“What is the price of experience?” asked the poet William Blake. The question on our lips today is “What shape is experience?” Customer experience, specifically. Gartner has the answer: it’s a pyramid. Of course!
Seriously, CX is such an important proposition for brands today that attempts to systematize it, and measure success in delivering it, are to be welcomed. Gartner this week proffered the CX pyramid as a foundational methodology for evaluating whether brands are achieving CX success at weak, moderate, or strong levels.
Getting relevant information to customers in the right channel at the right time is actually only the starting point. More important are solving the customer’s problems, engaging with customers at the level of their specific, individual needs, getting ahead of the customer by delivering pro-active, relevant experience, and — at the pinnacle — making the customer feel enhanced and empowered.
Here at DMN we see that last step as closely connected with the kind of lifetime affinity only the very best brands are able to build with customers. There’s a horizon beyond mere transactions.
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Marketers and Sales Reps Must Be Friends Department: Affirming the increased sense that revenue is a responsibility to be shared between marketing and sales teams, the attribution mavens at LeanData and the B2B thought leaders at Sales Hacker teamed up to produce “The State of Revenue Operations,” based on a survey of almost 1,000 B2B sales and marketing pros. Here are the big takeaways:
- Agreement on the definition of revenue and responsibility for it is still lacking, with 45 percent of respondents identifying it as jointly owned by sales, marketing, and customer success teams
- The majority of companies surveyed don’t have anything like a revenue ops team
- But 50 percent said they should have such a team, with 20 percent pointing to the complexity of the tech stack as a reason for it
- There’s a similar lack of agreement on who should own revenue metrics and KPIs.
But don’t worry, folks. After all, it’s only revenue, not anything important.
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Meanwhile, are retail CMOs headed for the exits? Handed the very responsibility of driving online sales, expanding market share, many are concluding they just don’t have the tools for the job. That’s the implication of a new report from Nanigans. With 58 percent believing they don’t have the means to reach their goals, and 39 percent figuring they can’t do anything to change that, no fewer than 42 percent predict they’ll be interviewing for other jobs some time in the next six months. The lifecycle of the CMO seems truncated too, with respondents reporting that their companies have had (an average of) 2.6 CMOs in the last seven years.
Take the pulse of CMOs right here.
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Big brands were recognized for their marketing chops during the Nexty Awards at CommerceNext in NYC last week. All eyes were on Warby Parker, who snagged the “Top Innovator of the Year Award” for their campaign surrounding last year’s epic solar eclipse.
Other winners included Sephora, for their impressive use of chatbots and social engagement through Facebook messenger, Adore Me for their use of email marketing personalization, and ThirdLove for their creative approach to direct mail.
For more CommerceNext coverage, click here. — Amy Onorato
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Two major players in CTV advertising announced a partnership on July 26 that will aim to allow publishers and device manufacturers to validate audience-based inventory at scale — an apparent effort to crackdown on OTT fraud by ensuring audience reach is accurately reported. Beachfront, which has previously taken actions to prevent OTT ad fraud, is the first supply-side platform (SSP) to provide both inventory quality validation and audience validation across all OTT devices. With Tru Optik, Beachfront publishers can setup private marketplaces filtered with advanced audience data across beyond their Roku inventory — also across Apple TV, Fire TV, Smart TVs, game consoles, and other OTT devices.
“With billions of connected TV requests across our supply side publisher network, it’s critically important we have a partner like Tru Optik to ensure the right advertisers connect with the correct, validated audience segments,” said Frank Sinton, Beachfront’s founder. “Our data indicates that mid- and long-tail publishers will increasingly prosper due to accelerated CTV streaming growth, with overall inventory rising quickly and, therefore, making the need for Tru Optik’s audience validation all the more important.”
Andre Swanston, CEO, Tru Optik, said that the partnership was one-of-a-kind. “Advertisers want to have consistent targeting and buying capabilities across all OTT publishers and devices,” Swanston said. “Beachfront is one of only a handful of platforms that had the technical and logistical capabilities to work with us to pull this off. Our new partnership helps level the playing field allowing buyers and sellers of CTV inventory to have a consistent, scalable audience strategy across all devices.” — Nick Ciccone
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Cision, the PR software and services vendor, is harnessing the visual. This week’s acquisition of the technical assets of ShareIQ, the Cision Comms Cloud is enabled to recognize and evaluate the impact of online images which aren’t necessarily associated with text or hashtags. ShareIQ’s technology recognizes brand images and logos independent of text and hashtags across social and other digital channels, and maps engagement.
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And finally, where are we next week? Well Amy Onorato will be “humanizing B2B” at #FlipMyFunnel, the sales and marketing conference. If you see her, say hello.
