The CMO Struggle For True Marketing Integration Rages On

Since February of 2011, the CMO Survey which is sponsored by the American Marketing Association, Deloitte and Duke University's Fuqua School of Business, have asked chief marketing officers the following question: How effectively does your company integrate customer information across purchasing, communication, and social media channels?

Survey participants are asked to respond via a scale of 1-7 with 1 representing "not at all effectively" and 7 being "very effectively."

Oh yeah before I forget, this survey is conducted twice a year, in February and then again in August. That is significant, trust me.

What's 4 Got To Do With It?

Here's the results of this one question since February 2011.

With this most recent survey completed this makes eleven straight times the response average has not equalled or even surpassed 4, which in very unscientific terms means for five years CMOs, on average feel they're doing, well an average job of integrating across all channels.

This result truly astounds me. Especially when you consider that the average is actually dropping since August 2014. 

Singles Only

No, this section is not about the latest dating site or the next chapter meeting of your local community association. This is all about the inherently important need for your organization to have a single customer identity that unites behaviors across all channels into one comprehensive profile.  

Today, certain technologies can link all the unique cross channel identifiers of a customer back to a single unique identifier. Once you have a single unique identifier, you can really know who your customers are across all channels, and begin to:

1. Personalize interactions based on channel preferences and behaviors.
2. Reach a more precise level of targeting and segmentation by using cross channel behavioral information in real time.
3. And most importantly, integrate cross channel communications and speak to each customer with a single voice regardless of channel.

Many marketing technology vendors can execute on some aspects of personalization. And some might even be able to help marketers target their customer better. But the ability to actually use personalization and targeting to integrate cross channel communications differentiates Modern Marketing solutions from other, less comprehensive alternatives.

By unifying cross channel identities and creating campaigns on a scalable cross channel program canvas, the right technology empowers marketers to reach new levels of digital sophistication. 

The problem is today there are seemingly an infinite number of technology options out there to pick from. How can you possibly know which technology works best for you?

Fortunately for you we're here to help. 

Download The CMO Solution Guide to Leveraging New Technology and Marketing Platforms and learn directly from your fellow CMOs as to how they decide which technology is right for them and their company. 

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50 Top Content Marketing Influencers #CMWorld 2016

