The B2B Marketer’s Guide to Managing Customer Experience

Consistency, Content, and Connection in the Age of the Customer

3

B2B marketers have come a long way in the last decade.

Over the past ten years, technology has changed how we operate within our organizations. It has empowered buyers and made marketers accountable for serving them at every stage in their journey. It has also produced a myriad of digital channels, and a portfolio of new tools to engage customers across them.

The Pendulum Swings Back Toward Alignment

Consistency in the Customer Journey

Marketers have hustled to adapt to this digital transformation.

But for all our progress, few of us have mastered the transition. Chaos still reigns within marketing organizations, and the repercussions go beyond company walls. This internal chaos results in a disjointed, confusing experience for our customers—and if we don’t address this challenge now, it will only get exponentially more difficult.

As the Economist points out in their report, “The Rise of the Marketer: Driving Engagement, Experience and Revenue”:

Marketers have seen their jobs transformed over the past ten

years. The transformation is happening again—but faster

this time.

If modern marketers are to capitalize on new technologies and

“Marketers have seen their jobs transformed over the past ten years. The transformation is happening again—but faster this time.”4

deliver a positive customer experience, the pendulum must swing away from confusion and silos back toward simplicity and alignment.

CEB foresaw this shift in its 2012 report, “The Digital Evolution in B2B Marketing.”

The report details three stages of digital maturity for B2B marketers. The the first stage is characterized by experimentation, while the second stage is when marketing teams gain greater expertise by leveraging new technologies. In the second stage, “several performance gains are earned, but many new managerial issues emerge.” Specifically, teams silo around these digital tools, yielding misalignment across internal departments and a fractured buyer experience.

CEB’s third stage of evolution is called “multichannel management,” where silos break down to provide a more aligned, integrated impact on the market.

A recent Salesforce report, “The 2015 State of B2B Marketing,” reinforces that the most critical challenge facing marketers

5

86% of senior-level marketers say that it’s absolutely critical or very important to create a cohesive customer journey

today is taming the chaos wreaked by the past decade’s technology:

For the past ten years, digital channels and data points have been accumulating at breakneck speed. Every industry has been disrupted. The customer now rules, and speed is the new currency of business. Marketers have scarcely had a moment to make sense of it all with a single big idea that ties everything together. Enter the customer journey. A growing number of marketers today are envisioning their entire marketing strategy under the umbrella of a cohesive customer journey, which we defined in this survey as ‘all interactions your customers have with your brands, products, and/or services across all touch points and channels.’ According to recent research, 86% of senior-level marketers say that it’s absolutely critical or very important to create a cohesive customer journey.

We’ve come a long way with digital technology, but the next step is to simplify the impact of technology on our buyers and deliver a more consistent customer experience.

And as the owners of digital channels, messaging, and market insights, it’s marketers that must take responsibility for this mission. In fact, it’s already happening.

The Economist reports that over the next three to five years, 75% of marketers say they will be responsible for the end-to-end experience over the customer’s lifetime.

Customer Whiplash

Siloed teams tend to center on different tools and deliver different messages to the buyer. A recent report, “Scale Your B2B Customer Obsession with a Go-to-Customer Strategy” (Forrester Research, Inc., August 31, 2015), has this to say:

6

75% of marketers say they will be responsible for the end-to-end experience over the customer’s lifetime

Organizational silos splinter the buying experience. Only 23% of B2B marketers claim to have a customer-centric—versus a channel- or product-centric—organizational structure. B2B companies create jarring customer experiences when responsibility for engagement with a buyer flips from team to team: from digital marketing to demand generation to inside sales to field sales to service. And it’s getting worse, as marketers in brand, demand gen, and product marketing are moving to engage customers further downstream in the buying process, while sales is trying to engage buyers earlier, often via social channels. With no single function accountable for creating a consistent experience across the life cycle, B2B firms end up delivering a disjointed collage of experiences.

Forrester further examines this dynamic in “Make Your B2B Marketing Thrive in the Age of the Customer” (Forrester Research, Inc., September 11, 2015):

Business transactions silo customer relationships. B2B firms divide customer interactions across functional teams, with marketing leading the promotion effort, sales doing the deals, and customer service handling implementation and support after a sale happens. Hard handoff points create jarring customer experiences as staff tosses buyers from one department to another. The situation worsens as firms grow and begin to specialize, leaving no single function accountable for understanding the buyer’s journey or for creating a consistent experience from awareness to loyalty.

All marketers struggle to provide the consistency their customers need. To understand the impact of today’s disjointed customer journey, let’s look at a fictional security-software firm and its customer experience, which is unsettlingly familiar in its misalignment.7

A Customer Journey Fable: The Inconsistency of Securita

Securita is a fictitious company that provides modern security software-as-a-service (SaaS). It has high-performing teams across sales, services, and various marketing functions. The marketing department developed new prowess across digital channels and tools, adopting many of the best practices around demand generation and content marketing. But disparate technologies and channels have left Securita’s customer journey disjointed.

Here’s how it happened.

To earn the attention of buyers at the top of the funnel, Securita turned to buyer-centric content marketing. Securita’s CMO charged the corporate communications team with producing thought-leadership content. They responded with a set of content assets—eBooks, blog posts, and videos—around the theme of “system security for modern platforms.” This content focused on best practices for security management in the cloud, in big data, and in mobile.

