do they care about what you do? Will they miss you if you go away? That to me is quality. Your customers, your prospects, they want to know you. They don’t want marketing that feels like marketing. All that to say, we need to “do less and obsess” over what we do. The other thing I would say is that, as much as we talk about all the ways we can reach customers, sometimes the simplest thing is looking at your email newsletter in a very different way. Most brands have an email newsletter. Customers have invited you to their inbox. Can you use email more effectively? Are you really doing it as well as you should?

Shaw: Certainly, the ones I get as a consumer are too generic — they’re just promotional tools. Is that due to a disconnect between traditional brand messaging and the idea of personalized marketing?

Handley: I think there’s a big difference between “personalization” and “personable”.

Being personable should be the goal, not simply “personalization”.

But that’s uncomfortable for a

lot of brands. And I understand that. It means being vulnerable — opening yourself to censure.

I mean, I totally get it. Every two weeks I send out an email newsletter and I get letters back from a handful of people who hated something I wrote and tell me why. When you make yourself “personable”, that means as a brand you have a personality, and some people won’t like you. And that’s a hard thing for a lot of companies to accept, a lot of brands.

Shaw: What’s been the most significant trend or shift that you’re now seeing in content marketing?

Handley: We talked about one of them already, which is “doing less and obsessing”. I think the smartest companies are focusing on providing real value for their customers, for their prospects. Going back to basics, not chasing the next bright and shiny thing. That’s why I think email newsletters deserve more attention, because if you do nothing else, at least get that right.

And that doesn’t require a lot of technology, it doesn’t require a lot of special skill.

Shaw: Are you seeing greater adoption and use of content hubs as a means of improving the content experience?

Handley: Yeah. Making your content more easily accessible and discoverable is a massive challenge.

Content hubs really solve that challenge very nicely.

Shaw: Have we entered — I’m going to use this term loosely — a “post-literate” era, and by that, I mean where video is starting to become the predominant form of communication? And if so, what does that mean for the future of long-form content?

Handley: So, short answer, no, I don’t think we’re entering a postliterate era at all. Mary Meeker in her 2019 State of the Internet report quoted Kevin Systrom, the co-founder of Instagram who said that we’re increasingly communicating through images.

So, okay, a few things. Number

one, I don’t like binary thinking.

I don’t like saying that the rise of Instagram and visual media means the death of text. Both can coexist nicely. I love Instagram. It’s my favorite social media platform next to Twitter. I’m not saying I don’t believe in images or I don’t love video. I do. I think it’s fantastic.

It’s super strong. But that said, it doesn’t mean we have to give up on long-form content or text. And I also really don’t like the idea that we live in a world where everything is short and “snackable”, to use a word that makes me want to throw up in my mouth. I think we’re just more discerning about where we’re spending our time and attention.

This isn’t a battle between images and video and text. That’s just silly.

What it comes down to is, are you creating something of value and are you matching the format to the best delivery channel you can?

Shaw: Where do you see the discipline going from here? How will it evolve? What skills will be required?

Handley: I think the term “content marketing” will go away.

I’d be surprised if we saw it in 10 years. It just becomes marketing - the ability to produce content that engages an audience. I don’t think content marketing is going to be living in its little corner anymore. It will be fully integrated across everything. So that’s the first thing. And secondly, I think the biggest skill you can have as a marketer is empathy. The ability to write well, speak well, the ability to communicate - you can learn all of that. But empathy is critical — to be able to see through the eyes of other people. Honestly the world needs more empathy. Companies need more empathic leaders. And so, the ability to think outside of yourself.

Shaw: That, and being curious, I suppose.

Handley: Yes, exactly. That’s another really good one too. Yes. Shaw: So does marketing become the empathy department?

Handley: Yeah, I love that.

“Empathy and Curiosity”.

SEPTEMBER 2020

// 13

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// 14

EXCELLENT EXECUTION

Time to Rely on Marketing, Not Cut It

BY ALLEN DAVIDOV

D

uring an unprecedented period like we are experiencing during the COVID-19 pandemic, decisions about marketing could not be more front and centre. Instincts may suggest the prudent choice for many leaders is to act defensively, cutting expenses or scaling back areas that do not always have a solid or clear ROI. History has shown that one of the first budgets to be put on hold or get cut is marketing.

It might seem to make sense.

Organizations across all sectors and sizes are struggling to find their footing. They wonder when and how they should “pivot” and even if it even they should at all.

They are navigating unchartered waters and going through an ocean of unknowns.

In fact, these are times when the case should be made to scale up and not scale back. Here is why I say this is a moment in time they should be investing in their marketing, not cutting.

