Context is the connector to the customer. It establishes relevance to what the customer needs or is interested in. If we deliver a marvelous experience at every touchpoint, our chances of being listened to go up rapidly. The customer experience is often both emotional and realistic. It takes research about customer needs to make sure you are capable of delivering a better experience than any other competitor.

Companies that have mastered the ability to deliver contextually relevant messaging based on individual end-user requirements can then offer contextual services as Apple’s Genius Bar or Nike’s “build your own shoe” or the ability to keep track of an important package being delivered by UPS or personalized financial advice from “Chuck” – all to increase customer satisfaction.

What is Context?

Context is the interrelated conditions in which information or activity exists with other situational events that impact decision making and the final outcome. What do we aspire out of our lives? What are the barriers? What defines our world view? Are we willing to look at alternatives to turn barriers into positives? Are we control freaks? Are we trapped into situations or conditions that we fail to see a way for improving our condition. Is family the most important attribute that defines how we act? Or is it success or respect? Or protecting our silo at work—even if better ideas come along that could threaten the silo? What is it that we want our of our careers?

All significant decisions occur within a context. Every action occurs within a context. All consumption occurs within a context so not addressing it leaves you with a less efficient marketing program. The more you understand my context or that of people similar to me, the less information you have to give me while serving me more efficiently and effectively.

What is Contextual Marketing?

Marketing is contextual when it is made relevant to each individual prospect’s situation (the prospect’s fine-grained profile of demographics and informational interests, location, timing, needs and decision process) while also addressing the needs of the sponsoring enterprise (awareness, positioning, qualification, barrier identification, trust, closure). Contextual marketing brings customer and seller together so that customers can make better decisions, faster and easier.

• Location context—a prospect is in on a business trip or is in the mall where you sell medical devices or at a convention hall where you have a booth
• Job Role/Department–a prospect’s point of view shifts dramatically with different responsibilities
• Life-cycle context—a prospect has just been promoted or bought a house or had a baby or made the 100% Sales Club
• Behavioral—a prospect is browsing your website and clicked your demo video, has complained on Google + that his CRM system just lost valuable data and he is madder than hell, or joined an online group
• Event related—the stock market just took a plunge, or the prospect tweeted about reading a book with relevance to your business or is evaluating new business systems or attending a relevant business conference

With context, it is often fairly easy to identify when, where and what the prospect is doing. The more important question is why. If your telemarketing team is armed with such contextual information, they can dig for the why to shape a contextually relevant message that can move a prospect into a buying cycle.

What brings a prospect into a buying cycle? The choices a prospect makes to satisfy aspirations or challenges. To understand the effect of a campaign, we need first to understand the cause. Usually, there is a combination of offline and online interactions across various touchpoints, many of which go unrecognized or recorded. Downloading an eBook is best understood by observing the prospect’s next action. The next action might be to contact the company or to answer the phone when the supplier calls. Or the next touch might be to continue a process of research about the supplier by visiting more deeply into the supplier’s website and that of similar suppliers. It is a series of actions and reactions.

In all cases, when a prospect takes an action, there are three and only three options the prospect now has before her:

1. Yes, I will engage.
2. No, I will not engage.
3. Maybe, I will consider this supplier after I am clearer as to what I really want to do about resolving my aspirations or challenges. To the supplier, this might appear to be a “no” when actually the prospect goes dormant.

The illustration below attempts to show this interdependence of the next touch. The faces are prospects. The stars are marketing initiatives. The lines are actions taken or not taken.

A web visit from someone who accepted a campaign offer is a high value touch, as is the opening of an email and a click through to the next step. Or a direct mail campaign might cause the prospect to click to a Personalized URL (PURL). A tweet about an upcoming event might result in clicking a link to the web page describing the event in more detail and a click from this page to a registration page could be the cause of a closed sale. Campaigns work in concert with one another to move prospects along. But the decision and time frame are entirely in the control of the prospect.