The team delivered authoritative content and avoided talking about Securita’s specific solutions, instead addressing the knowledge needs of their target personas. Web traffic spiked and new leads poured into the database.

The demand generation team at Securita was responsible for moving these leads into purchase-ready opportunities. Demand gen didn’t have the content-production resources of the corporate communications team, so they stuck with a tried-and-true theme: using examples of security threats to develop urgency in the leads.

Relying on nurture campaigns consisting of emails and webinars, the demand gen team delivered powerful case studies on companies that avoided disastrous, career-ending security attacks thanks to Securita software.

However, most of these stories were old, and involved traditional on-premise and data-center security environments. The buyers attracted by top-of-funnel messaging around cloud, big data, and mobile security were now confused by the traditional architectures.

Just what is Securita about? these buyers wondered. Cloud and mobile, or on-premise security?

8

9

Due to this confusion, fewer leads converted to opportunities than demand gen expected, and they missed their forecast.

Some leads were scared enough by these disaster stories to investigate further, becoming sales opportunities. During calls with these leads, the sales team used decks and scripts developed by product marketing.

These sales tools focused on Securita’s data protection, fraud protection, and identity protection services, with third-party white papers showing how Securita scored better than the competition on these features.

At this point, buyers were really confused. They initially became aware of Securita through thought-leadership content on cloud, big data, and mobile security. Next, they heard stories about on-premise security disasters. But the content prepared by Securita’s product marketers and delivered by sales discussed data, fraud, and identity protection services, and didn’t address the other topics at all.

As a result, buyers struggled to understand how Securita would meet their software security needs. Most chose to purchase alternative solutions, and sales struggled to hit their revenue numbers.

A few buyers, convinced by the third-party white papers, purchased Securita. They moved into a post-sale process run by the services team. The services team had recently transformed their process to focus on a “Safety Score,” a metric they created to measure security maturity. In the kickoff call with the customer, the services team explained that all interactions with Securita would center on this Safety Score, and that they’d track progress over time.

Customers were caught off guard. The concept of a Safety Score hadn’t been introduced during prior interactions with Securita. Also, Safety Score focused on broad progress with software security, but most customers needed to address specific data, fraud, or identity protection challenges.

The surprise and misalignment produced by the Safety Score delayed customer implementation, and in SaaS, delaying time-to-value can be lethal for customer engagements. Much of the early interest in Securita waned. Customers struggled to get value, and many failed to renew a year later. Of those who did renew, few upsold and even fewer became the advocates Securita needed to drive further growth.

The Moral of the Securita Fable

In the Securita story, each team did an excellent job creating content for their part of the customer experience: corporate communications produced engaging thought-leadership content; demand gen created urgency-driving nurture content; product marketing delivered authoritative sales and third-party content; services executed a comprehensive post-sale experience around the Safety Score.

All of this content was outstanding—but only on a standalone basis. It was totally misaligned across the customer journey. At each stage, the customer became more confused about Securita, and conversion to each subsequent stage suffered. As a result, opportunity, revenue, upsell, retention, and advocacy metrics all disappointed.

All marketers suffer some form of the Securita fable, responding to technology with siloed teams focused on different tools, sales stages, and content.

The resulting customer experience is disjointed, and it kills business.

The Value of Consistency

As the Securita fable demonstrates, marketers must focus less on standalone content and more on alignment and consistency across the customer experience. While this concept makes sense on an intuitive level, researchers have also proven

Maximizing satisfaction with customer journeys has the potential not only to increase customer satisfaction by 20% but also to lift revenue by up to 15%10

that cross-experience consistency trumps single-experience delight.

McKinsey looked into this issue in “The Three Cs of Customer Satisfaction: Consistency, Consistency, Consistency.” They found that a focus on consistency across the customer journey—as opposed to individual interactions—yields significant customer results:

Measuring satisfaction on customer journeys is 30% more predictive of overall customer satisfaction than measuring happiness for each individual interaction. In addition, maximizing satisfaction with customer journeys has the potential not only to increase customer satisfaction by 20% but

also to lift revenue by up to 15%.

Jake Sorofman, of Gartner, argues for the same focus on consistency in the customer experience in a blog post titled, “In Customer Experience, Consistency Is the New Delight:”

But in the game of customer experience, I’d argue that consistency will always trump delight. Why? Because delight is episodic—it’s once and done. It’s artificial—it’s rendered because someone else is watching. And because delight doesn’t scale—by design, it disobeys basic customer economics. While delight has a purpose in customer experience strategies, it will

never move the needle like consistency.

Sorofman goes on to identify the main barrier to consistency: internal silos.

For many companies, consistency is lost in the gaps between organizations, systems and processes. … Consistency is often compromised when good intentions work at cross purposes; when one organization makes promises that other groups

“While delight has a purpose in customer experience strategies, it will never move the needle like consistency.”

11

can’t or aren’t willing to fulfill. These promises may begin with the right intentions, but they end up making the experience appreciably worse for the customer who’s whipsawed by the dissonance from one interaction to the next. All the choreographed moments of delight can’t overcome that sort of thing. So, before you seek to delight, focus on getting the experience right. It’s your consistency that will delight customers the most.

To achieve consistency, then, marketers must close the gaps between people, programs, technology, and channels.