Without question, the Content Marketing World conference is a force to be reckoned with when it comes to all things content. This is where I should segue into a Death Star reference and something about a love child between Joe or Robert and Princess Leia. Or was it Chewbacca? I kid. What I'm not kidding about is that there are over 150 speakers at Content Marketing World that have spent numerous hours researching, planning and crafting presentations as well as practicing and coordinating their travel and stay at the event. When you think about it, the cumulative amount of content created amongst all those speakers isn't just formidable, it's outright impressive. As you may know, I’m very interested in influence when it comes to marketing and events create an ideal opportunity to identify, qualify and rank the social influence of the speakers that have worked so hard to deliver useful information to attendees. That's exactly what I've done with this post and the 2016 Content Marketing World speakers. Keep in mind, this is not a popularity list of marketers or a subjective list of personal favorites. It is a researched group of those who are most influential for “content marketing” based on social media and blog content on the web. To create this list of 50 content marketing influencers, we used our client, Traackr's, influencer marketing platform and their filtering methodology that combines topical relevance, resonance of that topic amongst the influencer's community and overall reach. Traackr pulls data from crawlable RSS feeds, Twitter, public Facebook and LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram and Google+. "Content Marketing" is a huge topic and we could have easily added many more than 50, especially people like Stephanie Losee, Joe Chernov, Ahava Leibtag, Rand Fishkin, Ann Marinovich, Justin Levy, Jeannine Rossignol, Todd Wheatland, Kristina Halvorson and keynote speakers John von Brachel and Lars from LEGO. But, ironically, there are only 50 spots in a list of 50! In the end, this list is a good mix of the smart brand, agency, vendor and industry content marketing talent you can expect to meet this week in Cleveland.  Enjoy! Michael Brenner @brennermichael CEO, Marketing Insider Group, Author Presenting: A Content Formula for Complex B2B Organizations and How B2B Executives Need to Strategize in the World of Content Juntae DeLane @juntaedelane Senior Digital Brand Manager, University of Southern California and founder of the Digital Branding Institute Presenting: Using Content Marketing with No Budget or Resources to Build Your Digital Brand Joe Pulizzi @joepulizzi Founder, Content Marketing Institute, Author Presenting: Welcome to the Content Marketing Revolution and Content Inc: Startups to Small Businesses Pam Didner @pamdidner Consultant, Author, Adjunct Instructor, West Virginia University Presenting: How to Build a Global Content Marketing Team and The Step-by-Step Guide to Create Global Content Marketing Strategy Ian Cleary @IanCleary Founder and CEO of RazorSocial Presenting: Tools and Technology for Building a Content Conversion Funnel Carla Johnson @carlajohnson Marketing and Customer Experience Consultant, Type A Communications, Author Presenting: My Employee Said What?!?! Creating a Content Strategy For Employees, The Most Vital and Ignored Audience and How B2B Executives Need to Strategize in the World of Content Andy Crestodina @crestodina Strategic Director, Orbit Media Studios, Inc., Author Presenting: Keynote: Content's Fortune and Glory: How to Make Friends, Rank High and Get Famous Online and Web Design vs. Analytics Setup: 5 Little Design Decisions That Cause Big Analytics Problems Lee Odden @leeodden CEO, TopRank Marketing, Author Presenting: How to Improve the ROI of Your Content Agency Investment and How B2B Executives Need to Strategize in the World of Content Jay Baer @jaybaer President of Convince & Convert, Author Presenting: How to Use Customer Service and Community to Create Killer Content and Evolution and Opportunities in Business Podcasting - Q&A Pawan Deshpande @TweetsFromPawan CEO, Curata Presenting: Ridiculously Awesome Curation Hacks to Goose Your ROI Like Crazy Arnie Kuenn @arniek CEO, Vertical Measures, Author Presenting: How to Get 77% More Traffic from Your Existing Content Chad Pollitt @chadpollitt Adjunct Instructor, Rutgers University, VP of Audience & Co-founder Relevance, Author Presenting: Paid and Unpaid Content Promotion and Distribution Methods That Actually Work John Jantsch @ducttape President, Duct Tape Marketing, Best-Selling Author Presenting: Workshop: Content Inc.: Startups to Small Businesses Robert Rose @robert_rose Chief Strategy Advisor, Content Marketing Institute, Author Presenting: Opening Keynote Q/A Interview: Content Marketing and Change Management - Making it Real, The Biggest Challenges and Opportunities in Content Marketing: A Q/A with Leading Technology Marketers, and Content Marketing is Broken - Here's How to Fix It and Tie It to Real Business Results Brian Carter @briancarter CEO / Digital Marketing Consultant, The Carter Group, Author Presenting: Facebook Advertising Lead Generation and Content That Sells Bryan Kramer @bryankramer President + CEO PureMatter, Author Presenting: How to Create and Manage an Influencer Marketing Program Marcus Sheridan @TheSalesLion President, The Sales Lion Presenting: The 7 Keys to Owning the Digital Age and Dominating Your Niche: Today, Tomorrow and Beyond and How to Tear Down Sales and Marketing Silos: The Secret to Developing a Culture of Content Across the Entire Organization Jennifer Goforth Gregory @byjengregory Freelance Content Marketing Writer and Strategist Presenting: Hunting the Unicorn: Five Ways to Rope in Highly Qualified Freelancers Gini Dietrich @ginidietrich CEO, Arment Dietrich, Inc., Author Presenting: Email Drop Campaigns That Work and Use PR to Fuel Your Content Marketing Efforts Matt Heinz @heinzmarketing President, Heinz