Whitepaper 7 Steps to Digital Marketing Success

Original published January 2014, Updated August 2015

For Further Information please contact: Cathryn Fox, Managing Director

[email protected]

Karen Harding, Marketing Manager

[email protected]

Contents Introduction................................................................................................................................................................ 2 Step 1: Introduce a Multi-Device Strategy – Mobile, Tablet and PC .................................................... 3 Step 2: Attract and Communicate - Social Media Integration ................................................................ 5 Step 3: Understand & connect - track customer behaviour .................................................................... 7 Step 4A: Cultivate an online relationship ........................................................................................................ 8 Step 4B: Cultivation - what button colour makes you click? ................................................................ 10 Step 5: Nurture relationships by mapping your Customer Journey .................................................. 11 Step 6: Build Rapport - bridge online and offline communications .................................................. 13 Step 7: Turn your best customers into lifetime advocates .................................................................... 14 On-Line References: ............................................................................................................................................. 15

Telephone: +44 (0)1245 330360 Email: [email protected] Web: www.objectiveit.com

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Introduction Why? Technology is the enabler of digital marketing success. And, it’s becoming the norm in many companies for marketing managers and marketing directors to drive technology decisions. 7 Steps to Digital Marketing Success is a guide geared to help marketing people reach the right digital decisions in the right order for their business situation.

How? Through each ‘Step’ and ‘Phase’ we compare the customer experience with the commercial experience. We offer Tech Tips, digital stats from the likes of the Internet Advertising Bureau, along with ‘It makes sense ...suggestions’ to provoke thought and ideas plus consumer stories, which help visualise the customer journey.

7 Steps to Digital Marketing Success

Here is the complete works…

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Step 1: Introduce a Multi-Device Strategy – Mobile, Tablet and PC We all know that today’s consumers tend to use more than one digital device to plan, research and make purchases. Consumers want to access relevant, useful information on whichever device they choose. So your digital marketing strategy needs to support a cross-device customer journey. According to the Internet Advertising Bureau: 

About 80% of adults in the UK have a smartphone

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About 40% of adults in the UK have a tablet, these are often shared devices

Which means more than half of the UK population will be regularly using tablet computers in 2015, up from a third in 2013. But the growth is set to slow “dramatically” in the coming years according to research firm eMarketer. The drop can be explained by several factors. One is that the lifetime of tablets is being extended - they are shared out amongst family members and software upgrades, especially for iOS devices, keep the tablets current. That said, tablet usage is driving mobile bookings and purchases so it makes sense to have tablet apps as well as mobile apps and a website. Introduce relevant content in channels favoured by your customer Treat the three channels, Smartphone, PC /Laptop and Tablet in a separate but brand consistent way to reach your potential customers with relevant content and device-savvy software. Make sure your website is mobile-friendly. Your website should be responsive, which means it adapts to smaller screen with easy access to the most important functions such as inspirations, prices and a simplified shopping basket. In meeting your business and digital objectives, consider how the customer journey may span desk and mobile devices to give your customer an engaging and harmonious user experience.

Our story section is based on the travel sector. It illustrates each step with a real life scenarios, which could easily apply to any consumer buying experience.

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Page 4 STORY Our affluent consumer ‘Kate’ commutes to an office in the day and relaxes at home in the evening. Her working life revolves around her PC. During her journey and lunchtime Kate searches for holiday inspiration on her mobile smartphone – where she creates a short list of options. In the evening, Kate shares her thoughts with her family to try to draw consensus using tablets or laptops. The family may be simultaneously researching online and discussing holiday details. On Kate’s smartphone she’s looking for inspiration, clues, ratings, and maybe some pictures or ideas. At home she’s looking for quick and easy search software targeting detail covering all her questions (and so are her key influencers – her children). Within a week or so, at home, maybe after a glass of wine, Kate books the chosen holiday. Once a decision is made she just wants an easy to use booking system to complete her enquiry. BENEFITS Through multiple devices, relationships are introduced and nurtured, leading to an increase in engagement. A positive user experience should encourage recommendations to aid reputation management. 