Content at the Center of Customer Experience

B2B marketing analysts report consistency as the top priority for marketers today. In “Make Your B2B Marketing Thrive in the Age of the Customer” (Forrester Research, Inc., September 11, 2015), analyst Laura Ramos lists four imperatives for marketers, two of which center on content and consistency:

1. Ensure that digital and physical experiences are consistent and reinforcing

2. Invest in relevant content; repurpose it for physical or digital use

You can’t discuss customer experience management without content. Content is the fuel for digital channels and marketing initiatives, and it’s essential to the delivery of your message. If marketers can overcome organizational gaps, deliver consistent content, and use content strategically to engage buyers across the funnel, they’ve already made important gains in the customer experience.

“You can’t discuss customer experience management without content.”

12

But how, in practice, can B2B marketers break down internal silos? How can they align technologies, channels, initiatives, and people to deliver a consistent customer experience and meet their goals?

This guide will provide you with tools to face these challenges today. It will also look forward to the future of customer experience and help you prepare for what’s on the horizon.

“Marketers have seen their jobs transformed over the past ten years. The transformation is happening again—but faster this time.”

13

14

Understanding, Mapping, and Delivering an Effective Customer Experience

Before jumping into how marketers can effectively and efficiently manage the customer experience, let’s start with a definition.

An Experience, Defined

An experience is a set of content assets or touchpoints with a similar purpose: to move a customer persona from a set of questions to a set of conclusions.

As discussed, content is the backbone of customer experience. A content asset can be a blog post, email, or video. It can be a voicemail script for an inside sales rep, or a presentation used by a field rep. Content can be a physical, in-person conference or event. It can be a tutorial or a “getting started” guide.

In this definition of an experience, the term content asset is expansive; it references any touch point and interaction across the customer life cycle. Some assets make up an entire interaction with the customer (e.g., a blog post), while other assets support an interaction delivered by a person (e.g., a call script used by a sales rep). Either way, content guides the interactions between customer and vendor. And it’s marketing’s job to orchestrate these content assets—these touchpoints across the entire customer life cycle— to deliver a winning, high-growth customer experience.

15

“Content is the backbone of customer experience.”

Thinking back to the Securita fable, here’s how Securita might define an experience around cloud security awareness:

Experience: Cloud Security Awareness Persona: CIO

Buyer Questions

How important is cloud security to my overall security profile? What are the best-practice approaches I should take to managing cloud security?

Conclusions Cloud security is critical to my security profile, and only becoming more so. I understand the best practices to managing it, and I need to familiarize myself with how to operationalize those best practices within my organization.

The Securita “cloud security awareness experience” then might have the following set of assets:

Video interview with experts on the state of cloud security

Blog posts on real-life stories of failed cloud security

Infographic on the current state of cloud security

White paper on the most common challenges and approaches to cloud security, based on survey data from CIOs

Case study featuring CIOs who are using Securita to support cloud security in their organizations

Pitch deck focused on how Securita supports the most effective best practices for cloud security

Multiple, Customer-Centric Experiences

In the Age of the Customer, marketers must meet the buyer where they are—particularly early in the customer life cycle, when the customer is focused on asking questions and finding solutions to specific business challenges.

But different experiences resonate with different customers depending on their interests and concerns. A successful approach cannot be one-experience-fits-all. By using a customer-centric model, marketers must provide multiple experiences to engage with the customer on the topics they care about most, and strategize how these experiences will guide customers deeper into the funnel.

16

This goes one step beyond the current model for mapping the customer journey, which is the one-message-per-stage buyer’s journey map.

Evolving the Buyer’s Journey Map

Creating a buyer’s journey map—a commonly used tactic—is a valuable jumping-off point for theorizing customer behavior, but it does not help marketers fully understand the customer experience. In this practice, the marketer defines the stages of the buyer’s journey and the goal of content at each stage. When mapped across buyer personas, the resulting grid looks something like this:

17

Persona 1 Persona 2 Persona 3 Persona 4

Stage 1 Content goal for persona at stage

Content goal for persona at stage

Content goal for persona at stage

Content goal for persona at stage

Stage 2 Content goal for persona at stage

Content goal for persona at stage

Content goal for persona at stage

Content goal for persona at stage

Stage 1 Content goal for persona at stage

Content goal for persona at stage

Content goal for persona at stage

Content goal for persona at stage

Stage 4 Content goal for persona at stage

Content goal for persona at stage

Content goal for persona at stage

Content goal for persona at stage

The intention is to define what content a marketing organization should create, while taking into account the concerns of a given persona at a given stage. If we were to look at the buyer’s journey map and the content for a single persona and buying stage, it may look something like this:

As you can see, the model above presumes that there is one message per stage of the journey. This is precisely where the model must expand.

Today, customers decide their own path in ways that defy one-dimensional mapping tools.

Because buyer’s journey maps don’t provide an actual overview of the customer experience, they’re often created and promptly ignored. As a result, different teams fail to coordinate efforts and create inconsistent content, producing disjointed pathways with poor conversion rates.18

Awareness

Consideration

Decision

Adoption

Advocacy

If marketers are going to successfully deliver consistent customer journeys, they must engage the customer using many different experiences that address specific buyer questions, provide relevant conclusions, and draw the customer down a seamless pathway.

For example, Securita might build the “cloud security experience” discussed earlier, as well as experiences for big data security, mobile security, or—as outlined below—security thought leaders:

Experience: Security Thought Leaders Persona: CIO

Buyer Questions

Who are the thought leaders in modern security that I should follow? Who can help me guide my security strategy?