Marketing Inc Presenting: 50 Essential Content Marketing Hacks: New Tools, Tricks, Shortcuts, Best Practices and More to Convert Readers Into Customers Russell Sparkman @fusionspark Co-founder, CEO, Fusionspark Media, Inc. Presenting: First, Find Your Mission: How to Use Brand Purpose to Drive Content Marketing Strategy Ann Handley @marketingprofs Chief Content Officer, MarketingProfs, Author Presenting: Keynote: A Look Back at the Best Marketing of 2017 and How to Level-Up Your Writing and Make it Ludicrously Spectacular Mari Smith @marismith Consultant, Facebook Small Business Training, Author Presenting: Social Video: How Companies Are Succeeding with Videos on Facebook Jay Acunzo @jayacunzo VP of Platform, NextView Ventures Presenting: The Content Talent Crunch: How Marketing Leaders Approach Hiring A New Breed of Marketer, and Unthinkable: How the World’s Most Creative Content Marketers Do What Others Wouldn’t Dare, and This Session Disappears in 10 Seconds: A Fireside Chat and Q/A on Snapchat Cassio Politi @tractobr Diretor de content marketing, Tracto Presenting: How Small Differences in Buyer Personas' Behavior Impact the Global Strategy AJ Huisman @ajhuisman Founder, Y Content Presenting: How to Turn Highly Billable Professionals Into Extremely Productive Content Marketing Rockstars That Get Bottom Line Results Jonathan Crossfield @kimota Editorial Director\u2014Telstra Smarter Business Ideas, Bauer Media Australia Presenting: Social Media and Your Audience: The Proper Approach to Social Communications Doug Kessler @dougkessler Creative Director & Co-Founder, Velocity Partners Presenting: What Great Content Looks Like: The Power of Insight Jeff Herrmann @jefflherrmann Chief Strategy Officer, Fathom: A Digital Marketing & Analytics Agency Presenting: Social Selling 101: 3 Methods to Enable a Social Savvy Sales Force Ardath Albee @ardath421 CEO & B2B Marketing Strategist, Marketing Interactions, Author Presenting: How to use Content to Maximize the B2B Buying Process and B2B Demand Generation - It's Bigger Than You Think Bernie Borges @bernieborges Executive Producer: Social Business Engine, Find and Convert, Author Presenting: Opportunities for B2B Brands in Live Video Andrew Davis @drewdavishere CEO, Monumental Shift, Author Presenting: Killer Content: How Brilliant Brands Create Less Content and Deliver Bigger Success and Content Marketing ROI Simplified Colleen Jones @leenjones CEO, Content Science Presenting: Leveraging Content Intelligence: Lessons Learned at American Cancer Society Tom Webster @webby2001 Vice President, Strategy and Marketing, Edison Research Presenting: The Forgotten Discipline of (Content) Marketing - What To Do When You've Written All the "Helpful" Content John Hall @johnhall CEO, Influence & Co. Presenting: The New Jedi Mind Trick: How to Dominate Your Industry By Building Your Authority and Leveraging Influencer RelationshipsThe New Jedi Mind Trick: How to Dominate Your Industry By Building Your Authority and Leveraging Influencer Relationships Buddy Scalera @buddyscalera Senior Director Content Strategy, Global Health Science, The Medicines Company Presenting: Creating A Visual Content Strategy that Scales Deana Goldasich @goldasich CEO, Well Planned Web, LLC Presenting: Getting Executive Buy-In For Content Marketing David Beebe @davidbeebe Vice President, Global Creative and Content Marketing, Marriott International Presenting: Between the Sheets of Marriott's M Live Rebecca Lieb @lieblink Analyst, Advisor, Principal at Conglomotron, Author Presenting: Contextual Content From Websites to Wearables to Wherever and Mobile Moments: Where Content Meets People, Places and Things Jeff Julian @jjulian Chief Marketing Officer, AJi, Author Presenting: A Journey Through your First Agile Marketing Effort Susan Borst @susanborst Sr. Director of Industry Initiatives, IAB Presenting: Great Content: Now What Are you Going to Do With It? Let's Talk Native Advertising Cameron Conaway @cameronconaway Content Marketing Manager, Flow Presenting: Journalism, Content Marketing and the Shared Wor(l)ds Between Ian Altman @ianaltman CEO, Keynote Speaker, Sales Advisor, Grow My Revenue, Author Presenting: The Right Content to Accelerate Sales Travis Wright @teedubya CMO, CCP.Digital, Author Presenting: How to Develop and Execute a Social Business Strategy Paul Roetzer @paulroetzer CEO PR 20/20, Author Presenting: Content Marketing in the Machine Age: 25+ Tools and Techniques to Make Your Content More Automate and Intelligent Mathew Sweezey @msweezey Principal of Marketing Insights, Salesforce Presenting: How to Improve the Value of Your Email Through Marketing Automation Jesper Laursen @jesperlaursen CEO, Native Advertising Institute Presenting: Panel: Great Content. Now What Are You Going To Do With It? Let’s Talk Native Advertising Amanda Todorovich @amandatodo Content Marketing Director, Cleveland Clinic Presenting: Team Building: How to Staff, Structure and Budget A Content Marketing Team Mitch Joel @mitchjoel President, Mirum Agency, Author Presenting: Keynote: Content is Dead: Focus on the Network Effect and Evolution and Opportunities in Business Podcasting -A Q/A Tami Cannizzaro @tamicann Vice President, Head of North America Marketing, Oracle Presenting: The New Rules of Global Customer Engagement: How to Build Momentum for Your Brand Around the World Through Content Marketing I’m pretty sure people that attend conferences don’t realize the aggregate volume of effort that goes into an event like Content Marketing World and the CMI staff do a great job, which is self-evident given their growth and the recent acquisition. Hats off to Joe, Pam, Robert, Cathy and the CMI team for all their hard work in making Content Marketing World the death star of content marketing. See what I did there? In addition to sharing this list of 50 content marketing influencers, I’ve pulled together the top 10 most popular content marketing articles from this blog from 2016. Enjoy!

