Engage to Win

A Blueprint for Success in the Engagement Economy

Steve Lucas

• Publisher: Greenleaf Book Group Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781626344990
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Marketing
• Index: Business

Engagement is the key to success for today's businesses. The world we live in is radically different today from what it was even just five years ago. It is hyperdigital and becoming more so every day. Ironically, we use connected to describe this new world, yet we are asked to interact increasingly through apps and browsers instead of via face-to-face contact with customers and clients. Even with all the incredible advances, it's worth pondering whether organizations actually feel more connected to the people and the companies they do business with. In Engage to Win, author Steve Lucas introduces a new model for marketing to address this new hyper-digital world—one founded on engagement. He introduces the idea that embracing and driving engagement throughout organizations and using it with customers, prospects, employees, and partners is what will set companies apart. This digital era demands that marketers understand the science of marketing in order to scale and succeed. But if we embrace mathematics alone, while abandoning feeling, meaning, and authenticity, we will fail to deliver on the desires of our clients: to feel listened to and understood. ?So how do we win the heart and mind of the buyer in this new world? Develop a real strategy around engagement by practicing these simple steps: listen, learn, and engage. Listening creates insights, insights drive engagement, and engagement drives revenue. Truly engaging with customers will allow businesses to see, in real-time, when customers' wants and needs are changing, so businesses will be able to adapt, survive, and ultimately thrive!

TWO

The Challenge We All Face

What you’ll learn in this chapter:

• How to engage.
• How to synthesize quantitative and qualitative information about your customers and prospects.
• A new metric that will make your marketing more precise: Key Personal Value Indicators.
• The yin and the yang of customer retention.
• Why good enough never is.
• Why we are thinking about transformation the wrong way.
• How antiquated business model “lock-in” invariably causes not only frustration but also financial hardship.
• Why transformation is even harder than you think— and what you can do to simplify things.

EMPATHY

I want to underscore something here at the beginning of this chapter. You’ll notice that I called it “the challenge we all face.” The “we” is extremely important. The word “we” means we are all in this together, and that perspective is vital.

A key element of engagement is empathy, identifying with the thoughts and feelings of others. Your family and friends want to know that you understand what they are going through.

Your customers do as well. In every part of every interaction we have with them, we need to demonstrate that we are on the same side. Because this point is important, not only am I going to refer to it several times in the book, I wanted to mention it early on.

LAYiNG THE GROUNDWORK FOR ENGAGEMENT

Engagement, as we established, is understanding who your customer, consumer, or client is as a person and what they value. Before you can ever engage, you also need to know who you are talking to and the different channels by which you’ll converse (e.g., inbound and outbound, digital and analog). You get the idea.

MARKETERS ARE BEGINNING TO ENGAGE

I was pleasantly surprised when our research revealed that most marketers have begun to understand the importance of engagement and that the best companies have already taken steps to make it a reality.

The data shows that marketers are investing in engagement primarily to retain existing customers (65%), meet increasing customer demands (57%), and respond to competitive market pressure (49%), which includes, in part, the fact that their peers are already doing this.

Two out of five companies are investing to build emotional connections to the brand, and one out of three are making investments to build brand advocates of their customers.

It seems so obvious, yet most of the time, most companies deal with people as if they are anonymous IP addresses. Our culture has become hyper-transactional. Granted, it’s much more pronounced in developed nations, but the point is that our society is optimized entirely for efficiency, so we simply do not know enough about our customers, and our customers agree that is the case. According to Marketo’s independent research:

• 69% of buyers believe “engagements are relevant but still primarily transactional.”
• Just 16% said that “brands take the time to understand me and develop a relationship.” Even worse,
• 14% feel “like [they are] just being marketed to.”