Conclusions Securita has provided me with a list of security thought leaders. By being the centerpiece of modern security discussion, Securita itself is at the forefront of the modern security landscape. The thought leaders have raised intriguing issues on modern security, and I’d like to investigate how Securita might help me navigate those issues.

Asset list ● Blog series with security experts● Video interviews with thought leaders on the most

important topics in modern security● Webinar with a modern security expert● White paper on the biggest challenges to security, with

insights and quotes from thought leaders● Pitch deck incorporating thought leader quotes and

addressing how Securita supports the need

With multiple experiences for the customer, the question becomes, how can marketers manage all of these experiences, and how do they connect?

19

The Marketing-Driven Customer Experience Map

Using these multiple experiences, a marketing-driven customer experience map (MDCX) emerges that contrasts the one-message-per-stage buyer’s journey map. In this map, the awareness stage would include the various experiences we’ve outlined above (and presumably more):

This pattern of multiple experiences per stage continues as we go through the entire customer life cycle.

This updated model, the marketing-driven customer experience map, accounts for the need to have multiple experiences across the customer life cycle.

A company like Securita, for instance, would have one customer experience map for each of its personas. Using these customer experience maps, marketers would be able to visualize and manage all content assets and also see how they fit into the customer life cycle.

20

Awareness

Cloud Security

Big Data Security

Mobile Security

Modern Security Thought Leaders

Changing Security

Landscape

In the common depiction of the funnel, the width of each stage reflects the number of prospective buyers with the volume decreasing at every progressive stage. However, when going through the exercise of mapping your content to multiple experiences, you don’t need to constrict your strategy to a funnel.

In fact, the customer experience map often takes the shape of an hourglass, reflecting the number of experiences—or sets of content assets and touchpoints with a similar purpose—at each stage.

21

Awareness

Consideration

Decision

Adoption

Advocacy

Why might more experiences be required during the awareness and advocacy of the customer journey?

Early and post-sale stages of the buyer’s journey are the most customer-centric portions of the customer life cycle: vendors must offer more experiences, content, and touchpoints in these customer-centric zones.

To fuel a customer-centric marketing organization, marketers can create many different top-of-the-funnel experiences to correspond to the varied interests and concerns of the buyer at this stage.

As buyers proceed through the buyer’s journey, however, their focus shifts: instead of centering around their initial concerns, they start vetting the product they are considering. As there are fewer product topics than customer-concern topics, the number of experiences thins out as the customer approaches a purchase.

Once the customer does purchase, the number of experiences must expand again.

Experiences start to become more customer-centric again with, for example, case studies of how other customers achieve great business results by using the product. These expereiences inspire greater adoption, advocacy, and even upsell. As we get to advocacy and upsell, the process cycles around again, starting at the beginning.

22

Awareness Customer-centric

Customer-centric

Product-centric

Consideration

Decision

Adoption

Advocacy

The next step to successfully strategizing the customer experience is to connect these experiences together, so the buyer transitions seamlessly from one to the next.

Experience Interlock: The Solution to a Disconnected Customer Journey

If we were to map out existing customer experiences—and the connections between experiences—for most companies today, they would look something like this:

This is what Forrester refers to when discussing how “hard handoff points [between siloed functions] create jarring customer experiences as staff tosses buyers from one department to another.”

This is what happened in the Securita story. The corporate communications team created outstanding top-of-funnel content and experiences around cloud, big data, and mobile, but the demand gen team created an entirely different set of experiences around on-premise security, resulting in a disjointed and ineffective journey.

23

In order to fully fix this disjointed customer experience, another element must be added to the model: interconnections between experiences. This is called experience interlock.

Experience interlock is the connection between the conclusions of one experience and the questions of a subsequent experience.

For example, Securita’s cloud security awareness experience for the CIO included the following set of questions and conclusions:

Experience: Cloud Security Awareness Persona: CIO

Buyer Questions

How important is cloud security to my overall security pro-file? What are the best-practice approaches I should take to managing cloud security?

Conclusions Cloud security is critical to my security profile, and only be-coming more so. I understand the best practices to managing it, and I need to familiarize myself with how to operational-ize those best practices within my organization.

If we look at Securita’s “on-premise security consideration experience,” the disconnect is clear:

Experience: On-Premise Security Consideration Persona: CIO

Buyer Questions

How are CIOs operationalizing on-premise security challeng-es? What are real stories of what they’ve accomplished?

Conclusions CIOs operationalize on-premise security challenges through advanced firewall technology with the flexibility that a mod-ern corporate data center needs. I understand how many CIOs have accomplished this through Securita. I need to review what investment of my budget and team it would take to implement Securita.

24

The attempted handoff from one experience to the next failed: there wasn’t a fluid transition, and each experience focused on completely different topics.

To create better coherence in the customer experience—and thus, better conversions and growth—organizations must establish interlock between experiences by ensuring that the conclusions of one experience align with the questions of the experiences that follow.

Here are two new experiences in Securita’s consideration stage that would provide interlock:

Experience: Cloud Security Consideration Persona: CIO

Buyer Questions

How are CIOs operationalizing cloud security best practices? What are some tools that could help that operationalization?