1. 6 Bad Content Marketing Habits
2. How Social Media & Content Marketing Work Together
3. SEO Tips and Tactics for Content Marketing
4. Using Long-Form Content on Social Media as a Content Marketing Tactic
5. 8 Ways to Build Credibility & Trust with Content Marketing
6. What is a Content Marketing Strategy?
7. 4 Elements of Successful Content Marketing on LinkedIn
8. How to Be the Best Answer: Content Marketing Best Practices
9. 38 B2B Content Marketing Case Studies for 2016
10. Content Marketing: Integrity, Storytelling & Creativity

On the topic of Content Marketing World - I’m presenting on Thursday at 12:05pm in Room 1 on How to Improve the ROI of your content marketing agency investment. Unlike breakout sessions, pre-registration is not required for lunch and learns. It's first-come, first served, so you should get there early if possible to get a seat.

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Digital Marketing Spotlight: Josh Mueller, SVP Global Marketing at Dun & Bradstreet

Meeting and getting to know smart digital marketers is easily one of my favorite things about working in the marketing industry. I first meet Josh Mueller when he was at Director of Digital Marketing at Dell and I was presenting an integrated approach to search, social and content marketing. There was a palpable enthusiasm in the air for inbound marketing and it was exciting to see that kind of reception from a large company. Fast forward to today and Josh is Senior Vice President Global Marketing at Dun & Bradstreet. He is definitely one of those people you want on your digital marketing team or more specifically, leading your team. He always seems to be two steps ahead, is results-focused and a genuinely nice human being. In this interview, Josh talks about everything from career advice for fast-tracking digital marketing executives to the impressive digital marketing initiatives he's led at Dun & Bradstreet. He also talks about lessons learned, prioritizing for 2017 and examples of B2B brands doing it right. Your career from MBA Intern at Dell to SVP at a major B2B brand in under 10 years is truly impressive. What best prepared you for that journey and what advice do you have for talented, aspiring marketing executives with eyes on a similar prize? Looking back, I’m not sure if I was ever fully prepared, but my journey thus far certainly would not have been possible without focusing on a couple of fundamental things from the beginning.

Invest heavily in building, nurturing and leveraging real relationships. Success is impossible in a vacuum.

First, invest heavily in building, nurturing and leveraging real relationships. Success is impossible in a vacuum. The people you surround yourself with will have a significant impact on the trajectory of your career. You’ll know you’re doing this well when you realize you’re consistently willing to put more into a relationship than what you ask for in return. Second, never take a break from learning. I read as much as possible and do so on a daily basis. If you can become a little more knowledgeable every single day, you’ll build a huge competitive advantage over time. This simple but powerful habit not only equips you to become a world-class expert within your discipline, but also allows you to see big picture trends, apply your expertise across disciplines, and prepare for the future. I was really impressed with the Dun & Bradstreet website redesign earlier this year and what went into the real-time personalization experience. Can you share some context for the project and your expectations for such an ambitious undertaking? This was so much fun and continues to pay dividends. What started as a traditional redesign project quickly transformed into a complete re-imagination of our brand’s digital experience. We wanted to ensure that the site truly represented the overall transformation of Dun & Bradstreet that has been progressing since our CEO, Bob Carrigan, joined the company in 2013. To accomplish this, we needed to expand our primary online focus on SMB customers to include enterprise customers across five new lines of business, our partners and our worldwide network. From a KPI perspective, we initially wanted to maintain parity at launch and then improve from there. Fortunately, metrics were up from the very first week and continue to climb. (More information can be found here.) Now that the new website has gone through some iterations, what have been some of your key lessons and best practices? What is on the roadmap for dnb.com going into 2017 when it comes to personalization? It’s very typical with a major redesign to initially experience drops in your primary KPIs and that risk was even greater when we set out to completely transform our digital experience. Despite taking a data-driven approach and performing a lot of user testing, we were completely prepared to experience this drop. We formed cross-functional teams to meet daily to review the latest metrics, form hypotheses and quickly deploy tests targeted at getting everything back to parity and beyond. Fortunately, we never experienced this dip. Our metrics were up from the very first day. Because we had prepared ahead of time, we still followed the same approach, but instead of getting back to parity we were able to increase conversion rates to all-time highs.

Personalization is such a powerful customer experience and conversion optimization tool.

