An individualized experience

In his paper, Hulme identifies the following key trends: first, people look for an individualized experience and second, mass marketing now leads people to these experiences.

Essentially that the Web does not replace the principles of marketing, but provides an opportunity to deepen the experience as marketers apply technology to build trust,empathy and engagement with consumers.

Consumer cynicism

These changes are occurring in the context of increasing cynicism towards the sales and marketing voice of organizations, with trust in advertising at around 8% for those surveyed.

“Brands at Risk” seems an appropriate title, when you consider that those surveyed are empowered consumers; 58% of those surveyed were active on social media and 95% had conducted online product comparisons for at least one of their recent purchases.

The game has changed

Hulme observes that people are changing. This encompasses the way in which they consume marketing messages, how they assemble their own web experiences, crowd-curated social media content and their use of mobile devices and apps. Organizations need to focus on consistent, integrated, cross-channel messaging, which poses a challenge when attempting to stay current with all emerging media and channels.

Respond through engagement

Be relevant. To address cynical, busy, fractured audiences, organizations need to respond by being relevant. Relevance is multi-faceted; it’s not just personalizing a website, but about being where the audience is, listening to them and responding directly to the insight they provide.

For most organizations, their website is still the preferred primary destination for their audience. Ideally they can understand their content consumers and use visitor behavior to ensure relevant engagement. But, as Hulme discovers, information from corporate websites forms only part of the overall trust (and therefore the depth of engagement) an individual develops with an organization or brand.

As marketers we need to be where our audience is. Major brands, like Coca-Cola, are moving more of their campaign sites to social media platforms like YouTube and away from traditional destination microsites.

Engage with social media. Social media doesn’t just empower consumers; it also empowers marketers and communicators. In return for the collaborative empowerment generated by crowds, consumers share an unprecedented amount of information with the web at large and with the brands with which they interact.

When talking about Web Analytics it is often said that ‘you can’t follow a consumer around a store, but you can follow them around your website’ but the information available on social media takes this analogy further, in that you can start to get inside the head of the consumer and understand what they feel about your products or services, their motivations and not just where they went or what they bought.

Join the conversation. But engaging with content consumers through social media isn’t just about passively listening, it isn’t just about tweaking a product, service or marketing message to be released in a few weeks or months – it’s about an immediate, direct connection with a member of your audience – this consumer, prospective customer or citizen.

Impact on Content Management

What does this demand for relevance mean for content management and web publishing?

More content. Web engagement needs a constant and fresh supply of good quality, tailored content to feed site visitors, nourishing them with the relevance they crave.

No matter how expertly you separate your content from its presentation and re-use it, to address different audience segments and their consumption channel of choice, you will need more content.

More contributors. Aside from the fact that in most organizations, writing this engaging content can no longer be managed by a few individuals in marketing since online customers are increasingly familiar with informal and direct content.

They want to hear from your engineers, subject matter experts and their peers, not just the corporate voice of sales and marketing. Social media drives organizations to find and empower brand ambassadors, regardless of job title.

Meanwhile, brand ambassadors are also finding their own voice on Twitter or blogs, outside the corporate communications strategy. Successful organizations in today’s connected world need to find strategies to embrace and encourage this.

More destinations. As we’ve observed, the destination for our content is not just our corporate websites – but where the consumer is.

We need to publish demonstration videos to YouTube as well as the corporate websites, we need to promote our latest press releases not just on the corporate homepage, but also on Twitter and we need to publish our blog posts as an e-mail newsletter as well as an RSS feed.

Then, when the consumer chooses to engage with us outside of the corporate website, we need to maintain the conversation.

When someone comments on our YouTube video, reacts to a special offer on Twitter or comments on a blog post – we need to react directly on those channels.

WCM – Business as usual?

We’ve established that in order to engage with our audience, we need more content, more people empowered in creating that content and we need to be able to publish it across multiple digital channels.

On the surface this seems like standard functionality for any Web Content Management system. But these new demands throw some of the established requirements into sharp focus.