Conclusions CIOs are solving cloud-security challenges through flexible, cloud-based security systems specifically designed to protect modern cloud environments. Securita is the leading provider of cloud security solutions.

25

Cloud Security

Awareness

On-Premise Security

Consideration

Experience: Modern Security Examples Consideration Persona: CIO

Buyer Questions

How are CIOs operationalizing on-premise security chal-lenges? What are real stories of what they’ve accomplished?

Conclusions CIOs are operationalizing on-premise security challenges through advanced firewall technology that has the flexibility that a modern corporate data center needs. I understand how many CIOs have accomplished this through Securita, and I need to review what investment of my budget and my team it would take to implement Securita.

Putting the “cloud security consideration experience” conclusions right before the “modern security examples experience” questions, you can see the interlock:

Let’s look back to our Securita customer experience map. Where there was a block or gap in the customer experience, there is now a connection.

26

CIO Cloud Security Consideration Experience Questions

How are CIOs operationalizing cloud security best practices? What are some tools that could help that operationalization?

CIO Modern Security Examples Consideration Experience

Questions

How are CIOs operationalizing modern security best practices? What are some examples of CIOs who have successfully overcome the modern security challenge?

CIO Cloud Security Awareness Experience Conclusions

Cloud security is critical to my security profile, and only becoming more so. I understand the best practices to managing it and need to familiarize myself with how to operationalize those best practices within my organization.

When customers encounter a coherent transition from one experience to the next, their understanding—both of the company and the value it provides—strengthens.

This same process of mapping experience interlock applies to all the experience nodes on the customer experience map. This doesn’t happen overnight, but it’s important to build a strong foundation by mapping the customer experience with interlock in mind. Once marketing organizations visualize and manage the customer experience, they can steadily deploy content to improve interlock. Thus, a disjointed customer experience map will develop into a series of connected experiences.

27

GOVERNANCE AND EXPERIENCE INTERLOCK

Delivering experience interlock requires clearly defined roles and consistent, effective messaging across teams. To do this, particularly in large organizations, marketers may need to establish a governance committee, responsible for overseeing the internal communication and evaluation of messages across experiences.

Once the customer journey is defined and the customer experience map created, it’s the job of the committee to provide data-driven proof of topics that resonate with customers or may provide interlock between experiences. Once these experiences are defined and evaluated, the committee must communicate priorities and gaps to each team with a role in the customer experience, so they can begin creating the right content to support the most effective customer experiences.

Cloud Security

Awareness

Cloud Security

Consideration

Modern Security

Examples Consideration

How the Actual Customer Journey Looks

The customer experience map is a tidy visualization of how customers interact with vendors.

It’s very organized, and it might give the impression that the actual path the customer takes through the experience is similarly tidy and linear.

Marketers know this is rarely the case.

In the Age of the Customer, the buyer is in control and has access to multiple experiences. Thus, the actual customer journey usually looks more like this:

28

Defying the step-by-step logic of the theoretical customer experience map, customers often zig and zags across stages and experiences.

When the actual path taken by the buyer is so disorderly, should we be discouraged from using the customer experience map model? Is the model less useful if the customer doesn’t take a sequential, orderly route across its pathways?

No. Even as the customer zigs and zags, they still make progress, albeit in a two-steps-forward, one-step-back cadence. Marketers can’t expect to fully anticipate the interests and reactions of every customer, but if the underlying logic of the customer experience map—and experience interlock—directs the customer forward, then the buyer will steadily get there, even if they take a few unforeseen turns.

“Even as the customer zigs and zags, they still make progress.”

29

3030

From Chaos to Marketing-Driven Customer Experience: The Steps to Effective Customer Experience Management

We’ve seen why disjointed customer experiences curtail revenue growth, and how customer experience maps and experience interlock solve that problem.

Now, let’s put these strategies into practice.

To get your organization from chaos to delivering an effective marketing-driven customer experience, use the following four-phased approach: (1) establish awareness of the problem and plan a solution, (2) gain visibility into the current state of customer experience and content across your organization, (3) align marketing initiatives, technology, people, and channels, and (4) optimize processes and experience interlock to drive impact and business growth.

Phase 1: AwarenessOvercoming chaos in the customer journey involves several stakeholders from across the organization. Without first establishing awareness of the problem through data, metrics, and examples, strategies for establishing marketing-driven customer experiences often fail due to lack of buy-in. Here’s how to take the first step on the path toward optimized customer experience.

Audit Current Content and Experiences

First, research the problem and quantify the impact that a broken customer experience has on your organization by gathering data, metrics, and examples. Use statistics from industry analysts to prove urgency internally. Pull examples of disjointed messaging currently spread across your organization’s marketing channels and present them as examples of confusing customer experience. Prove that old 31

Chaos

Awareness

Visability

Alignment

Optimization

messaging is still influencing customer journeys by pulling metrics like pageviews on blog posts, leads generated from white papers, or the number of active nurture campaigns that are using outdated messaging and disconnected topics.

Next, visualize this problem for internal stakeholders by auditing your content and mapping the current customer experience. Depending on the scope of your organization, a comprehensive audit may be an unrealistic first step. If this is the case, limit your audit to a single persona for a single product line at the pre-sale stage of the customer life cycle.

Start by identifying your content assets. Categorize them by persona, buying stage, and topic, and begin to cluster assets into experiences based on the specific questions they introduce or answer. As you collect content into experiences, document their question-and-conclusion sets.

