The Top 10 Questions Every Brand Must Answer To Grow In 2015

Every marketeer faces a dizzying array of choices in terms of strategy, tactics, and tools through which to reach their customers and inspire them to buy your products. As the media landscape becomes more fractured and the tools more varied, it’s more important than ever to stay focused on the right priorities that will ensure short-term and long-term success. With that in mind here are the top ten questions every brand must answer if they hope to grow in 2015.

1. What is your brand’s purpose? Every marketer is now aware that Boomers, Millennials, and Gen Z generations are looking to brands to be more responsible in exchange for their product purposes. As such, a clear definition of your company purpose is critical to capturing their attention and converting their support to sales.

2. What is your brands story? Once you have defined your brand’s purpose, mission, and vision you need to be able to distil that into a brand story that employees and customers want to share. Only then will you unlock the power of social technologies to amplify your message and build your customer community.

3. How do you align your leadership, employees, and partners around that brand story? Too often marketers think only in terms of how they will share their story with customers and ignore the need to create a company culture that is in alignment with that story.

4. How do you align your corporate citizenship, sustainability and foundation efforts? For decades each one of these areas had been treated as distinct silos within a company matrix. As such, they are often insufficiently connected or aligned with a brand’s story. Only when they are all pointed in the same direction can they amplify one another to generate marketing efficiencies that improve your bottom line.

5. How do you align your company and product brand stories? Many corporate brands have chosen to remain effectively unknown and lead with their product brands. With the new demands for transparency and accountability, company brands are now rising to the challenge of defining their story and aligning their product brands within it.

6. How do you align your external marketing with your internal culture?There is nothing more destructive to a business than for a customer to discover that a brand’s marketing is very different to the customer’s experience. By extension, very easy for an employee to become disillusioned when they see that a brand is telling its customers one thing when their experience inside the company is another.

7. What strategies must you use to tell your story effectively using social technologies? Too often brands bring a broadcast and self-directed mentality to social tools that turn on dialogue, interaction, and intimacy. It’s not surprising then that they find that their employees’ time and marketing spend is wasted.

8. How must you use each social media channel to capture the attention of existing and new customers? Each channel presents a unique way to command the attention of different audiences and to inspire them to amplify the company’s brand story. Only with clear communication architecture can that story and these channels be sufficiently aligned to build the brand and its business.

9. How do you share that brands story effectively at a local level? The people closest to a community are the ones best qualified to share a story. As such, every brand faces the challenge of localizing its overarching story in a way that makes it meaningful and relevant to customers in order to win their attention and purchasing preference.

10. How do you establish your leadership at a global level? Irrespective of your company size, you can now lead a global conversation once you have clearly articulated your point of view on a given cultural conversation related to your products and their benefits. Any ambition smaller than that undervalues the reach and impact of the web, social media, and mobile phones.

Each one of these questions is important in their own right, but taken together they are critical for the short and long-term success of a brand in today’s social business marketplace.

Emerging Big Data Opportunities For CFOs

Big data is one of the most influential technology trends for the accounting profession, according to a recent report from IMA® and ACCA (Association of Chartered Certified Accountants). To explore what this trend specifically means for CFOs, check what the assistant controller of IBM said about emerging types of data from channels such as social media and how it can be used to inform strategy.

How do CFOs harness big data differently from other C-suite executives such as the CMO?

For CFOs, big data is an opportunity to glean deeper insights into the internal and external forces that influence their companies’ performance. The integration of big data brings new inputs and variables that help anticipate the future, enabling rolling views of leading indicators versus more traditional retrospective views. More frequent inputs allow the enterprise to respond more quickly to change.
By capitalizing on big data using business analytics tools, the role of the CFO is moving beyond optimizing the finance function to transforming the enterprise.
For other members of the C-suite, for example, the Chief Marketing Officer, big data provides insights on customer behavior, delivering information about customer sentiment and general perceptions of the company and its products to help shape future strategy. While CMOs are using big data and analytics to better understand the individual customer, CFOs are utilizing data to better understand the environment.

What new types of data have emerged that CFOs should pay attention to?

CFOs are used to dealing with highly structured and verifiable data – big data isn’t like that and it requires a change in mindset for CFOs to feel comfortable making use of it themselves.
Many CFOs are driving business agility by analyzing performance metrics such as resource productivity and inventory turnover. They are using this data to better understand their businesses and re-engineer and integrate business processes as part of a broader enterprise transformation.
From a CFO perspective, big data isn’t just about new types of data; it’s also about harnessing the availability of existing data. Business analytics tools enhance access while removing manual activity and enabling the processing of large volumes of data to make new connections and accelerate decision making.

What are some examples of CFOs incorporating data from social media sites and online forums as part of their integrated financial reporting responsibilities?

CFOs can make use of data from social media sites and online forums, and we see this in areas such as regulatory compliance, supply chain and labor climate. They monitor formal and informal media to predict sales trends and understand investor sentiment.
CFOs are also starting to generate their own big data by instrumenting their businesses to collect and incorporate large volumes of performance data supporting their new challenges of driving strategy and growth.

What typical roadblocks do CFOs face in using big data to drive strategy?

Many of the roadblocks that CFOs face are similar to those experienced by other members of the C-suite – the availability and usability of the data. However, tools are becoming available which make it easier to access data from less structured sources. CFOs have the opportunity to use this data to support fact-based decisions, developing their role as trusted business advisors.
A different challenge arises where big data cuts across traditional silos, encouraging enterprises to operate in a more integrated fashion. This changes the dynamics of the C-suite, with traditional roles becoming less clear-cut.

How will the way CFOs use big data change in the next five years?