Those prospects that receive a campaign and do not respond should be watched to see if they remain disengaged over consecutive campaigns during a one-year period. At some point, they should be treated as having “unsubscribed” themselves from your company. You might try a ‘win-back’ campaign as a final action before removing them from your active list.

What is your ratio of well-targeted contacts versus disengaged contacts? The cost of replacing these inactive people is an often ignored cost of your marketing campaigns.

By understanding the cause and effect of prospect actions, we can attribute transitional power to those that moved a prospect to a closed sale. We can also capture the first contact and the last contact. The first contact is like scoring a baseball player to first base and the last contact to a run batted in. All the transitions (men on base) contributed to the win.

When it comes to attributing contribution to a contact’s High Impact Score, the First Point of Contact and the Last Point of Contact each get equal weight and those intervening points would be averaged out equally. On the green line in the above illustration, the First and Most Recent each get, for example, 20 points and the three touches along the way get a total of 20 divided by three, or 6.6 points each.

All five marketing initiatives in this illustration had a cost to produce and deliver the program. The cost of so called free email compared to a direct marketing dimensional mailing, of course, is not really free. All marketing initiatives have internal and external costs to produce the closed sale.

Bright glimmers of hope are starting to radiate from what had been some ominous, dark clouds of an economy that looked to be in retreat. Jobs continue to be created, industrial production is nearly back to its pre-recession levels, blue-chip stocks have re-couped their losses, and consumer confidence is finally climbing. These are the glimmers of hope that show an economy on the rebound.   You can see the data that backs up these points in last week’s Wall Street Journal column, The U.S. Economic Recovery Shows Signs of Accelerating, but Still Has Lots of Ground to Cover.

Make no mistake, a recovery is on the way.  It’s time for each of us, as companies and people, to get up off the ground, dust ourselves off, and get back in this fight.  Fear still has many companies and people frozen however.  But the best way to kill fear is to completely commit yourself to your goals, plans, objectives with intensity and passion.

The best strategy of all is to double-down on what you stand for and who you are.  It’s time to revisit your marketing manifesto, both at a personal and corporate level.   Why?  Because when the rebound gathers more momentum and hits, it will be too late.  It’ll be like trying to get in shape for a very long, fast race when the starting gun goes off.  Now is the time to get in shape for the rebound.  That’s why you need to consider your own marketing manifesto for You. Inc.  And even if you work for a company today, your own marketing manifesto is even more relevant – because in the end each of us are actually in business for ourselves, regardless of who signs the check.  Here are five ideas on how to get started:

1. Define yourself by your competencies, expertise and passion and forget about titles. When economic growth hits full stride and this rebound fully takes hold, the people who will be excelling and benefiting from it will be the ones paying the price right now of working to excel at their jobs, not hunkered down in a bunker somewhere. Continually learning, striving to excel, working to create value for customers, that needs to be part of anyone’s manifesto right now. The best marketing is based on  solid, real results.  The results of people who are now choosing to pay the price of extra effort will be the ones way ahead when the rebound fully takes hold.  Titles come and go, but who you are and what you stand for, and your willingness to excel – those last a lifetime.
2. Kill Fear With Passionate Goals. It amazes me, how many of the students  have in classes have exceptional analytical and writing skills.  Yet they sit in class, silent, not sharing what their brilliant minds are thinking.  The majority of them are Asian and Middle Eastern young women who, being new to the United States and from cultures that taught them to be silent in groups, are afraid to say what they think.  They have such potentially amazing careers ahead of them if they could just crush the fear of speaking that holds them back.  Go find your passionate goals in your career, and in your life, and use them to kill fear now.  Life is too short to go around being so afraid.
3. Be relentless in your pursuit of intelligence and knowledge.  Make no mistake, when the rebound hits the people that will be getting paid the most and progressing the fastest made the decision months or even years ago to pay the price of being experts in their fields.  In whatever shape the economy takes in the coming months and years, your titles from this year or years past will not nearly be as important as what you know.  How quickly you can solve complex problems, the value you deliver, your ability to avert problems for your customers – all great skill sets that come when there is a passion for continual learning and the pursuit of knowledge.  It’s not where your diploma is from either, it’s how passionate you are about learning over the long-term and your ability to translate that into results that matter most.
4. Hit the gym and start training for the rebound – you’ll think better and be stronger. The excellent article this week in Scientific American How Exercise Jogs the Brain makes many outstanding points about how increased energy supply allows the brain to work faster and more efficiently.  As part of any marketing manifesto, there must have energy to propel it forward.  Working out and making yourself stronger for the rebound is key.
5.  Realize economic fatalists and pessimists love company – choose to say “no” to them and “yes” to your goals and the vision of the future you want to make a reality.  A truly great marketing manifesto makes the decision to say “no” easy because there is a much bigger, compelling, valuable and important ”yes” waiting to get done.  Say “yes” to your goals and define yourself by them.  The fatalists want to see economic failure to make their theories correct.  Refuse to ride on that train of thought, find compelling goals, objectives and create a manifesto you can be totally committed to instead.