You may end up with something that looks like this:

Each node, or circle, corresponds to an experience, which includes a set of assets.

32

Awareness

Consideration

Decision

Adoption

Advocacy

Complete the following information for each experience:

Experience Name: Experience’s Targeted Persona:

Buyer Questions

Conclusions

Next, assess the interlock between these experiences. Do the conclusions of a prior experience connect with the questions of a subsequent experience? Most B2B organizations will find gaps, and that’s okay. This will help you understand the scope of the problem and gain the buy-in you need to fix it.

Mark each interlock by connecting the experiences on your map. It should look something like this:

This will emphasize the magnitude of disconnect across the current customer experience and help to show how important it is to resolve the problems. 33

Awareness

Consideration

Decision

Adoption

Advocacy

Create a Plan to Move Forward

Next, create a strategy for addressing the issues you’ve uncovered.

Here’s an example to help you organize your strategy into specific phases that are broken into three related initiatives:

Initiative 1

Summary: Create experiences A, B, and C with initial content

Time range: Mar 15–April 30

For Experience A: 4 assets

For Experience B: 4 assets

For Experience C: 5 assets

Initiative 2

Summary: Strengthen interlock between awareness and consideration experiences

Time range: April 15–May 15

For Experience W: 3 assets

For Experience X: 4 assets

Initiative 3

Summary: Execute pillars at new awareness experiences

Time range: May 15–July 1

For Experience A: 12 assets

For Experience B: 10 assets

For Experience C: 15 assets

34

Remove Ineffective Experiences

As marketers, we often feel the pressure to always be adding more, more, more—particularly when it comes to content. But more content—particularly content that’s off-message and disconnected from other assets and the overall customer experience—can be detrimental, as it only serves to confuse the customer.

In large organizations, that have content sprawled across many sites, microsites, and shared repositories, there is a sense that excessive content needs to be pruned back. But without a big-picture view of the entire customer experience and its corresponding assets, it’s nearly impossible to nail down which content to deactivate.

The customer experience map provides this big picture. As part of your solution strategy, make sure to include timelines for pruning outdated marketing content that no longer supports consistency and growth.

To do this, consider the two ways in which customers encounter content: either they discover it independently on the Internet, or an internal stakeholder finds the content and distributes it to the customer (e.g., a marketer includes an asset in an email campaign or a salesperson shares the asset with a buyer).

For self-encountered web content, discern if it’s inaccurate or 35

not. If it’s inaccurate, it needs to be taken down or updated. If it’s not inaccurate, but is no longer promoting a relevant message, it can remain as long as it isn’t prominently linked to from one of the major points of entry within your web experience. The reason to keep, say, an outdated blog post, is that it might have SEO and referral-link value that you’d rather not lose by removing it completely.

For content distributed by internal stakeholders, you need to have tight control of the content approved for stakeholders to utilize. This is best done by using an internal-facing, centrally managed content repository through which internal stakeholders find relevant content assets. Using such a repository, makes it easy to deactivate assets and experiences that no longer fit into the wider customer experience strategy.

Phase 2: VisibilityOnce the disjointed customer experience is acknowledged, buy-in has been earned, and you have a plan for moving forward, visibility is the next—and perhaps most immediately impactful—phase in aligning internally to deliver an effective customer experience.

As internal teams gain access to current, relevant content, they can use or repurpose it across channels and stages of the journey to create immediate connection and consistency. Also, visibility gives organizations insight into marketing plans and timelines across initiatives, so collaboration and reuse occurs organically.

Give Your Team Access to Existing Content

A key benefit of visibility is that the customer-facing teams that are directly responsible for delivering content at specific stages of the customer journey—for example, social, demand gen, sales, or services—can access current, relevant content. They can then reuse that content to fuel their channels and campaigns, ensuring unified messaging and fluid interlock.

By getting all the marketing content into a single content repository that is filterable by experience, persona, and buying stage, teams can search for—and find—the content they need to support experience interlock, answer a buyer question, or 36

move a customer to the next stage in their journey. With this layer of visibility achieved, internal teams won’t need to create one-off, misaligned assets to serve their immediate needs, which further confuse the customer.

Also, as mentioned in the awareness phase, having content in one place allows marketers to better manage which assets are used by internal teams, so outdated assets can be retired.

Establish Altitudes of Visibility

To successfully execute any marketing plan—particularly one involving many different stakeholders—it’s critical that the high, strategic-level visibility is well connected to the tactical layers involved in execution. Specifically, visibility must seamlessly zoom in and out along a hierarchy of elements.

Your marketing-driven customer experience map is your high-level view of what’s happening across the entire customer experience. It’s made up of multiple experiences, which are sets of assets that have the shared goal of moving customers along in the life cycle. Initiatives are groups of assets produced in a certain body of work in a certain time period. The assets 37

Marketing-driven cutomer experience map

Experience

Initiatives

Assets

Tasks

themselves define each customer interaction across the customer life cycle, whether the interaction is a blog post, sales script, or help article. Last but not least, tasks are the individual assignments that need to be completed by an internal stakeholder by a certain date in order to get an asset produced and distributed (e.g., a task could read: “Jodi to approve email copy by 7/31”).

With the proper altitudes of visibility, managers have the ability to see and understand all the moving pieces that make a consistent customer experience possible. This also helps managers identify possible disconnects before they become a problem and see when crucial elements of execution are in danger of getting off track.