Greater reach through mobile-enabled websites and responsive design

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Brand awareness - cohesive voice across all software platforms and devices

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Building customer satisfaction - less fragmented customer journey

Telephone: +44 (0)1245 330360 Email: [email protected] Web: www.objectiveit.com

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Step 2: Attract and Communicate - Social Media Integration Social integration helps develop a circle of trust between you and your customers. It tends to take place during two main stages: 

The planning stage, for research and checking recommendations and reviews

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Post-purchase stage for people sharing their own experiences

Many consumers enjoy sharing their good (and bad) buying and customer service experiences, and they rely on other people’s honest reviews to affect their judgement and choices. It makes sense to ensure your website and mobile apps support social media integration. And it’s worth having a strategy in place to respond quickly to counteract any negative posts. Attracting consumers in real-time on social media has huge implications cross-industry. With good database software behind the scenes, data is segmented, diced and sliced allowing extra products and upsells to be presented as soon as customers indicate an interest or need. The best ways to attract and communicate with customers include: 

Integrate social media content with your website and mobile apps

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Share points of interest across social media and your website

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Click Like, Favourite and Re-tweet, Add Comments

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Respond to website feedback

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Add relevant content and

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Use smart hashtags

STORY ‘Kate’ our affluent travel consumer has created a short list of travel options by researching on multiple devices: smartphone, PC and tablet. Before booking, she turns to Facebook to connect with friends, look at their trips, holiday photos, and any reviews to confirm her choices. Her husband ‘Mark’, an avid social media fan, decides to do his own twitter research using relevant hashtags he also views videos on YouTube. On comparing social feedback and online reviews the original holiday destination is discarded (too many jellyfish!) and a new destination is chosen along with a hotel upgrade deal and an extra booking for an organised trip during the holiday.

Telephone: +44 (0)1245 330360 Email: [email protected] Web: www.objectiveit.com

Page 6 BENEFITS 

Social Commerce, Social sharing and Checking In bring traffic to your website

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Social Media provides a way to monitor your company name across different software platforms, and the marketing of your reputation

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Mobile-enabled websites, mobile apps and tablet apps allow you to keep the conversation going wherever your customers are.

It’s useful to pay attention not just how social media attracts and influences consumer choices, but also the impact it has on search and resulting choices – in terms of social search rather than just PPC or organic SEO.

Telephone: +44 (0)1245 330360 Email: [email protected] Web: www.objectiveit.com

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Step 3: Understand & connect - track customer behaviour The more you know about the interests and behaviours of your customers and prospects, the better website experience you can provide them each time they visit and connect across your digital channels. Understanding what your customers are doing, where they’ve been, and what they’ve searched on ie: keywords and geo-location will help you recognise patterns and personalise your content dynamically. It makes sense to use web analytics and marketing intelligence reporting to gain data insights, which will help you to understand and connect more effectively when customers and leads return. Encourage your online customers to do something! When customers get to your site - drive them to relevant call to actions - get them to connect with you …watch a 30 second video, answer a 3 question survey or request a brochure. Use your software to track this interaction by applying a lead scoring mechanism. Establish web analytics to focus on customer outcomes and set up website lead scores, which award points according to customers’ online actions. And help the marketing team to understand customer interests. Start looking at multi-channel funnels to see how your marketing channels work together to create sales and conversions. STORY

Affluent travel consumer ‘Kate’ has created a short list of travel options by researching on multiple devices: smartphone, PC and tablet, her choices have also been influenced by connecting with friends on social media to choose a family holiday. She also wants to book her husband a surprise weekend away. Visiting a recommended luxury travel website for the first time Kate selects the

most popular destinations page, looks at tailor-made holidays and suggested itineraries before watching a short video. Liking what she sees she downloads an e-brochure, shares this on twitter and is invited to sign up for a newsletter. Using web analytics and lead scoring the brand can track customer behaviour and effectiveness of digital campaigns for better understanding of their customers. BENEFITS 

Visibility into customer preferences and buying patterns

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Data Insight about drivers of customer behaviour

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Measure, evaluate and improve online marketing effectiveness