Personalization is such a powerful customer experience and conversion optimization tool. Most ecommerce companies have fully adopted it, but very few B2Bs focused on demand generation are doing it well. Currently, we’re personalizing dnb.com based on company size and persona. Late this year and in 2017, we plan to expand this by personalizing for specific strategic accounts as well as extending and coordinating personalization across other offline and online touchpoints. What do the lessons you've learned tell you about how other B2B companies should be thinking in terms of digital strategy in 2017? What are some key areas to focus on and things to avoid? Too many companies still treat their digital strategy as something separate from their overall marketing strategy. I believe Marc Mathieu from Unilever was one of the first to talk about moving away from the mindset of digital marketing as a standalone function to concentrate instead on increasing marketing effectiveness in a digital world. Making this shift is absolutely critical, but it doesn’t mean organizations should move away from hiring and training digital specialists with deep expertise. Those skills are more important than ever.

We’ve succeeded in modernizing our marketing mindset by formalizing cross-functional teams around each of our personas.

At Dun & Bradstreet, we’ve succeeded in modernizing our marketing mindset by formalizing cross-functional teams around each of our personas. Each team has experts across all the core functions such as messaging, content marketing, site strategy, outbound demand gen, SEO, communications, social media, events, etc. Organizationally, this expertise is aligned by function, but the cross-functional team operates as one on behalf of the customer with shared KPIs. This model ensures that digital strategy is always a core component of everything we do. Today's marketers are faced with a cornucopia of options and challenges from continued emphasis on data and martech to creative opportunities with more visual and interactive content, working with influencers and investing in deeper content. What advice do you have for other senior marketing execs on prioritizing marketing tactics? It can become overwhelming when the cornucopia of options become the focus without first implementing a framework to properly manage everything. This starts by getting back to the basics – using quality data and analytics to determine which customers or accounts to pursue, which personas to target within these accounts, and which solutions best fulfill their needs. Once these basic building blocks are in place, it’s easy to map out the customer journeys within that universe and set clear KPIs for each stage. The ultimate goal may be conversion and revenue, but the KPIs in the early stages are just as critical and allow marketers to track the progression of individuals and accounts throughout the journey.

KPIs in the early stages are just as critical (as conversion and revenue).

Using this framework as a reference, it becomes easy to see where an organization is having success and where change is needed. Will new marketing technology or a creative strategy overhaul have a bigger impact? The answer comes more easily when you can clearly see which KPI you’re trying to impact with the decision. This guides prioritization, not only for senior executives setting overall strategy and making resource decisions, but also for the teams executing the tactics. Few marketing departments can execute well on all things they have planned. How do you balance hiring more marketing staff vs. using outside vendors and agencies? What trends do you see in terms of outsourcing vs. insourcing marketing talent? Capacity is almost always our biggest challenge. The model I prefer – and one that I continue to see gaining traction – is to insource expertise across critical functions without making teams too large. Once you achieve this, you can leverage partnerships with agencies that bring an outside-in approach and act as an extension of your team over time. This hybrid model allows you to maintain a steady state across critical functions while maintaining the ability to dial up or dial down capacity based on current priorities. As we get closer to 4th quarter and planning for the coming year, what are some of your top digital marketing priorities for 2017? Our first priority is all about scale. We’ve built an amazing foundation that has enabled us to hit critical KPIs much faster than we anticipated. Now we are very focused on continuing to bend the curve and pushing the limits on how far we can take things.

Our first priority is all about scale.

The second is to continue drinking our own champagne and pushing the envelope in modern B2B marketing. I’m fortunate to work for the company that maintains the world’s largest commercial database that we continue to leverage for new use cases. We often get our hands on the latest and greatest marketing solutions before they’re widely available, which gives us a first mover advantage in predictive targeting, personalization approaches and sales acceleration techniques. Great marketing is always fun. Doing things for the first time can be even more fun. What B2B brands' marketing do you admire most? Any examples? Dell is definitely on the list, and I’m excited to see how its marketing team leverages the EMC acquisition. It’s amazing, looking at the amount of marketing talent that has worked at Dell at some point over the last decade, and how many individuals have gone on to become senior marketing executives or CMOs at other big brands. I certainly stay closely connected and follow those brands as well. There are so many other great B2B brands to admire across industries for different reasons. A few that come to mind immediately are Adobe, LinkedIn, Salesforce, GE, Workday, Cisco, American Express and Accenture. Now let’s play a little social network word association. After each platform, share the first thing or short reaction that comes to mind.

• Facebook – changing the open web
• Vine – initially interesting
• LinkedIn – making all the right moves
• Periscope – first mover advantage wasn’t enough
• Twitter – one of the best, but time to evolve
• Google+ – will its failures lead to success?
• Snapchat – raising the bar on growth
• YouTube – well positioned
• Instagram – so simple yet so brilliant
• Flickr – will it survive?