The key point here is that engagement begins with knowing who you’re talking to and knowing some intimate level of detail about their likes, their wants, their hopes, their aspirations, and their dreams, not just their preferences. You may think that you do this today (i.e., you’ve developed a buyer persona) but I will address this in more detail throughout the book. We must go beyond a basic demographic representation of an ideal or even real customer and get into granular levels of detail about our customers and prospects that will enable us to engage like never before. Admittedly this is difficult, but it’s critical. Why? You can’t infer that because I bought a tent on Amazon, I like camping. It could be that I’m buying it for my brother-in-law, who is an outdoor enthusiast. The algorithm doesn’t know who I’m buying the tent for. It just knows that I’m buying it. Using science alone to figure out what your customer wants can lead you astray.

Since engagement is about delivering personal and authentic experiences, the first thing you’ll need to do is build a digital persona (i.e., a digital profile of every customer or prospect you intend to do business with). A digital persona goes way beyond demographics and gets into much more fine-grained, deterministic data. To be precise, a digital persona is a datadriven model of someone that contains both quantitative and qualitative information about them, especially as it relates to that person’s online behavior.

Figure 2.1 Most marketing contact databases contain quantitative data but often lack qualitative data that facilitates better engagement.

The second most important thing you can do is determine the what, the when, and the how of engagement (i.e., how you can deliver the right message at the right time). This is where you start mapping out inbound and outbound activity and aligning it with your current and potential customers.

An easy way to do that is simply to ask a customer, “How should I be engaging with you? By phone? In person? Digitally? All the above? When should I be engaging with you? (For example, if you want me to engage digitally, when should I send emails?) And who do you want to be doing the engaging? Account executives? Customer success managers?”

It’s impossible to engage if you don’t know the person you’re talking to. And unfortunately, the reality today is that most organizations have no idea who they’re talking to. Before you can even engage, you must attempt to better understand who you are communicating with. You need to develop a digital persona of your buyer.

Third, when you do engage, you need to know your prospect’s or customer’s mood. Most companies today don’t really take the time to try and sense your mood, and that’s a mistake. Why? Because you may not be in a buying mood! How many times have you had an off-putting experience when you’re not in a buying mood, but someone is really trying to sell you something—whether you’re sitting at your desk browsing a website, you’re physically in the mall, or you’re sitting in a park using a mobile app? To some degree, mood can be inferred by probabilistic means or data, as it’s not an exact science.

What is mood in an economic sense? It’s a propensity to buy at a given point. It’s the difference between “kicking the tires” and actually buying a car. And yes, you can “sense” mood digitally. But let’s start with an analog example.

I always think about the three kinds of people in a shopping mall. There are those who are there to walk around, those who are window shopping (i.e., not really buying anything), and then there are others who are there to buy something, anything. You need to know who you are dealing with.

If you understand someone’s mood, you can understand their intent to buy. And as I said, you absolutely can understand mood digitally. Most digital marketers today can get a sense for whether someone is just “clicking” around. We know how much time they are spending on a page and understand their browsing behavior. Incredible advances in marketing applications are based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) that, through sophisticated data analysis and modeling, can determine if someone is ready to buy.

Does mood only matter in a B2C setting as opposed to B2B? No: It’s vital to understand in B2B settings as well. Here’s why. Let’s say you are a software company and provide a cloud product. If someone lands on your site for the first time, you most likely don’t know that person. They’re an unknown IP address, and if they are like you and me, they’ll use multiple devices, so they may visit you in the morning from an iPhone and in the afternoon from a desktop. Furthermore, you don’t know if that person is a buyer or someone simply researching your offering. This is where the audience data you collect, how you classify it, and then continue to refine it over time matters most.

On the other hand, in a B2C scenario, if someone visits the Under Armour^® website to look at running gear, for example, they’ve come specifically to the website for a particular item. Knowing that fact is far more valuable than knowing that someone on Amazon.com was looking at thirty different brands of jogging pants.

In our example, our buyer has landed on a preferred brand site—www.underarmour.com. They’re specifically looking at jogging pants, and then they’re specifically evaluating things like color. The question that you have to ask at that micromoment as a retailer is, “Is my job to educate the buyer? Or is my job to incent the buyer to purchase now? What am I trying to do?”