With many struggling to keep their doors open or put contingency plans in place for these unchartered waters, the question of how to deliver on the revenue needs and long term manage the customer or donor relationship are two of the many important questions being asked. Much of which can be distilled to focusing on behaviour, attitudes, and experience with an organization.

Being in the charitable sector for nearly 15 years, I have experienced the pressure to manage and maximize revenues and partnerships and find unique and innovative opportunities, including during the last recession in 2008.

Having worked alongside hundreds of organizations across Canada in my role here at Environics Analytics, I have witnessed, and helped, marketers adapt in a way that applies their strategy and tactics at critical times for the greater good. This is perhaps the best example of what marketing needs to do in a crisis.

Why is marketing important To understand why marketing is important, it is important to first ❱ DMN.CA

dive into what marketing really is.

For many, when they think of marketing their minds go to the advertising they see on TV, Newspapers, Online or in their Social Media feeds. The campaigns they see for products. Some may even answer by talking about their logo.

All those answers are not wrong, but they are a small part of what marketing really is. If I were to start with the definition, it would go something like this: “Marketing refers to activities a company undertakes to promote the buying or selling of a product or service. Marketing includes advertising, selling, and delivering products to consumers or other businesses.”

Just by the definition, anyone can clearly see that marketing is more than just ads. But clearly defined is more that growth marketing would translate to a better chance at raising revenues and engagement.

By cutting marketing activities, the rationale expectation is that its harder to focus on changing behaviour, attitudes, and improving the experience.

Brand marketing In my years at several charities and foundations, I contended with stakeholders who thought PR was fluff, and who would rather spend money on Facebook ads, but would not invest any funds into building their brand. I saw the opportunity and impact of PR and brand marketing every day, and I see it today with many of our clients.

Brand marketing helps to build an employer brand, it drives leads, sales and donations (sometimes unpredictably), it can position you and your company as thought leaders, it builds trust and legitimacy, and it helps to build a narrative of momentum and growth over time. And a brand — and brand values — are even more important when faced with an unprecedented global pandemic.

Purpose and values A big part of your brand, is your purpose and the values you and your organization believe in. If your why or purpose is clear, it should make understanding what to do

in difficult times, much easier.

If your why is jumbled with your what, then it makes it a lot harder to rationalize how you should act and creates a lot of blurriness. It would not be as clear if you should stop asking for donations if you are not directly at the front lines of COVID-19, or if your services are relevant during a pandemic.

And if your purpose and values are clear, transitions or taking a stand become more authentic.

Audience Understanding, defining, and managing an audience is a big part of marketing--and a key part of any organization’s success. How your audience shifts and changes and moves through your organization over time is key to having a clear picture of where you are today, but also reveals opportunities that exist for tomorrow and further down the line. Again, during a difficult time, organizations need valuable insights to make the best possible decisions on strategy and tactics. These would include such choices as which media channel is the current better choice for customer acquisition, such as direct mail, an investment in online ads, social media activity or a bigger focus on PR. From an Environics Analytics perspective, we help our clients understand their audiences through our PRIZM segmentation system , developed using dozens of authoritative data sources, PRIZM gives any organization access to over 30,000 data points and can be combined with your own customer data to better understand your customers, donors, and markets.

It provides our clients with a more comprehensive view and allows them to make sounds data-driven decisions rather than guesses.

Channel mix Once an organization knows their audience for their product or service, its much easier to gauge the right channel mix, and know how to align a budget against this area.

Intuitively we all assume consumer or donor behaviour varies from generation to generation, but it can also vary from life stage to life

stage and geography to geography.

Having all the right information can make tough investment decisions easier, and much more successful.

Such as understanding audiences, there is some comprehensive postal code level data available to guide organizations to make the best data driven investment decisions when it comes to executing their strategies. And replicating previous strategies or cutting based on lack of knowledge or assumption, is the worst thing any organization can make.

Effectiveness and metrics Many times, during discussions around marketing, directly correlating revenue and sales is thought to be difficult when connecting to brand awareness and activities that do not always have a direct link to a sale, donation, or engagement. That does not need to be the case, as there are ways to track effectiveness of a social media and PR campaign, traditional media campaign or other activity.

With the outlook for the fall season and last quarter of the Canadian economy still blurry, as many are bracing for a second wave, it is hard to gauge what is the best way to move forward. Even though an initial reaction typically is to cut marketing, I truly believe now is a time to re-imagine how your marketing has worked for you, and dig in a bit deeper, which will result in making a difference in your organization in the short and longer term.

ALLEN DAVIDOV leads Environics Analytics’ Not-

For-Profit Practice. He has more than 15 years of experience helping charities of all sizes use #DataForGood to achieve their fundraising goals.

SEPTEMBER 2020