Bottom line: With an uneven yet promising recovery on the way, now is the time to define who you are, both as a company and a professional, creating a manifesto that gives you many more reasons to say “yes” to your goals and “no” to the naysayers, negative, pessimistic people who may drag you down.

This Sunday, more than 111 million people will tune in to the big game – The Super Bowl –  to watch the 2011 football season come to an end. Many of them will be watching JUST for the commercials. However, over on YouTube, some of the ads have been leaked accidentally on purpose.

A REAL BARGAIN: 30 SECONDS FOR 4 $MILLION

While some companies are coughing up close to $4 million for 30 seconds of air time, international software provider Cincom Systems decided that the $7-8 million it would take to air its ad would be better spent invested in its products and services to help companies improve their bottom line. (Although we did spend $7.00 on this advertisement for a soft drinks and a large peanut butter, anchovies, jalapeño jelly fried veggie burger.)

IT’S NEVER TOO EARLY TO TRAIN

Cincom’s advertisement is a reminder to everyone that it’s never too early to train, strengthen and strategize to position your company to win your big game – and get that next big sale.

ANOTHER CINCOM FIRST

Since every other company is releasing their advertisements this week to try to get ahead of the pack and garner as much buzz as possible, Cincom wanted to get in on the act. So far, this is the first software company advertisement we’ve seen.

VIEW THE LEAKED, SUPER NOT-SO-SECRET VIDEO

Special thanks to Eric Nies, Marilyn Cox, Robyn Robinette-Johnson, Carey Hoffman, Carla Johnson, Ed Mack, Tom Rolf, Devin Meister and Liz Harter (AKA the Cincom Video Team of the Week).

B2B content producers are sales people who sell with concepts, words, illustrations; crafted together by a graphic designer. It is preparing the way for the salesperson to make his onsite visit with a prepared prospective buyer.

But the sad thing about it all is that the team of content producers and professional sales people fail 92% of the time to consistently create top and bottom line growth. That was the result of a study published by the Conference Executive Board in 2010. They reviewed 1,780 companies and only 143 had achieved sustained profitable growth from 1995 to 2008. 143 of 1,780 companies had the magic mixture.

Just 8%. Really?

What we need is a new way to turn content into magic, that like the Indian scout goes ahead to prepare the way for the sales team. We need to depart from traditional marketing.

Clearly it is not working.

We need to innovate around sales and marketing practices that impact decision making upstream from the sales cycle. We need to provide content and early stage selling that helps customers make good decisions about how to reach their aspirations and to overcome their challenges—even if you lose the sale, your reputation will grow. You are the people who help buyers make good decisions instead of selling them snake oil.

