crm strategy – Veronica Stenberg

The 3 keys to be more successful in your marketing – no matter the channel

Veronica — Mon, 10 Jun 2019 05:19:01 +0000

If you want to reach everyone, you are relevant to no one. Yet, with the most advanced technology available for marketing today, there is still a huge gap in terms of being specific in both targeting and messaging towards the desired audience.

One can, of course, argue that with increased targeting parameters comes an increased cost for a specific campaign or activity. However, the cost of being irrelevant is far greater. Why risk your company’s brand by being irrelevant? And in the long run, you want to craft marketing that reaches the right people when it matters, something that I argue is worth paying a premium for. Especially since in order to be able to make decisions based on data you cannot “spray and pray”.

Relevance is the key.

To increase the relevance I’m sharing the incredibly three key questions and steps that will take your marketing to the next level.

Who specifically do you want to reach?

The first thing you need to do is identify who specifically you want to reach. Create well-defined target groups from an overarching perspective.

Examples:

People in New York City that want to discover things to do nearby/outside New York City

Can be broken down into

Residents of New York City

Tourist in New York City

From these two overarching segments, you can drill down further

Residents of New York City: retired couples, hipsters, couples with children etc

Tourists in New York City: US tourists, UK tourists, German tourists etc

Goal: get specific about who you want to reach

What do you know about them?

For each specific and identified target audience that your company wants to reach, what do you know about them besides the classic demographic data? Can you craft a story about an individual that represents a person from each identified target group from the exercise above?

To be really on point with creating your customers’ persona, add their pain points. That is, the challenges they face. As well as including the gain points, in terms of positive results they are looking for. This helps you position yourself in your customers perspective and avoid the illusive trap of thinking from the “inside out”.

From here, you can start building a persona that helps you to increase the relevance of both communication and marketing tactics to specific audiences. Then you go from a personalized target group to a more specific person, with a laser focus on their specific needs.

Goal: craft a persona

Where are your target groups online and what existing behaviour can you tap into?

Once you have clearly defined and specific target groups, with a persona for each group you are in a much better position to start crafting compelling and relevant communication towards each specific customer target group.

As well as starting to research and brainstorm where you can find them online.

What channels to utilise and when in their decision journey they may be relevant.

Goal: channel selection based on existing behaviour for each target group

Photo by Amy Shamblen on Unsplash

Simplify your marketing automation with my CRM planning template

Veronica — Mon, 27 Nov 2017 05:12:07 +0000

Personally, when planning anything CRM related, I map it out against at least generic customer journey from pre-purchase stage to post-purchase experience. Since there are a multitude of ways to use data to enhance the customer experience and be useful, post purchase to support that the customers come back and that your company lay the foundations for a relationship with the customer.

However, doing more of a overarching type of planning for your internal customer life cycle, to design triggers for marketing automation, identify new opportunities and so forth. To map out what should happen when, it’s really simple to use this template where there is one positive “dream path” illustrated in green and the negative path in orange.

The template has the following framework:

Acquisition – tasks that are acquiring new customers, a first step can be some kind of registration, sign-up or follow in social media, prior to conversion

Conversion – the actual purchase, but also in the negative path basket abandonment tasks

Develop – task that both up-sell to the customer and develop the actual relationship, and help enhance the customer experience

Retain – tasks that focus on retaining existing customers

Reactivate/win-back – tasks that helps you process customers that have been inactive and are showing signs of leaving you

When you have done this type of mapping, then it’s time to give each trigger a timing, frequency, and channel/where. Then it’s just to add the content and start to implement and refine!

Remember that if you have different type’s of services and customers, this type of framework, may need to be adjusted accordingly for each group.

If you want the template in power point format, to adjust to your business and to map out triggers, then you can download my CRM planning template for marketing automation here.

Two days of data

Veronica — Mon, 20 Nov 2017 05:21:06 +0000

My work comes with some perks, one of them is being invited to attend events on topics that I think is very interesting and other might deem as a bit nerdy. I thrive when I get to leave my computer and get outside the office, meet new people and listen to seminars on topics that I’m interested in and get new perspectives and knowledge. This enriches my own work.