Thanks Josh! Josh Mueller is Senior Vice President of Global Marketing for Dun & Bradstreet where he has global responsibility for demand generation, digital, operations, marketing technology, creative and content. His organization is pivotal to Dun & Bradstreet’s transformation to a modern company with a focus on providing an amazing customer experience and scaling demand generation. Prior to Dun & Bradstreet, Josh served as Director of Marketing for Dell, where he led B2B digital marketing teams responsible for demand generation, search, social media and content marketing. Josh holds an MBA from The University of Texas and a BBA from Texas A&M University. You can find Josh on the social web at: LinkedIn: in/joshmueller Twitter: @jmueller03

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Weekend Favs September 3

Weekend Favs September 3 written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

My weekend blog post routine includes posting links to a handful of tools or great content I ran across during the week.

I don’t go into depth about the finds, but encourage you to check them out if they sound interesting. The photo in the post is a favorite for the week from an online source or one that I took out there on the road.

ReportGarden – Compiling manual reports by pulling AdWords & Analytics data is an absolute waste of your time and resources. ReportGarden facilitates end-to-end report automation, with the click of a button.

Unsplash – Free, do whatever you want, high-resolution photos.

Justworks – One product to take care of all your benefits, payments, and HR administration.

 

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How to Use Release Notes to Drive Feature Adoption

Companies are understandably excited to tell the world when they push new features. New developments can take months and they are the hope for more users, greater engagement, and achieving milestones towards success.

So how do teams communicate these big announcements to their users? A blog post, an unread notification, an email, and… that’s it. They sit back and wait for impact, but are disappointed if the anticipated uptick in usage doesn’t arrive.

Here we’ll explain why standard feature announcements are missing the mark, and how to drive new feature adoption amongst your users.

The Standard Feature Announcement

The BJ Fogg behavior model is a big component of our thinking on user experience. It explains that new behaviors form when three elements align:

• Motivation—the user wants to perform the action.
• Ability—the user has the capacity to perform the action.
• Triggers—the user is nudged to perform the action.

You can see how these three elements intersect in this graph:

When people have high motivation, they are more able to do hard things. When people have low motivation, they will only take action for easy to do behaviors. Triggers will push people into performing the actions, as long as there is sufficient motivation AND ability (above the action line curve).

When trying to change user behavior to adopt a new feature, an announcement serves as the trigger.

However there are three problems with conventional feature announcements:

1. Users miss them or forget about them because those channels are noisy and are out-of-context.
2. Announcements focus on HOW to use the feature and emails are a terrible way for this: we learn by doing, but emails are not interactive. We explain more here.
3. Announcements don’t actually help a user adopt the new behavior, because they don’t improve a user’s ability (they don’t make the new feature “easy to do”).

In these cases, the feature announcement email or notification or blog post is a trigger below the action line, and so it doesn’t cause users to act and adopt the new feature or workflow.

Blog & Email Announcements

Blog and email messaging can help motivate users, but they don’t help them adopt any new behavior. What’s more, when a user is going through their inbox or reading a blog, they are away from the context of the app. Even if they see information about a new feature, it is difficult for them to internalize the new actions just through reading.

Automation tool Zapier has a whole section of their blog devoted to product updates:

They post once a month about new updates to their product. This is great information for new and current customers alike, but it isn’t actionable. They are in the wrong place and the wrong frame of mind, so don’t have the ability to make any behavioral changes. They are just reading a blog, not thinking about using the product.

Following this up with an email highlighting the feature is also common. This is an email from email marketing tool MailChimp announcing improvements to their A/B testing tool:

Image Source

This email does tell you all you need to know about the new features. These type of update emails are great for maximum reach as you can send the update to the thousands of users on your email list. If any currently aren’t finding good use for your product, this might be enough to bring them back.

But this doesn’t help the user actually use the product. The call-to-action at the end of the email is to read more, even though they have just read a very long email about the product. Reading doesn’t help the customer internalize the idea of the new feature. Though they might be giving use cases for the new features, the only way people can really learn is by using the product. MailChimp missed the opportunity here to direct the user into the product and to a tour of the new features.

In-app notifications

Ability is slightly higher with in-app announcements. In this case, the user is in the product and they are familiar with how it works.

But they are still way below the threshold needed to get the new user invested in the product. They are often delivered at the wrong time to the wrong user. Also, they just give the user more to read, instead of guiding the user through actions they need to take to get value from the new feature.