Use the total experience from distributing useful, well crafted content to making the onsite visit all helpful to the buyer. Then we will begin to reshape customer understanding of their own needs. Targeted, provocative communications that challenge customer assumptions about their own business growth. Create impact rather than just activity.

What happens in the buyer’s world?

Once we challenge a buyer’s old assumptions, the buyer will convene a group to hear about the new reality. You can be sure that at least one person will see a way of hanging on to the old way or that will come up with a different way of resolving the situation that we recommended. Challenges will surface. Those at risk will fight. The decision drags on.

Those of us on the outside seldom get the view of what is happening on the inside, but we know the likely scenario. Again content marketers need to help the sales team keep the buyer focused on the new reality and on the impact of success or failure.

Content marketing is anticipatory and longitudinal.

Times past are gone when the marketing department could prepare an campaign, a brochure and a few data sheets. Now traditional marketers need to produce a huge array of content to meet what are really foreseeable situations. We have to anticipate these expected challenges.

We have to be ready for a long siege that keeps the buyer engaged throughout a buying cycle that is months long and treacherous with politics.

We have to be out in the marketplace with social content so we remain an important voice in the entire conversation. It is not good enough to have a blog that touches the social conversation. We have to comment on other relevant content posted on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook … on the blogs our buyers publish … on the articles in the online trade media. We have to be everywhere or someone who outsmarts us will slip through and steal the sale we worked so hard to win.

So Content Marketing Institute assembled their list of the top 20 women generating great content to show some might female writers. I might add that Joe  and CMI have done an excellent job at putting the spotlight on women leading the way as serious influencers and contributors to the content marketing institute. Content handled this way is an important factor in improving customer experience.

As a sample, here are 5 of their top 20 (in alpha order):

Ardath Albee (@ardath421): Ardath is the E.F. Hutton of B2B marketing: When she talks, people listen. Her blog and Twitter stream are among the most influential in her category.

Leslie Bradshaw (@LeslieBradshaw): Leslie runs data visualization firm JESS3, which has produced some of the most shared content of the entire social web. Ever. Her “More Seats” column for the Forbes Blog highlights women in tech.

Deirdre Breakenridge (@dbreakenridge): Deirdre is proof that PR and content marketing are kindred spirits. She’s omnipresent across her blog, Twitter, webinars, social Q&A sites, and more.

Jennifer Cisney (@kodakCB): Jennifer runs Kodak’s blog and social media presence. She’s also a prominent speaker at industry events. Anyone who follows Kodak marketing knows it takes smarts and swagger to succeed. She’s got both.

April Dunford (@aprildunford): April’s probably the least “classic” content marketer on this list, but her RocketWatcher blog might just be the smartest, most interesting marketing-related content on the blogosphere.

As marketing content developers we should keep in mind how our content impacts trust and credibility with prospects, clients, employees and suppliers. Words are important. Buyers are absorbing content from all sorts of places. They evaluate emotionally and rationally if our promises sound true or too good to be true. When we accomplish trust and credibility, our marketing content will drive business.

• TRUST means that your marketing content conveys that you will work to make the buyer successful.
• CREDIBILITY comes when your actions follow through with what you promised.

Done well, this will lead to a positive customer experience—one where customers will tell others that they love being associated with your company. Given the openness of social networks, such advocates for your company will spread the word and your reputation as a valuable resource instead of just another vendor.

Keep in mind, however, that B2B buyers can spot a fake from a mile off. They have seen and heard it all a thousand times. They stand alert. False promises can bankrupt your brand. Fake sincerity and you will die by your words. Instead, a sincere commitment based on a deep understanding of your buyers’ aspirations and concerns will enhance your reputation as a trusted adviser.

Parity is broken.

Differentiation is established.

Experience is positive.

Avoid jargon and bells and whistles. Such language always sounds fake and unreliable and communicate you are more interested in selling your solution than in helping the buyer to be successful. Use simple, direct words that clearly communicate what you do and how you create economic value. Use customer testimonials and industry analyst reports to validate your promises. Never slam your competitors. Do what you promise and don’t over-promise. Provide links to your social network profiles. Comment on other blogs. Make it personally relevant wherever you can.