The altitudes of visibility also apply in the reverse. The overall strategic plan from marketing leadership is often lost as it’s funneled down to the front-line contributors. But with proper altitudes of visibility, a contributor can zoom out from their individual task to the wider asset, campaign, experience, and

customer experience map to see exactly how their part fits into the bigger picture.

Phase 3: AlignmentDuring this stage, the goal is to eliminate misaligned efforts, both internally and externally. Internally, different teams work within disparate tools and processes and struggle to communicate plans, share insights, and collaborate effectively. Without established processes, handoffs between teams are painful and sloppy, and important items fall through the cracks and cause frustration. Each team is creating and sharing inconsistent content through different channels and stages of the funnel, and this lack of alignment creates a jarring and

EXPERIENCE VS. INITIATIVE: WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE?

While both experiences and initiatives refer to sets of content assets, experiences are defined by the external impact on the customer, while initiatives support internal organization and execution.

Given the sheer amount of content assets demanded by today’s customers, it’s important to group assets into (theoretical) containers to plan, manage, and track the work done by B2B marketers more effectively.

In the customer experience management model, experiences refer to the external or customer-facing container, defined by its mission to the customer. Initiatives, however, refer to the internal container, defined by a body of work executed in a certain period of time.

For example, you might plan a product launch initiative, which will introduce a new product to the market. This initiative utilizes assets associated with various stages of the customer life cycle and specific personas. You create top-of-funnel videos addressing high-level questions about a topic, and bottom-of-the-funnel assets describing how this product drives growth in a specific industry. While these assets are part of a single product launch initiative, they answer different questions for different buyers at different stages of their journey, and thus fall into many different experiences.

38

disjointed customer experience.

Here’s how to establish alignment across people, initiatives, technology, and channels.

Break Down Silos between Teams

At this point, you’ve already mapped the customer experience and defined the interlock between these experiences. By creating connections between experiences, marketers cut to the root of the customer experience problem: disconnects between marketing silos.

In large, fast-moving organizations, facilitating coordination and integration between disparate teams is difficult, but necessary. Adopting an experience interlock approach supports this mission.

By its very structure, experience interlock forces marketing organizations to identify disconnects and clarify the role of each functional group.

As marketers chart the pathway through the customer experience map and plan each interlock, functional teams can still operate individually to execute the plan, but they do so as part of a connected customer experience.

39

Awareness Corp Com executes Experience A

Demand Gen executes Experience B

Product Marketing executes Experience C

Customer Marketing executes Experience D

Consideration

Decision

Adoption

Experience

A

Experience

B

Experience

C

Experience

D

If interlock is clearly designed across experiences...

… then functional teams can execute content creation separately, but still

achieve customer experience coherence.

Working under the strategy for experience interlock also removes the need for spontaneous, asset-by-asset coordination. Instead, disparate teams comply with the broad design illustrated by the customer experience map and experience interlock, and continue to work in their separate teams to create the assets.

This is true in executing particular experiences, and it’s also true for initiatives. As covered earlier, experiences are defined by the external impact on the customer, while initiatives support internal organization and execution. Initiatives focus on specific goals and are executed in a particular timeframe: for example, a product launch. By aligning teams internally around initiatives, it also makes coordination of efforts—and the efficient reuse of content across teams and channels—organic.

Align Marketing Technology and Channels

As discussed at the start of this guide, technology and channels have fractured the customer experience. When different teams use different tools to execute their piece of the marketing strategy, they lose visibility and the ability to collaborate efficiently. This is a huge problem when it comes to delivering an effective customer experience, as it supports a siloed and disconnected approach to execution instead of a cohesive strategy.

The importance of aligning the tools needed to execute your strategy cannot be overstated. Not only does it help coordinate efforts across teams for more efficient execution, but integrating all the pieces of your marketing technology stack ensures alignment in data and reporting. Without this step, optimization (the fourth phase in delivering an effective customer experience) is a much more challenging step to achieve.

Another outcome of integration is consistency across your marketing channels. When everyone is working with the same tools, visibility is further supported and different teams can deliver interlocked marketing experiences and cohesive content through every marketing channel, from social to marketing automation to sales channels to customer success teams.

THE CONTENT PILLAR APPROACH

One of the most efficient ways to repurpose content by using a “content pillar,” or the strategy of filling all channels by breaking down a major asset into multiple derivative assets. Hundreds of marketing organizations have implemented this strategy, yielding dramatically more efficient marketing content efforts.

40

Phase 4: OptimizationOnce alignment is achieved, organizations move into the optimization stage. Instead of driving marketing initiatives based on instinct or opinion, marketers focus on creating a data-driven customer experience. With a systematic operation in place, internal processes can continuously improve and scale for global collaboration and alignment. Furthermore, with tools aligned, data on every stage of the customer lifecycle (full-funnel metrics) can be pulled from across teams and technologies, allowing for constant improvements to the customer experience.

Measuring Engagements across Experiences

Once experiences have been mapped and content has been aligned across the customer journey, the first step to optimization is to review engagement, reach, and conversion metrics. Do this for every experience in your customer experience map. This won’t give you insight into interlock yet (we’ll get to that later), but it will help you understand which experiences currently reach your customers and drive performance.