Most in-app notifications have this fatal flaw. For instance, if you’ve ever used project management tool Trello, then you will be familiar with Taco the Husky and his announcements:

Image Source

If you were to click on that link though you would be taken away from the product and to their blog:

This is the opposite of what you want. Users have been moved to a detailed description of your product, possibly raising their motivation, but lowering their ability. Plus, there’s no guarantee users will come back once you send them away from your app. How many times have you clicked through a link thinking you’d just read one blog post or article and get back to what you were doing, only to disappear into a hours-long timesink? This is the fate Trello is tempting with this kind of feature announcement.

Instead showing them what to do in bitesized chunks through tooltips and product tours is much more effective. Users can internalize each new concept and start to use that feature, without being overwhelmed.

Increase Adoption with Targeted Product Tours

In each of the feature announcements we’ve looked at, users are simply told about the new feature and then left to find it themselves. They have low motivation and low ability. You need to get to your users when they have high motivation and high ability. This means teaching users with a product tour within the product.

Some products do this. For instance, Instagram’s new Stories feature comes with a quick in-app tour that is easy to find, and pushes you towards using the feature:

These tours work best when they are in-context of what the user is doing at that very moment. For that, you need to segment users by both time and behavior.

Targeting the Right User

Sharing a new feature with all your users may seem the best way to increase engagement. But the truth is that each of your customer personas will have different use cases for your product. They will favor some features over others. Therefore, they will want to hear updates about some new features more than others.

Using behavioral data you can look at how different subsets of users have used a certain feature before, how engaged they currently are with the feature, or if they have used adjacent features recently.

You are looking for a behavior they have exhibited that demonstrates they are ready to learn about your new update. For instance, you could use Kissmetrics Analyze to identify specific customer journey’s through your app and target different features to these different journeys.

Another example is the MailChimp feature above. If MailChimp want to increase the use of their improved A/B testing they could target a tour towards users who exhibit the following behaviors:

• Have previously created five regular campaigns — this shows they have the motivation to continually create campaigns, but perhaps not the knowledge of A/B campaigns.
• Have two or more saved templates — they have the ability to start testing each of these templates immediately with A/B testing.
• Have 1000+ contacts in their list — they have enough users to make a test statistically useful.
• Are currently creating their next campaign — they are in the position to start their next campaign.

These are the users that will be ready to use A/B testing in their email campaigns. Users who are just starting out with a single campaign, don’t have templates ready, or only a small readership will not find value in this new feature.

Targeting at the Right Time

Targeting at the right time is as critical as targeting the right person. In the MailChimp example above, pinging that ideal customer just as they start generating their new campaign with “Hey, there’s a better way!” can be just the trigger to move them to the new feature.

This isn’t as simple as targeting someone the moment they sign in or start using a feature. It depends on what the new feature is and how it corresponds to the current feature they are using. Look at this example from survey platform Typeform. They show the announcement at the start of building a new survey:

This is a lost opportunity. At this point I have a form to build. That is my main motivation. I am going to immediately dismiss this tour and continue with my main task. By the time I’m finished, I’ll have forgotten about these “cool features.”

If instead this was targeted after I had finished my main task then my motivation could be to check the new features out. Once I had successfully completed one task, I would then be ready to learn more.

Conclusion

Emails, blogs, and in-app notifications all have their place when it comes to feature announcements. Each messaging channel can be used at a different point to inform, teach, and highlight features to users.

But the in-app tour is the most powerful tool at your disposal for engaging users with new features:

• You can target the right people: New features will appeal to a certain segment of your users most. Using behavioral data, you can find out who uses the features you’re upgrading or aligned features and target a brief tour of the release only to them.
• You can target those people at the right time: in-app tours let you get your new features in front of users at the exact moment when they would find them most useful. This might be just as they finish a task, or just as they start another. But timing an in-app tour allows users to have the context needed for them to find value in the feature, as well as the ability and motivation to learn more.

When you target a tour to the right people at the right time you will have them when both motivation and ability are high. Then it only requires a small trigger to push them into action.

If you get this targeting right, then you have introduced the best customers to the most valuable features to them, meaning you are building success for them and your product.

About the Author: Pulkit Agrawal is cofounder & CEO of Chameleon, a platform for better user onboarding. He believes that first-user experience is a hidden treasure to drive improved user activation and retention. He writes on the Chameleon blog, which contains great resources on the psychology of effective user engagement. You can converse with him on Twitter.