Keep all your marketing content contextually relevant to your buyer personas. The key is to focus on the needs and wants of the customer. Contextual content marketing drives business because it builds credibility and trust. Credibility occurs when buyers understand you have the knowhow and credentials to support your brand promise.  Trust happens when buyers believe you. They will buy from you when they are convinced that you can really help them. That’s when your content will drive more business.

In 2007, Joe Pulizzi launched a content marketing service called Junta42. Recently this was renamed Content Marketing Institute. CMI runs Content World, a huge educational event with the next one occurring in Columbus, OH, on September 4-6, 2012. They also publish a magazine: Chief Content Officer.

CMI’s philosophy is that content marketing must include strategic planning, content creation, distribution, and metrics for multiple stages of the buying cycle to multiple customer personas. In my view, that means a complete content marketing strategy would incorporate inbound marketing principles, but it would also take a more holistic approach to meeting a business’s overall marketing goals.

Developing and implementing a
marketing content strategy is today
the single most critical task
that B2B marketers must master.

Content has always been “king of the hill”.

The power of unique, quality content has been self-evident as a way of capturing audiences with continuity programming. One of the earliest examples of content marketing came in 1895 when John Deere published The Furrow magazine—a magazine still being published today.

Procter & Gamble created its own radio soap opera production subsidiary in 1940, and produced the first network television soap opera in 1950. P&G Productions created 20 soap operas on radio and television, becoming a pioneer in producing award-winning daytime serials like As The World Turns and Guiding Light, which ended in September 2009 after 72 years.  P&G brand marketers were unbeatable because they understood the need to produce their own content to drive business.

So what is different about content marketing today?

The production of content exploded as the Internet became a viable way to reach audiences. For too long, however, the content on websites was not much more than online versions of printed brochures. Customers ditched the approach by ignoring such content. Company-centric content gradually gave way to customer-relevant content—what we call contextual content. Such content has to be well-written and designed, but most important; it has to be relevant to specific buyer segments. It has to be about customer needs rather than product features and benefits.

You simply cannot afford to market the old way—with branded messages that are watered down into creative taglines that hardly any potential customer could give a hoot about you.

Your customers are in control.

We live in a world where buyers want to make up their own mind about what they need. When buyers have problems that need solutions, they will go on the Internet and read about their problem until they are satisfied that they know how solve their situation. They do this without ever talking to one of your salespeople. If you are not in the online dialogue while they are learning, you will not be in the final list of companies they choose to explore in face-to-face meetings. This is true whether they plan to buy a new fire engine or CRM software or business continuity insurance.

Content is today’s path to marketing success.

The raw fact is that B2B marketing is now a content publishing business.  Buyers demand content. Search engines demand content. Marketers must demonstrate through content how we understand our buyer’s needs and how we have developed solutions that are a perfect match to the issues they are trying to resolve.

Today, every marketer must learn what academia insisted on for as long as there have been professors teaching at colleges:

Publish or Perish.

What does it mean to think like a publisher?

When I was editor of a trade magazine for retail merchandisers, we met every day to plan the next issue of the magazine. We visited stores. We talked with retailers. We met with the people advertising in the magazine. We knew the industry and where to find stories that would help these retailers drive more business with better merchandising solutions. We had an editorial calendar so advertisers could plan their ad schedules around the content we would be publishing. The passion everyday was to publish the best content serving our industry.

In the 1980’s, the marketing agency I founded with two partners, produced recipe books for P&G that were unique to each household – coupons personalized to the households’ previous redemption patterns. For Butler Manufacturing, a provider of steel buildings and metal roof systems, we produced a quarterly magazine, Building Profit,  that ran for nearly 10 years.