41

Reach is a difficult metric to define because it is calculated differently (impressions, engagement, etc.) from channel to channel and system to system. But what’s important to calculate is how content creates an engagement (e.g., a click, view, share, download, or email open) across the channels and tools used to reach buyers. Look at reach for each experience, then slice and dice the data by channel, responsible team, and specific content assets.

To help you visualize the impact of these engagements, consider the customer experience map below, in which the size of the circle represents the number of engagements that the assets of a specific experience generate over a time period—say the last 12 months. The bigger the circle, the more touches a specific experience generated.

Such a map provides a visualization of engagement per experience and stage:

42

Awareness

Consideration

Decision

Adoption

Advocacy

Normally, we’d expect the touch count at the top of the funnel to be greater than toward the bottom, since companies typically have more leads than new customers. But in this example, the model shows that touch counts for top-of-funnel experiences are comparatively low.

This reveals that experiences at the awareness stage need an overhaul, as they aren’t resulting in touches. Perhaps the content in these current experiences consists of archaic, product-centric pieces like press releases or product announcements instead of compelling, customer-centric assets.

Furthermore, these new experiences can be designed so the conclusions at the awareness stage connect to the questions at the consideration stage. This experience interlock will improve the awareness-to-consideration conversion.

Addressing the gaps shown in the map—poor-performing awareness experiences and poor awareness-to-consideration interlock—should be the top priority for marketers to optimize the experience moving forward.

Measuring Content Score across Experiences

Once you have a sense of which experiences drive engagements, review the actual impact on business growth. Use conversion metrics to understand how impactful your current experiences are at driving conversions from one stage of the funnel to the next. This is critical to understanding interlock, and strategizing the paths you create from one experience to the next.

To understand these conversions, track the content score by experience. The content score is essentially an attribution model for the leads, opportunities, and revenue at each stage of the pipeline. For instance, if your pipeline is made up four stages (marketing-qualified leads, sales-accepted leads, closed deals, and upsell), track the experiences that have generated the most conversions for each of these stages. This allows you to optimize future content based on what converts within your pipeline, not just above the pipeline. As with engagement metrics, this data should also be evaluated by channel, team, 43

stage, and content asset to provide the complete picture.

One way to think about this is by using the visualization below, where the size of the experience node represents the content score:

In this example, of the new experiences at the awareness stage, B and C perform extremely well, while A is a dud. With these insights, customer experience strategy can be shaped by the knowledge that the topics in B and C attract prospective customers and lead them into the funnel, while the topics in A do not.

44

Awareness

Consideration

Decision

Adoption

Advocacy

B

6

W

3

C

7

X

4

1

D

8

Y

5

2

E

9

A

Now consider another customer experience map visualization. In this diagram, the weight of the interlock between experiences indicates the frequency with which prospects travel that specific path from experience to experience:

Of the two highest-performing experiences, B shows good transitions—and thus, good interlock—with W. C shows good interlock with X.

The interlock planned between C and W is not manifesting, indicating that the conclusions of C don’t connect with the questions of W. This is a problem, because X is also not transitioning well to the decision stage. We therefore have a potential dead end at experience X. With this information, marketers can continue to optimize the customer experience.

45

Awareness

Consideration

Decision

Adoption

Advocacy

BA

6

W

3

C

7

X

4

1

D

8

Y

5

2

E

9

Looking Ahead: Growing Expectations for Marketers Getting to this level of optimization takes time, and it is impossible without first building a strong foundation for visibility and alignment. But measuring the success of the customer experience is critical for B2B marketers today, and as marketing takes ownership of the full customer journey, those expectations will only get larger.

B2B marketing leaders are increasingly responsible for managing all phases—planning, creation, distribution, and analysis—of their customer experience, and must prepare for shifts in the way success is tracked. Analysts identify these areas of customer experience management as the greatest challenge facing marketing leaders going forward. In “Predictions 2016: B2B Marketing’s New Mission” (Forrester Research, Inc., November 13, 2015), Forrester analysts assert:

With no single function accountable for creating a consistent flow of interactions across the buyer’s lifetime, B2B firms that deliver a patchwork quilt of experiences will lose out to more customer-obsessed competitors. 2016 is the year when B2B marketing will adopt an omnichannel orientation. …

B2B marketing leaders need to lead this transformation 46

from the role of top-notch supplier of leads and collateral for the load-bearing sales channel to the architect of full customer engagement. Marketing success measurement will change to metrics like retention/renewal rates (now mostly a performance metric for the sales function), customer deal close time, customer lifetime value, and even customer experience.

Marketing leaders’ success will be measured by their stewardship of the customer experience, and their ability to design “full customer engagement” across all channels and the full life cycle.

This guide has examined the steps that B2B marketers must take now to deliver effective customer experiences across technologies, channels, people, and initiatives.

47

Get Started, Now. B2B marketers have come a long way in the past decade, but there’s still a long way to go.

“The gap between what marketers used to do and what they need to do has never been

greater.” –The Economist

To be successful and achieve business growth, B2B marketers must tame the chaos inside the marketing organization and across the customer experience—and the first step can happen today.

Will you take it?

Check out more resources on marketing-driven customer experience and get your organization on the path to delivering impactful customer journeys today.

Learn More

48

Kapost powers B2B marketers to deliver a compelling, consistent customer experience by aligning content, people, and programs from first touch through sale to advocacy