Last week I attended two events in Stockholm, where I first spend half a day with a company that I worked with that sells customer profiling data (Mosaic and Orvesto customer data). This type of data, as far as I’m both informed and know it’s not included in the new GDPR legislation as Orvesto (local Swedish survey tool) is based on probability and is voluntary to participate in. The mosaic customer profiling data, is using it’s own segmentation information based on specific parameters and is based on probability based on the area/address where the person lives. This can then be used in various ways. From programmatic buying to building segmentation models, making selections for truly data driven initiatives.

To move on to the event. The topic of the day was data driven communication and this is a topic that I personally find very interesting. As it combines rational and emotional elements to create for marketing.

My own key takeaways from the Insight Expo:

With the vast amounts of data that is generated everyday, as with everything a purpose and goal behind the accumulation of and use of data helps you both to focus and to reduce data.
How and when to utilise slow and fast data and where it can be useful to combine them.
Examples of how to go from data strategy to operational action, with several examples throughout the day, as the red thread.
The most valuable for me was to get out there and listen, join conversations that helps me get back into my work with a fresh perspective and mindset.

The second seminar that I attended was a seminar on GDPR. As I’ve worked with Stena Line and in a position where I was highly involved in the preparation work for this new updated legislation for the market. I want to stay updated on the topic as it’s a responsibility for me, being a digital consultant within marketing, using data for more effectiveness, to futureproof any work and take this responsibility seriously.

My own key takeaways from GDPR with this event:

I was relived to get this information in Swedish as all the other information I’ve received both at my former workplace and in my own research online is in English. Don’t get me wrong, I’m very comfortable using English, even more so. But I need to be able to transcend and translate this information to Swedish and how it fits different businesses. Legal terms in Swedish are complicated.
Arvato went through the basics, the 7 principles and the foundations of GDPR in a structured, easy to assimilate way. The seminar ended with actions and checklists, which offered the attendees a framework to use for their own organisations.

The two seminars I attended walks hand in hand. Data is the new oil and utilized properly it can move a business forward towards their goals, by being relevant and identifying customers who are ready to buy a product or service, or just by being useful at the right moment.

And GDPR is a way to bring more structure into the world of now free flowing personal information and data, to get the companies that handles personal data to take more responsibility and be more transparent of what the data is used for, why. And hopefully our Apple Terms and Conditions will be shorter and more user friendly after den 25th May 2018!

The benefits of open customer journey mapping

Veronica — Mon, 09 Oct 2017 04:23:13 +0000

I’ve previously written about creating a framework for marketing around a very basic customer journey containing four phases – see, think do and care which is a very basic but very useful in terms of planning marketing and communication focusing on the path to purchase.

Open customer journeys on the other hand, are a more in depth look at specific customer segments actual journey pre and post purchase.

So what do I mean with an open customer journey?

With an open customer journey, I want to emphasise the actual process (outside your company context) that your customer goes through before buying a product or service that you sell. This can and should include before and after a purchase. This process is usually mapped out by a user experience designer after both research, interviews and other insight work is performed to really understand what the customers go through. Before deciding to purchase a specific product or service and to help you stand out by catering for their needs at every touchpoint with your brand.

Why is mapping your customer’s journey useful, how you can use this – and how it will have a positive affect your business bottom line:

Understand your customer’s behaviour, challenges and pain points
Understand your customer and know when you can be of service, useful, helpful, informative and inspirational
Design triggers for marketing automation
Find insight for target group segmentation
Find insights for micro-moments
Find insight for content, communication and marketing creation
Identify opportunities to improve your service offering, apps, homepage and other touchpoints
Spot new business opportunities by identifying up and cross-sell possibilities to increase revenue
Design a better customer experience
Understand what is important in your customer’s path to purchase
Understand how you can increase customer loyalty and return purchases within existing customers

To better illustrate this, I’ve created one very basic customer journey for an airline company in this image above. Each target group of customers will have a slightly different customer journey of course. In this case, a leisure travel customer and a business travel customer will have two similar but different journeys.

In the image above, There are “six main events” for the customer in the big circles, which will take most of the customers time. Then we have the purple lines which indicate other important check-points. This is the customers context and what I mean with an open customer journey.

There are plenty of opportunities here, post-purchase, to design a better experience with an airline company. That, however, is it’s very own article.

Photo by UX Indonesia on Unsplash