Big data and business analytics raises the expectations of finance; taking advantage of this will call on different skills and finance departments should be focusing on building those skills.
CFOs are asked to analyze different options and strategies under consideration by the business; their finance teams must be able to use analytics to predict business outcomes and influence business leaders to deliver optimum results. CFOs will also become more effective advocates for change by building and communicating business cases based on big data findings.

Drive Customer Experience with Social CRM

Social media and the Web have given rise to a new form of empowered consumers who can research and voice their options, solve problems and have a powerful sphere of influence well beyond their backyard fences. Social media has added yet another digital channel, similar to the email channel in the early-to-mid 90s, that needs to be included in every comprehensive CRM strategy.

It’s widely recognized that the amount of data, both structured and unstructured, has increased at a previously inconceivable rate since the advent of social media. What should you do about all this data and about the burgeoning number of social media channels? Just because social activity is taking place doesn’t mean you should get involved in all of it.

When you consider that the top 10 social media websites experienced 27 percent more visits between June 2012 and May 2013—specifically, visits increased from 2.38 billion to nearly 3 billion —the prospect of managing all your customer interactions can seem intimidating.  But it doesn’t need to be that way. By creating a focused strategy, and using CRM technology to deliver on that strategy, you can get a greater return on your investment than ever before.

Social Media is Here to Stay

Businesses like yours must recognize that social media is not a trend — it will keep growing and evolving, and it’s important that your strategy grows and evolves with it. Whatever your industry, social media can and will impact your business, whether you choose to engage in its usage or not.

Now are the days of the social consumer — consumers who might take a question to Twitter, a customer service query to a user forum, a compliment to Facebook, a photo to Instagram, a thumbs- up to a posting on Reddit or a complaint to Yelp. And, because more and more consumers are communicating with companies and each other this way, a complaint can go viral on a variety of social channels before you know it. Should you react to a complaint or ignore it? Could you have anticipated it? Can you turn a negative into a positive, and gain a louder, more positive voice? Have you thought about taking advantage of positive posts to promote your brand or company?

Change the Way You Work

You need to take advantage of social media as both a channel and a data source by integrating social, mobile, digital media and data into your direct marketing, customer engagement and overall CRM strategy. Consumers value objectivity, referrals and references are more critical than ever, and a social media relationship with one person is now a relationship with that person’s entire social network.

Take advantage of the peer influence-based consumer decision-making process by proactively executing social media-focused campaigns, segmenting campaigns by social media channel, and enriching customer records and profiles with social media attributes. By doing this, you provide your marketing department with a new way of thinking as it relates to creating customer segments and campaigns.

Consumers’ perception of your company, products and services can change rapidly as a result of the speed of social media. You need to respond quickly and effectively when potential issues or problems arise, and when consumers have concerns or questions. That means you need to know how to quickly respond with social media replies, next-best action and next-best experience recommendations across any delivery channel (including traditional ones such as direct mail and email). To drive consumer interest and build loyalty, you should recommend social media offers, customer membership promotions, and more. Additionally, by creating a bridge between Facebook and your company’s website via new social graphs, you can allow consumers to express themselves in new and creative ways.

Make it Relevant

Let’s take a look at some ways your company can use CRM and real-time marketing to leverage social media as a communications channel—and in the process bring effectiveness and finesse to the social media presence.

1. Take advantage of customer deals. You can manage your inventory by using social media and a CRM solution to educate customers about upcoming or last-minute discounts and deals. If you apply CRM principles to your strategy of educating customers about last-minute deals and discounts, you won’t send them every deal you have, because every deal won’t be relevant to every customer. You should send your deals with view and rest periods across media (for example, email, Twitter, and conventional mail), so you don’t become “white noise.” Sending irrelevant offers too frequently is deadly, regardless of the delivery medium. An integrated outbound and inbound marketing platform can make fast work of these needs and effectively coordinate the deals you offer.

2. Make the most of real-time messages. Remember, timing is one of the critical components of the CRM adage of sending the right message to the right customer at the right time via the right medium. You could send your messages as private tweets or as private Facebook posts via the use of triggered events depending on the data your CRM system has about a customer’s social media and digital marketing preferences, privacy settings and online behavior.

Maximize Your Social Media Investment

To maximize what could turn into a significant time investment in social media, you should:

1. Take inventory. Assess what you are doing today in social media. Perhaps you are sniffing for positive or negative mentions of your product. As is growing more common, you may be managing a social servicing department. Or you might have sidebar advertisements on Facebook and/or YouTube pages. Whatever your existing tactics may be, begin analyzing their effectiveness today.

2. Strategize. After you research the topic of social media, brainstorm and strategize about which new social media and digital marketing tactics you’d like to implement. Begin to include social media as  delivery points for your marketing messages and to overlay a CRM-centric approach to your messaging via social media.

3. Set a goal. Define a purpose for your social CRM project based on what it can do to assist and engage customers and on how it can improve a key business metric such as cost to serve, referrals or conversions.

4. Be careful not to overdo it. Layer your new social media strategies and tactics onto your existing cross-channel marketing roadmap or calendar. Treat them as campaigns and include cross-media rules so you don’t oversaturate your customers with “touches.” Remember that social media is an effective medium for customers to share their issues with the world. Use your touches as you would a spice — that is, easy does it.

With the right strategy and technology in place to support it, social media can be used to better understand, serve and communicate with your customers and prospects. By taking advantage of social profile data, you enhance digital marketing capabilities focused on contextual, transactional and addressable branding initiatives. But in order to unleash these benefits, you need to make social media part of your overall customer experience strategies instead of keeping it in an organizational silo.