When “everything becomes digital,” private, public, and civil institutions become more dependent on information systems and more vulnerable to attack by sophisticated cyber-criminals, political “hacktivists,” nation-states, and even their own employees. As a result, all of our institutions will have to make increasingly thoughtful trade-offs between the value inherent in a hyper-connected world and the risk of operational disruption, intellectual property loss, public embarrassment, and fraud that cyber-attacks create.
Professionals find it challenging to source content management technology due to the wide array of business use cases and content technologies to support them. Merely buying a content management solution can still result in functionality gaps, or it may result in shelf-ware if you don’t need its total breadth. Instead, as the number of content types grow, you will find it easier to match requirements with content usage, rather than just content types. A successful content management program must:
■ Provide a consistent, predictable ECM experience. Creating an acceptable user experience is essential for ensuring that the ECM solution is consistent and meets the needs of the users. A successful ECM implementation will define standard processes and procedures for maintaining structure and consistency in the access and management of the ECM system.
■ Surface the content easily. The primary goal of any ECM implementation is to provide quick, easy access to information. Easily turning content into knowledge is critical to realizing an effective return on investment (ROI).
■ Increase the value and reliability of the information. End users want to be assured that they can trust the content they are using to accomplish their jobs. Trust can be achieved by knowing the content at hand is valid, approved, and controlled.
Building this practice requires a four-step process:
1. Discover: establishing the value of a CM program to the enterprise.
2. Plan: creating the strategy and road map for the CM program.
3. Act: implementing the program.
4. Optimize: measuring, monitoring, and marketing your results
Marketers today are not settling for narrowly focused metrics of success defined by last-touch attribution. They strive to understand the true value of each interaction along the customer’s journey.
The benefits of attribution measurement far outweigh the alternative: last-touch attribution. The latter is primitive, inaccurate, and grossly misinforms the impact of specific interactions. Advanced cross-channel attribution calculates more accurate revenue and cost impact, while providing marketers with a source of truth for their channel and campaign performance.
Additionally, it analyzes the customer purchase path, assigning value to each specific interaction. From an organizational and strategic perspective, attribution measurement helps marketers realign resources, identify more effective ways of connecting with their customers, and eliminate marketing spend waste.
As a result, attribution shapes and defines a marketer’s overall customer and marketing strategy. But this is not an easy job. CI pros own this task and struggle with attribution measurement due to the following roadblocks:
■ Data integration across touchpoints is difficult. CI pros embarking on attribution measurement struggle with connecting data across touchpoints and to conversion points. Specifically, many CI pros find it difficult to obtain the right time series data to conduct attribution measurement. Further, not all data can be integrated at a granular, customer level.
For example, offline data points (direct mail, catalog) and point-of-sale information is difficult to connect to the digital cookie pool, which is needed for attribution measurement. This requires alternative ways to connect offline and online touchpoint data (like through probability models or rules based assumptions) to even begin true cross-channel attribution measurement.
As a result, CI professionals struggle to align all data at an individual consumer level to accurately attribute all interactions across the customer purchase path.
■ Attribution measurement calculation is cumbersome. Most marketers underestimate the enormousness and complexity of attribution measurement; executives are left confused and suspicious about the validity of advanced attribution. Advanced attribution is often seen as “black box” because there is a lack of transparency on how calculations are derived across channels and tactics.
As a result, CI pros are left responsible to communicate the complexity of attribution to executives. As one CI pro said: “Explaining to the CEO and CFO the concept of attribution and the metrics calculation is difficult. We had to demystify the math behind it and present it in an easy, digestible way.”
■ Metrics of success vary across the organization. Different functional groups want to measure success across different objectives. For example, CI pros need to use attribution results to identify the most optimal customer purchase path, while digital marketers use attribution to calculate campaign conversion.
As a result, CI pros have a multitude of attributed metrics to calculate to serve multiple stakeholders. This often leaves them burdened with creating reports rather than focusing on in-depth analysis.
The best marketers, in my opinion, understand “Deal Biometrics”. They work with customers across the company and with partners to define what constitutes a deal. They identify how the right customer experience can influence and empower the major actors of each transaction. Professionals have traditionally used long drawn documents to accomplish this: “the buyer process maps,” “pain chains,” and others.
These documents often take a long time to develop and by the time they are completed, they are too watered down to be actionable (sometimes, they are so detailed that the sales organization doesn’t have time or patience for them either).
At the end of the day it is all about understanding the connection, not just forcing or begging people to have something with the brand.