Telephone: +44 (0)1245 330360 Email: [email protected] Web: www.objectiveit.com

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Step 4A: Cultivate an online relationship Personalisation is about delivering the right website content to the right people at the right time. Getting it right requires leveraging company data using a robust database to segment the data. And armed with that customer information you have the ability to create personas. A persona represents a cluster of people who exhibit similar behavioural patterns in their purchasing decisions, use of technology or devices, customer service preferences, lifestyle choices, etc. Behaviours, attitudes, and motivations are common to a "type" which is often regardless of age, gender, education, and other typical demographics. Simply put, personalisation is effective marketing of products and services to a select group of people exhibiting a particular behaviour. Essentially, it aims to target the marketing message to a segment which has the highest likelihood of acting on that message. Cultivating an onsite relationship - entice your customers with vivid personalised content Once a new visitor lands on your website, what do you do? Do you treat all your visitors alike? Or, do you target content and promotions on your website depending on the type of visitor? It makes sense to apply personas and lead scoring. These identify which group the visitor’s actions match and measures the strength of purchase intention, through a scoring mechanism. Once a persona is established it also allows you to offer recommendations, such as ‘people that purchased this product also viewed these items’ a la Amazon. Development platforms such as Sitefinity’s Digital Experience Cloud provide the software tools to create personas and respond to visitor behaviour. Which means next time Kate returns the website appears to speak directly to her by way of more relevant content. STORY Depending on what kind of behaviour Kate our affluent travel consumer displays on your travel website, she would fall into one of your defined customer personas/profiles. Such as: “Information Gatherer”, “Frequent Visitor”, “Loyal Customer”, “Big Spender”, etc. Now you can treat each of the personas in a more individual way to maximise your business objectives. For example, you would want to convert Kate from “Information Gatherer” into “Loyal Telephone: +44 (0)1245 330360 Email: [email protected] Web: www.objectiveit.com

Page 9 Customer” by offering discounts on products she is interested in; in this case a Cocktail Master class is recommended.

Kate is delighted. This is a fun experience she wants to share with her friends and books immediately. As she is further cultivated to become a “Big Spender” there are opportunities to up-sell and cross-sell products at the time she makes a purchase.

BENEFITS 

Database software delivers improved customer intelligence ensuring quicker response to trends

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Cultivate onsite relationships to develop customer loyalty

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More opportunities to up-sell and cross-sell

Telephone: +44 (0)1245 330360 Email: [email protected] Web: www.objectiveit.com

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Step 4B: Cultivation - what button colour makes you click? Getting visitors to click on your website could be considered a science or an art. A/B testing makes it a science.

We’ve found a lot of savvy marketers and web designers are using A/B testing right now to gain data insight into visitor behaviour and to increase click through rates. And yet, A/B testing is still not as well-used as SEO, Web analytics and usability. What Is A/B Testing? A/B testing or sometimes called split testing is exactly what it sounds like: you have two versions of an element (A and B) and a metric that defines success. To determine which version is better, you subject both versions to test simultaneously. Simple online tests on visitor behaviour can identify how to significantly improve your website’s click through rate. And, if that click is for enquiries, bookings or purchase you can expect a direct impact on the bottom line. STORY Disneyland Paris achieved an 8% increase in flight searches after A/B testing six permutations of an enquiry button – the result showed that the smaller orange button to book tickets worked best for them and their ROI was huge! A/B and multivariate testing enables companies to test multiple messages and/or creative directions across a broader audience. A/B can be a precursor to behavioural targeting - providing a foundation of knowledge to help build ‘customer personas or profiles’. It can be used to test content for companies already running a behavioural program.

Telephone: +44 (0)1245 330360 Email: [email protected] Web: www.objectiveit.com

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Step 5: Nurture relationships by mapping your Customer Journey Do you have a customer journey map? It’s a very simple idea: a diagram that illustrates the steps your customers go through in engaging with your brand, whether it’s an online experience, a booking experience, a service delivery or any combination. Customers take paths through your website content while they are in decision-making mode. It’s important to understand each phase of this journey, to evaluate if you have the right web content to meet each step and encourage a favourable decision. Most customer journeys look like this:

Importantly the customer journey map should highlight what is required to meet a visitor's needs, or to shorten or reinforce their journey. Nurture and Cross-sell Opportunities Few marketing funnels move the website visitor on a straight path from entry through to commitment. Tailored software can support longer term involvement with repeating cycles of nurture/test/reward. These nurture/test/reward cycles are built so that the visitor is nurtured to a point where the marketer can give them a test of commitment, for example, a discount code in exchange for a completed personal profile. It makes sense to map your customer touch points and set lead scores. Using high performance web platforms such as Sitefinity or by working with data insights consultants.