Today, at Cincom Systems, CEO Tom Nies is constantly producing content to teach and inspire employees to better serve our clients. Marketing publishes eBooks and an animated video that help Chief Sales Officers find new ways to improve how they sell complex products as a major element of the Cincom Acquire software brand. We also publish an award winning bi-weekly online magazine called Expert Access—with over 125,000 subscribers and a weekly one-hour radio program on a local station where we interview business leaders to provide stories that motivate or inform listeners on how to do their jobs better.

What it means for marketers to become publishers is to have the same commitment for producing outstanding content that a magazine publisher has for developing articles that are useful to subscribers. Your buyers are looking for content that is relevant to the issues they face every day at work. You can build a powerful relationship by helping them with their issues and helping them to more smartly buy solutions to their problems or their aspirations.

An efficiency and transaction mindset is driving many industries including airlines into a churn-based business model that is tough to escape from.

In 2012 many businesses will need to step up their efforts to make better use of internal systems that are not integrated to CRM, analytics and customer service systems so they can deliver higher quality customer experiences immediately.  Integrating these systems together and making the quality of data and intelligence a priority will increase the quality of customer experience delivered.

 With these thoughts in mind, here are several customer experience predictions for 2012:

•  By combining quality monitoring, analytics and social media, many companies get a true assessment of the customer experience they are delivering for the first time.  2012 is going to be about measuring and improving the quality of customer experience first, increasing the speed and efficiency of interactions second.  Quality monitoring is going to get beyond just measuring activity-based and high-end customer satisfaction metrics.  Behavioral analytics, real-time feedback from social networks , integrated to sentiment analysis will give customer experience and customer service managers instant visibility into how effective their strategies and programs are.  For many, it will be the first true reading of customer satisfaction and quality of customer experience.

•  Consistency of customer response across all channels gets measured, monetized, and rewarded internally and externally.  One of the quickest ways to increase the quality of customer experience is to make responses identical, synchronized and complete across all channels.  Surprisingly, according to Forrester in a recent study, 90% of companies can’t do this.  Customers however expect this to be like a dial-tone in their interactions with you and your company.  In 2012, there is going to be a much stronger focus on this area, with more measurement, monetization (through upsell and cross-sell) and greater spending on this than ever before.  The bottom line is that delivering a consistent response across all channels is no longer optional, it’s required.  2012 will show how companies who did the hard work of making this happen end the year with higher gross margins, retention rates and customer satisfaction scores.

• Knowledge management and the use of configuration and constraint engines to streamline its use in Web self-service and agent-based applications goes mobile, accelerating across all channels.  Having real-time access to the knowledgebase of their companies further increases the quality of customer interaction and experience for service reps, driving up quality monitoring scores in the process.  Smartphone and tablet integration via Android and Apple iOS will begin to provide richer data sets and greater analytics application performance, giving customer service much greater ability to respond in real-time regardless of location or time.

• Using social media and online communities, customers will make it known which channels they are most and least likely to use for service and support – the migration between channels will be more fluid than ever before.  Using analytics, data mining and real-time quality monitoring is going to be essential for customer experience and customer service teams to stay on top of.

• Customer experience becomes more dependent on ongoing content development, management and personalization than ever before.   No longer will customers be satisfied with only a quarterly or bi-yearly update on what’s going on in the user communities they are members of.  It’s an always-on, real-time world right now and the companies who deliver a consistently high quality stream of content will emerge from 2012 with more profitable customers than they began with due to their focus on this area.

• Big Data, Hadoop and MapReduce will deliver on the promises of greater customer insight and intelligence through advanced data mining and business intelligence.  The insights gained from these initiatives will be a strong catalyst of change in many companies  stalled in their CEM strategies today due to lack of legacy data integration and analytics.   This is one area where quality will become king in 2012, as companies quit being satisfied with simple data integration and start pushing for higher quality of data analysis and predictive modeling.  Integrating Big Data with sentiment analysis and customer satisfaction data will yield insights many customer service, marketing and executive management teams are lacking today.