And the reality is that, for any retailer, you can go about it the right way, or you can go about it the wrong way. You might go about it in a way where you could potentially turn off the buyer, and you clearly don’t want to do that. Knowing what to do in that moment is what engagement is all about. You want to deliver the right message at the right time.

KEY PERSONAL VALUE iNDiCATORS CAN HELP

A new marketing metric that helps you employ the engagement philosophy is Key Personal Value Indicators (KPVI).

A KPVI is not an industry-defined term. If you Google it, you will get “key performance value indicators,” as in how I measure your performance as an employee. That’s not what I’m talking about.

KPVIs boil down to an easy question to ask but a tough one to answer: What qualitative things define a customer?

As I mentioned earlier, most companies focus on the demographic details or basic quantitative data. You’re five feet ten and x years old. You generally buy at this time of the day, week, or month. These are your preferences in terms of clothing type. Those are not value metrics. Those are just metrics.

The key personal values for me would be: Steve is a type one diabetic. He is health conscious. He’s worried his kids will develop type one diabetes. He’s a frequent exerciser who prefers CrossFit. He donates time and money to the American Diabetes Association and Children’s Diabetes Foundation. Those are some, but not all, of my KPVIs.

With KPVIs as background, you can start asking questions. Is Steve more likely to buy because a company indicates that it recycles? Is he more likely to buy because an organization makes a charitable donation on his behalf? Knowing someone’s key personal values can allow you to ask those kinds of questions. And those values will lead you down the path of creating higher customer lifetime value, because you will be able to truly engage with the person you are trying to reach.

You may be sitting there thinking that Key Personal Value Indicators are too qualitative. And while there are, indeed, qualitative notions baked into KPVIs, the truth is, we need to understand them now more than ever. Yes, they go way beyond the 4Ps of marketing—product, price, place, and promotion— that we learned. But isn’t the Engagement Economy, the world you live in today, way beyond the one you grew up in?

For a moment, I’d like to return to an example I used earlier: TOMS Shoes. (Note: This isn’t a double-blind study conducted by an independent research firm.) I was being interviewed by six reporters—four men and two women—at an industry tradeshow, and I decided to ask them a question. “Do any of you own a pair of TOMS shoes?”

Figure 2.2 A replica of a TOMS shoe.

Both women raised their hands. (TOMS sells shoes for men, women, and kids.)

I said, “Okay, what happens when you purchase one pair of TOMS shoes?” They both said, “TOMS donates a second new pair to someone who needs shoes.” They immediately knew TOMS’ value proposition.

“Now, let me ask you a second question,” I said. “Do you consider TOMS shoes to be the most attractive pair of shoes in your wardrobe?” They both said no. On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being most attractive, one gave TOMS a two, the other a three. So, clearly the attractiveness of the shoe was not driving their decision to buy.

“Now, tell me about comfort.” They both said, “They’re super comfortable.”

“But are they the most comfortable shoes you own?” They both said no and mentioned other brands.

Notice what is going on here. Both women said TOMS does not make the most comfortable pair of shoes, and they don’t make their most attractive pair either, yet each of them had purchased multiple pairs. Clearly, TOMS has aligned with their personal values.

There are two important questions to ask when it comes to engagement marketing:

• How do I discover what is meaningful to you in your life?
• How do I relate my brand to that?

Knowing someone’s KPVIs is extremely helpful, and the reason is obvious. In the Engagement Economy, there are just as many (if not more) things you can do to turn a buyer off as you can do to turn a buyer on. You only need to watch the news or skim social media to know that aligning to your customers’ values is paramount.

United Airlines is a great example. By now, most of us are familiar with the situation where a passenger was forcefully removed from a United flight after refusing to give up his seat. While there are too many problems with that situation to analyze in this book, it was clear that United’s insensitivity toward a customer made us all feel that we could one day be treated that way. United’s image suffered dramatically as a result.

The point is that value alignment and good behavior aren’t just digital acts but practices we as marketers need to champion everywhere. Brands that understand their customers’ personal value indicators, and align their products and services to them, will win. And the ones that don’t will lose.

ONE MORE THOUGHT ABOUT THiS

At the end of the day, engagement is no...