AZZARDCONSULTING

Content &

Omnichannel Reality

Content Strategy Applied USA 2014 November 17, 2014

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Some Introductions

Rebecca Schneider

o President, Azzard Consulting• Content Strategy Services & Staffing Firm

o 19 Years experience in Information Management

o Industries: Retail, Auto Manufacturing, Financial Services,

Telecommunications, Luxury Goods

o Twitter: #azzardconsult

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My Topics for Today . . .

Content Strategy Approach & Omnio 10,000 Foot Overview

o Content Prioritization

Content Productiono Value Proposition for Content

o Cross-Team Planning

o Internal & External (buy vs. build)

o Content Production Systems

o Taxonomy & Tagging

Social & SEO

Strategies for Successo Metrics

o Keep in mind . . .

Content Strategy

Approach & Omni

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CS Approach - Overview

Where do you start?

o Define overall marketing strategy (largely channel independent)• Describe your customer

• Define your business goals

• Create personas (or similar mechanism)

• Describe the customer journey and what channels will resonate

o Planning• What are your content priorities? Channel priorities?

• Who needs to be involved?

• Externally (e.g. agencies, content creators)

• Internally (e.g. business units, IT)

• Who needs to buy in? What are the political ramifications?

• What else is going on? (IT initiatives, budget cycles, marketing campaigns)

• Is this effort dove-tailing with a website redesign or CMS implementation?

• What is a realistic high-level timeline for rollout (staggered is best)?

• How will you measure results (positive or negative)

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Content Priorities

How do you prioritize?

To give everything a high priority is to give it no priority at all.

o Remember the Customer• Who they are

• How they shop

• How they consume information

o Single View of Customer• Customer purchase data

• Customer-entered profile

• 3rd party data (e.g. household information)

o Different approaches may be necessary for different types of

customers• Affects planning and prioritization

• May require different kinds of resources

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Content Priorities (cont.)

o Prioritize Your Channels• What channels do your customers use?

• Some channels may be tightly bound (e.g. store and desktop web –

pickup )

o Small Successes• Small successes can yield broad returns

• The Big Bang approach can be difficult

• Focus on the key Channels and bring additional channels later.

• Even reducing the number of times a call center has to ask for

identification number (or other) would be a bonus

• Integration with systems and collaboration with IT will be important

• What sounds great in theory, may not work in real life

o Define Metrics and Benchmarks• Data can assist in future planning

Content Production

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Value Proposition for Content

Why should the customer engage?

Customero Who needs to know it and for what purpose?

o What do they value the most?

Contexto What is the customer context?

• What is the primary entry into the omni-channel experience?

• What content needs to exists in all channels?

o What is the company or organization offering?• Why would a customer purchase or consume goods/services?

o How can customer find, understand and navigate these offerings

throughout the customer journey?

Assessmento Are there alternatives elsewhere?

o What evidence is available to validate the value proposition?

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Cross-Team Planning

How will you create/manage content on a day-to-day basis?

o How will content and content production be managed and

governed?• Roles and responsibilities

• Charting content across channels; Content triggers

o Who will be involved?• Content creators

• Stakeholders (business units, IT, etc.)

o Will you engage external content providers?

o What is your content production calendar (beyond campaigns)?

o What are the measures of success that can be used for each

channel?

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Internal & External Providers

Who will create and maintain content?

o Conduct evaluation of your current content (keep/kill/edit)

• Content inventories and audits

• Gap analysis

o Evaluate future content needs against resources.

o External providers may be an option if:

• Internal resources cannot be expanded

• Subject matter expertise is not readily available in-house

Stale content will undermine the omni-channel experience.

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Content Production Systems

What systems will be used to maintain content?

o Do these systems already exist?

o Can these systems talk to one another (either directly or through a

bridging mechanism)?

o Do these systems use the same language (taxonomy)?

• Business Address

• Address of Business Customer

• Work Address of Customer

o How will the triggers and/or customer data be communicated from

one system to another?

• Point of Sale > CRM > Web Profile

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Taxonomy & Tagging

How will taxonomy and tagging be used to support the omni-channel

experience?

o Do taxonomies already exist?

o Are taxonomies governed across the organization?

o Is terminology and tagging consistent across systems?

o Is tagging leveraged for cross-sell and upsell?

o How is tagging used for analytics and terminology used to inform

SEO and Social (e.g. microformats and associated descriptive

tags)?

Social & SEO

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Content & SEO

How do you help people find out about your goods/services?

If you want to rank higher in Google you need to have good unique

content and plenty of it.

Matt Cutts, Google

April 16, 2014

o Good Content = Good SEO

o Focus on original content

o Be cautious of over-optimization (don’t try so hard)

o Optimize for external and internal search

o Seek out opportunities to support omni channel, including social

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Content & Social

How can you leverage social channels?

o Prioritize specific social channels

o Robust content needs to support social triggers.• Myriad of content types (video, imagery, text, etc.)

o Consider how taxonomy can support social• Color Terms in Rich Pins (Pinterest)

o Social needs to be part of content planning (beyond campaigns)

and content production

o Use social listening to help identify communities and content ideas

o Focus on social outlets that resonate with your customers.

Strategies for Success

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Metrics

How do you know if you’ve been successful?

o Channel interactions: is the journey effective?• Trending content

• Conversion rates post-content interaction.

o User satisfaction: is the customer satisfied with the Omni

experience?• Sharing on social

• Downloaded content

• Survey data

• Bounce & exit rates

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Metrics by Platform

o Smartphones• Orientation changes

• Use of social media

• Acceptance of location awareness prompts

• Location of use (in-store?)

o Tablet• Use of specialized app vs. website

• Conversion rates

• What is sold in an app vs. website (mobile or

other)

o Cross Platform• Use of content between platforms

• Switching from mobile to desktop to app experience

• Commodity content – preferred method of ingestion

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Keep in mind . . .

o Your customers and their context

o Small successes are the foundation for arriving at long-term goals

o Do not underestimate technical implications of strategic decisions

o Organizational acceptance of omni-channel can be difficult due to

company incentive structure; redefinition of revenue attribution

may be required

o Measure and (re) Measure• Course correct based on metrics analysis

o Plan, Plan, Plan• And execute!

Thank You!

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Contact Information

o Email: rschneider@azzardconsulting.com

o Web: www.azzardconsulting.com

o Twitter: @azzardconsult