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Page 12 STORY Kate has been defined as a ‘Frequent Visitor’ to your travel website. To move Kate to a ‘loyal customer’ the relationship is nurtured by offering incentives to learn more about her holiday choices and preferences. If she completes the profile questions Kate will get her reward of a discount code to apply against a future travel booking. If she chooses not to divulge the requested information she will fall back into the previous nurture path.

BENEFITS 

Web software developed with the customer journey in mind delivers better customer and marketing intelligence enabling successful interaction

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Nurtures onsite relationships to develop customer loyalty and customer satisfaction

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Greater opportunities to up-sell and cross-sell

Telephone: +44 (0)1245 330360 Email: [email protected] Web: www.objectiveit.com

Page 13

Step 6: Build Rapport - bridge online and offline communications As a result of following the earlier steps to digital marketing success, your company will be doing lots of great online marketing… √

You have a mobile-friendly website – consistent on mobile, tablet and PC

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You are using Social Media platforms – which are integrated with your website

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Customer behaviour is being tracked

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Your website personalises content using personas and lead scoring

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A/B and multivariate testing is in use

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Your customer‘s journey through the website is being mapped

What about offline communications? To continue building a good customer rapport it makes sense to integrate and bridge the online and offline worlds, by establishing a single view of the customer in a central data hub / database. You can use an off-the-shelf database software or commission a bespoke software house to build a tailored database that suits your company’s exact requirements. Combine online and offline marketing automation, for example an adaptive print of a personalised brochure can be developed based on the customer’s online browsing behaviour. Adaptive print helps build further customer rapport and encourage repeat sales. STORY Kate has been spending a lot of time on your travel website she has made a luxury holiday booking and has responded well to incentives. Now she is browsing weekend city breaks focusing particularly on Rome. The next day Kate receives an email from the same travel company with a personalised booklet about Rome, boutique hotels, places to visit and special tours. Kate is delighted. She prints the booklet and pops it in her bag to flick through over lunch with her girlfriends. Having a personalised travel brochure makes Kate feel valued; she can share her holiday ideas meaning she is much more likely to buy. BENEFITS 

Central database offers one shared view of the customer

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Nurtures online and offline relationships to develop customer retention

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Greater opportunities to up-sell and cross-sell

Telephone: +44 (0)1245 330360 Email: [email protected] Web: www.objectiveit.com

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Step 7: Turn your best customers into lifetime advocates Is your company leveraging the influence of your most passionate customers? You know it’s important to effectively manage and respond to negative customer feedback. On the flip side don’t forget your most loyal, satisfied customers who may be willing to share positive experiences. Loyal customers will offer tremendous marketing value by being brand ambassadors. In the final step of: 7 steps to Digital Marketing Success we’ll share some tips on how to unlock the potential of your lifetime advocates to sell forever. Firstly identify who your loyal and influential customers are. These customers can be segmented using a bespoke database or CRM. This allows you to tap into repeat buyers, loyalty card holders or most active Facebook fans. You may have plenty of loyal customers who love your brand but that doesn’t necessarily mean they will offer recommendations. Direct them with specific actions, such as asking them to share their experiences on social media and integrating the feed on your website. Keep an engaging conversation going on the social media platforms that your customers use such as Twitter and Facebook.

Make them feel special. Deliver personalised email alerts of latest offers, automate content and select digital channels based on customer preferences. Use cross-channels to boost marketing initiatives. It makes sense to use technology to optimise customer experiences. Tailor-made software, customer databases, web applications and bespoke mobile apps will help maintain the consistency of service throughout; and turn your best customers into lifetime advocates. Good luck! BENEFITS   

A central database offers a single shared view of the customer Web solutions and mobile apps help nurture relationships to develop customer retention Tailored software provides greater opportunities to up-sell and cross-sell

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On-Line References: http://www.cim.co.uk http://econsultancy.com/uk http://www.gartner.com https://www.iabuk.net/ http://www.itt.co.uk http://www.genesys.net http://www.linkedin.com http://www.objectiveit.com/data-insights http://www.objectiveit.com/web-development http://www.objectiveit.com/web-development/digital-marketing http://www.phocuswright.com http://www.travelweekly.co.uk http://twitter.com http://www.sitefinity.com http://www.wingify.com http://www.wtmlondon.com/ http://youtube.com

Telephone: +44 (0)1245 330360 Email: [email protected] Web: www.objectiveit.com