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6-Step Checklist for Revamping Your Small Business’ Online Presence

6-Step Checklist for Revamping Your Small Business’ Online Presence written by Guest Post read more at Duct Tape Marketing

photo credit Pexels

It’s 2016. The days of prospective customers sauntering down Main Street or even flipping through the Yellow Pages in hopes of stumbling upon your business are long gone. We live in the Age of Information now, and the Internet is king of the castle. When someone needs a service or product, they go online to find the appropriate business and its contact information. According to Adweek, 81% of consumers conduct research online before making a purchase. You almost certainly already know this and pivoted your business online years ago, but unless you’ve stayed remarkably vigilant of the latest trends, your online presence could probably use a facelift.

As changes continuously sweep across social media, Google, and the content marketing world, your business’ online presence must evolve or you risk receding into obscurity, stagnating with an out-of-touch website or, god forbid, a MySpace page. For the most part, small businesses aren’t maximizing their online presence. Less than half of small businesses advertise online, pay attention to Search Engine Optimization, or have a social media presence, and a quarter of small businesses don’t have a website at all.

For those who wish to gain a competitive advantage, consider this 6-step checklist for revamping your online presence in 2016:

1. Reassess and Segment Your Target Market

Before you jump into any actual changes, it’s important to sit back and reconsider your target market. Get into the psychology of your consumer and begin to identify common characteristics of your target market. Now, segment your market into specific groups of people. It might be tempting to think that you want to sell to everyone under the sun, but without segments to focus your efforts on, you will never have a highly-focused campaign geared towards a specific group and will risk not reaching anyone effectively. Consider an online clothing store. They’ve segmented their market–men’s and women’s–to push customers down the sales funnel toward their desired destination. Customers are looking for something specific from you–they’re not just there to visit–so direct them to that segmented goal.

2. Listen to and Engage with Your Audience

Now that you know who you’re selling to, engage with them and test the waters. Find the best channels through which to interact with your past and potential clientele. Since social media platforms break down along demographic lines, it’s easy to focus your attention on one of your segmented groups at a time. Have a professional, career-oriented customer base? Try LinkedIn. Focused more on female creatives? Try Pinterest. Demographic-specific e-mail lists for newsletters are also effective in focused communication with specific segments. Once you’ve zeroed in, engage with your audience, track their online activity, and see what they are saying about you via Google Alerts to figure out how to best design your online presence to suit your audience’s tendencies.

3. Optimize Your Landing Page for Conversions

The central motivation of revamping your online presence is to maximize conversions, turning a visitor to your website into a customer. Your landing page is the most crucial part of this–most site visitors only spend up to 8 seconds before bailing on your landing page and moving on to your competitor. This means your page must utilize the most effective design tactics possible to keep your visitor’s attention and readily satisfy their needs. Videos can increase conversions by 86% and a clear Call-to-Action button (like, “Buy Now!”) is similarly important, so consider implementing these elements onto your own page.

4. Don’t Forget About Mobile

91% of small business websites aren’t optimized for mobile. This should be a major concern, considering mobile accounts for over half of web searches. Despite the countless how-tos that break down mobile optimization tactics concerning page speed and design, optimizing for mobile is a difficult and technical process that flies right over most heads. To make the most of your efforts on your landing page and mobile, put your DIY instincts on hold and hire a freelancer who works in responsive design, who can create a flexible web page for both desktop and mobile. It may be costly, but keep in mind a responsive redesign can increase conversions by up to 590%.

5. Revitalize Your Social Media Accounts

In order for your social media presence to translate to greater exposure and thus more customers, you must provide consistent, quality content and actively engage with comments. Create a selling strategy–how is your social media use going to get people in the store and ordering your product? With that in mind, be authentic and emphasize engagement, speaking with and caring for your customers, over hard selling. According to Magic Commerce, only 20% of your content should be promotional while the rest should get your audience involved in conversation on topics relevant to your business.

7. Take Advantage of Google

Google knows all, right? Maybe, but your business likely won’t show up on Google Maps unless you’ve claimed your Google My Business. Drop everything you’re doing and fix that right now. Google’s incredible market share of desktop search engines hovers around 90%, meaning that if you’re not maximizing your use of all that Google has to offer, you’re basically invisible to most potential customers. Beyond getting on Maps and My Business, be sure to use Google’s new 360-degree virtual tour, Business View, if you have a physical location. It will feature next to your business details on Google Search and give prospective walk-ins more reason to trust your business.

Whether you’ve run a small business for 10 years or 10 months, these 6 steps can help you embrace a fresh approach to your online presence and maximize your ability to retain and gain customers in this increasingly digital world. Have another piece of advice on getting a business up to snuff online? Share your comments below!

Ellie Martin is Co-founder of Startup Change group. As writer and author, her works have been featured on Yahoo! , Wisebread, AOL, among others. She currently splits her time between her home office in New York and Israel. You may connect with her on Twitter.

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