Tag Archives: Opinion

Personally I think its Personalisation!

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Personalisation

I was recently invited to speak at one of the Innovation Enterprise summits in London (IE run some excellent global events that attract CxO level attendees from a spectrum of businesses areas). Although this event was focused primarily on content, I was giving the final talk of the day and chose to concentrate on personalisation.

I opened with the above diagram and although all the images relate to recent experiences of mine, they all ultimately describe the need to know me as a person, and the importance of delivering a digital engagement that is targeted to me…that is me! Not a persona or machine generated impression of me, but me!

Why does this matter? In my opinion because I believe this is key to the digital future of all companies. We know of the generic user journeys we’ve no doubt all mapped, and the personas we’ve all created. But they are still very generic.

Marketing Week - Reaching e-commerce consumers in the 12-minute window

Marketing Week – Reaching e-commerce consumers in the 12-minute window

With ever shortening attention spans and social channels becoming clogged with information, ads or updates, getting the message across is becoming increasingly harder.

However, something targeted to me in my favourite colour (seriously) or on my preferred channel, or more importantly that knows where I am in the purchase journey and targets the information I need at this stage, will get me interested and engaged. The rest drop in to my conscious but dis-engaged delete marathon that I run almost daily on my spam email address (you know the one you use to register for white papers and so on).

In summary to get ahead you first need to get to know!

 

 

5 Key Inhibitors To Delivering Your Digital Strategy

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implementation

 

I find I often think, talk and blog about the speed of execution of digital strategies! Maybe because not many people understand this basic formula:

Faster Implementation = Quicker Realised Benefit

The sooner you deliver your strategy, the sooner your customers will reap the benefits and value of it. It sounds obvious, but if it is, why do so many companies fail to deliver?

I have some theories and below are some of the things to watch out for…and happy to hear of others you’ve heard of.

  1. Waiting for perfection! I used to be guilty of this a few years ago. Not anymore though. Get comfortable with the 20/80 rule! i.e. going live with 20% of what you want to deliver is OK. Just have a plan to quickly and iteratively deliver the remaining 80%.
  2. Delivering in a matrix. Often I hear that if one party isn’t comfortable with the direction, the whole project stops. Solution is don’t tell anyone you’re doing it. Keep your focus small and under the radar. Success is impossible to argue against.
  3. The boss! Sometimes the bosses view has the greatest weight but matters the least! Move from direction to opinion and once you’ve done that, help them understand their opinion has less weight than that of the customers. Hey, I didn’t say this was easy!
  4. Analysis paralysis. Cant make a decision because you don’t have all the answers to all the questions you have? Each question opens up another 3 questions? Just stop. Whatever data you have is no where near as good as you’re going to have once your strategy is live.
  5. Competition! Watching the competition, wondering what their next step is, trying to plan to do what they’re doing but better is a sure fire way to delivering nothing. Take the guess work out and just do something. That will be the springboard to enable you to beat the competition.

If you have any other inhibitors, drop me a line and I’ll update the post with your name and entry.

It’s not what you think, but what ‘they’ think!

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I recently stumbled across a great McKinsey report from 2013 that highlighted what top global B2B companies stated as impactful to their brand theme versus what their customer felt contributed to brand strength. Below is an extract of one of the tables in the report.

Brand strength

You’ll notice in the table that there’s an interesting trend in both graphs, namely on the left column (what B2B’s think was important) is almost completely opposite to that on the right (what customers found contributed to brand strength)!

I’m not sure I’m surprised by this, but it is a reminder that the sometimes corporate over-arching direction and/or messages – “…we’re he market leader”, “…we operate globally…” although may satiate the appetite of the CEO’s of the customers, do little to convince the purchasing power in the customers organisations the value of that vendor. However, engaging candidly and with transparency, delivering on time and having domain expertise does significantly contribute to brand engagement and probably (not stated) loyalty!

It’s a reminder that we all have opinions and views that play heavily on the definition and execution of our strategies, but the need to sense check what we think they want is actually what ‘they‘ want.