User adoption. What was ‘easy to use’ for our websavvy digital marketers is not quite so intuitive to the engineer that designed our product, the teacher posting school holiday activities or the pharmacist that knows the side effects of a drug that we sell.

These are the people our audience wants to engage with, that drive this demand for what we describe as the democratization of content management.

On the flip side, we also have an educated user community, familiar with social media, blogging tools, Facebook and Twitter, and who have a high expectation of what an organization should or could do for them.

Both of these groups are a challenge to user adoption and a risk to an engagement strategy; the social media-savvy will become disenchanted, potentially look outside the corporate systems to achieve their goals and those new to the tools will simply revert to emailing Word documents to someone in marketing.

Governance. More users, more content and potentially more tools also present organizations with risk. It’s all very well having something that is easy to use, loved by the users and capable of being deployed throughout the enterprise, but if you can’t actually open it up to all users as you’d be afraid of what might happen in terms of legal, corporate or brand compliance.

Things like the permission model, the workflow, accessibility checker and the ability for business users to easily create and configure these processes is an essential element to providing this framework that enables broader adoption, the democratized content publishing platform.

Understanding the content. Web engagement is about understanding the audience, learning about them by analyzing their behavior, social media monitoring and segmentation. But of course to match content with a specific visitor and to build a relevant experience we need to understand individual content items, how they relate to one another and the interests of the audience, and deliver them dynamically, based on visitor context.

Content needs to be described or tagged consistently and the relationships between items needs to be clear. For example the system needs to understand that content tagged as “parking” and “London” is also relevant to “England” and to similar terms like “automobile” and “transport”.

Flexible delivery. As we’ve discussed, being relevant is multifaceted and one way that enterprises create engaging web experiences is to provide targeted websites that are focused around an audience community or demographic. For example the UK Home Office provides drug information to teenagers on their ‘Talk to Frank’ microsite that is entirely different in tone, design and content to the information that the Home Office website provides about the same subject.

The hub of the conversation. In addition to the need to manage multiple websites, WCM delivery now includes any web destination, device or digital channel that our audience prefers.

Our web content management systems now need to enable digital marketers to publish to email, promote content on Twitter and Facebook, publish videos to YouTube. And after the content is there, to participate in that conversation and respond directly to audience reactions.

Prepared for engagement

Enterprises have discovered that when it comes to web engagement the old adage that says that ‘the only constant is change’ applies and that we need to be agile in adopting new tools and marketing practices.

The right technology platform. As new ways to syndicate and publish content become mainstream, the need for a flexible technical content interface becomes a business imperative. A system that publishes a whole page of static content isn’t going to help a digital marketer needing 140 characters for a Tweet, to drive the HTML content for an email campaign or deliver a relevant individualized web experience.

Easy integration is key. As we look deeper at engagement, the challenge then turns to leveraging the data we have about our audience – most organizations have this in disparate systems from CRM to Web Analytics and the integration of these systems to use this data determines level of digital customer engagement possible.

Freedom to differentiate. Enterprises need the WCM system to provide a platform that enables developers to create keep pace with the expectations of consumers, make the most of innovation and provide that technical agility to remain relevant and contemporary – to face the next Twitter.

Conclusions and next steps

While we can probably argue that consumer cynicism of sales and marketing is nothing new, the social media revolution now means that these folks are empowered and the way to engage them has changed. This new engagement model requires brands to be better at listening, to respond to this insight and to be relevant – both in terms of their overall brand strategy, but also in the way they deal with individual consumers.

Content management at the engagement hub. This new engagement requires digital marketers to reach for new technologies, tools like Twitter, social media monitoring and advanced web analytics – but at its heart, the currency of these interactions is content and the fulfillment destination is the website

The capabilities of the WCM system are thrown into sharp relief when faced with so many demands.

Next steps. Organizations find they have to re-evaluate their current WCM capabilities and the way they choose their next platform. The platform that produced a fine ‘brochureware’ site three years ago, the criteria and even the stakeholders may not be appropriate for today’s engagement architecture. Digital marketers need meet new demands and answer the question if their brand is at risk or ready for growth?