What is the best KPI to measure your customer relationship? Of course, you hear about NPS, sales and many more sophisticated ways to take the pulse, but at the end of the day, you are seeking to drive behaviour change.
Now, the problem we are dealing with is having CRMs, CLM (Close-Loop-Marketing), and many more tools with a lot of data categorised and with reasonably low usage adoption from Marketers.
Why not? Well, the missing link is that it is still difficult to link up a brand message within a brand touchpoint with a customer’s behaviour. Then, of course, you have the sales reps qualifying a visit, sliding up and down, left and right on his tablet, but with the increasing amount of non-personal promotional channels, the loop of insights is less easy to read.
Introducing Brands Learning Moments
Let’s start with a concept called a brand learning moment. Let’s define together that any experience with your brand is an opportunity to shift from unaware to aware, from aware to user, and from user to heavy user.
This is a classical A-B-C shifting model, but here we associate the notion of driving the experience through personalised brand content from the get-go. Each brand learning moment is designed to help you shift from one letter to the other. The number of touchpoints and content consumption to move correctly is also defined by marketers. For example, a diabetes drug requires three modules to go from unaware to aware. 50% of the attention span within these three modules is necessary to correctly understand the USPs before trying the product. One module is necessarily pushed 80% of the time through Sales Reps. 20% could be done by emailing and a product website. Module 2 and Module 3 could be made entirely by non-personal promotional channels if Module 1 is fully completed.
Personalise a value-based story by observing the customer’s context
Needless to say that on each page of these modules, you have two branches coming up: you can raise interest and are required to dive in a specific question or an objection. Therefore, mapping your strategic product’s story would anticipate these two scenarios at each Brand Learning Moment and their respective content touchpoints/channels.
Why? This seems so complex on paper. Why to bother, you might ask. This is an excellent way to sync channels so that a story can start on one track and end on another. It is like you would like to buy a car, and your experience with that car starts on a youtube channel. On a 30s advertisement capturing your attention, you are followed by a website visit, a configurator, an email and an appointment with the closest dealer. Of course, the channels sync and content triggers would be different in pharma, but you could apply the same principle.
But the list of requirements doesn’t stop at building a piece of the story in a 3d tree with many branches: you’ll need to have a proper engine that drives the right content to the right user into the right channel at the right time. This is where your CRM comes into play. Based on personae that would identify customer segments on the fly, each brand touchpoint is closer to understanding who is in front of you.
Start small, Scale fast, and Fail often.
A simple website banner would help you trigger this qualification engine. After one or two cycles of running this multichannel content story, you can explore new phenomena, such as demographic-based responses or non-responders. For instance, are some doctors more receptive to video content than others? Are nurses more interested in patient testimonials than long abstract studies?
Where to start? Most of you are still in the scheme below: a.k.a, you are copying and pasting an experience or a story from one channel to another, all plugged into a CRM. This is why most of you retrieve poor insights as you keep getting a blur vision of who your customer is. Mainly because within your channel, you keep pushing instead of pulling them in, your content is not ready to help you identify, confirm and use your customer segments.
Instead, you should plan this vision: having a CRM/datamart holding the fort of your customer interactions data points, while your CLM (Close-Loop-Marketing) engine is the one understanding the response rate or “preferred channels” for that customer, at that time for that learning moment. Then, because you would have prepared your story in advance, your marketing eco-system can switch and adapt to provide a truly personalised experience.
Kill the dead data
This forces you from the start to be customer-centric and to provide value for each step of the customer journey. You would also better understand the conversion points of your marketing elements, whether at the channel level or content level. You would also clean your database better: I recommend a two weeks window for minimum custotouchpointsints to qualify and excite the data points and a maximum of 6 months before declaring a data dead (could be sooner if B2C). This is also better for running data privacy by design.
What you can’t measure can’t be optimised.
As shown in the table above, the KPIs collected around the CRM, and the CLM would help you get closer to that “view” that many of us dream of having in our KYC discovery processes (know your customer).
Conclusion: no simple answer to the complexity of multichannel marketing
- While it is tempting to duplicate and recycle content from one channel to another, please DON’T!
- Plan from the start as if you were planning to build a role-playing game, and your character (your brand) has many ending possible at each quest.
- Start small, Scale fast, and fail often. It would always be easier to start with a two-pager detailer updated each week with follow-up directly by emails, collecting sales reps’ feedback, then waiting three months to get 20 pages approved on a compliance system. This new approach is designed to create a new framework for channel agility.
- Don’t forget your KPIs and what links your channels together.
Most of the time, marketing is about creating the right conditions for behaviour change, so you might want to start with this as a driver and then build a compelling story that conveys the benefits and value of your product.
