The year 2024 is just around the corner, and it’s bringing a tidal wave of changes that will reshape technology and work. At least that’s my hot take…and not everyone is going to agree with me (if so, I want to hear it!), especially on my predictions that AI is going to cause up to 40% of layoffs and the way companies market and sell is about to significantly change. Let’s break it down.

Prediction: Personalization Will be King

Pay-per-click advertising will take center stage in a way it hasn’t before. Adapting your marketing strategy to align with this trend will be crucial for staying ahead.

It’s time to say bye to generic approaches and hyper-focus on creating tailored and personalized communication. Avoid doing so, and you will lose any competitive edge you have. You’ll see companies introduce completely dynamic websites that change and update for every prospect and customer that visits them.

Prediction: Email Automation Will Get the S%$ Kicked Out of It

Consumers are about to get their revenge. They are going to turn the screws on all the companies that have been blasting their inboxes for so long. Don’t believe me? Check out this post. 2024 is the year of bigger, fewer, better. Companies are going to spend a lot of money and time trying to figure out who to talk to and what to say. Spray and pray will go extinct because it will stop yielding the results of the past.

Prediction: The Rise of Autonomous SDRs

Prepare to meet your first fully autonomous Sales Development Representative (SDR) — trust me, this is on the verge of happening. Imagine programming your founder into an SDR, Customer Service (CS), and Account Executive (AE) bot. Automation is stepping up its game, and this is just the beginning. Don’t run away from autonomous helpers — embrace them. Prompts will become a commodity; any you create on the job will be owned by your employer. Any you create for personal use you’ll be able to “take with you”.

Prediction: Job Shifts and AI Impact

As AI continues to evolve, job displacements will shift from middle management, and freelancers are going to be severely disappointed because a lot of the work they do (unless it is very specialized) will get replaced with AI tools. Layoffs due to AI will be a hot topic, sparking discussions on Universal Basic Income (UBI) and AI taxes to fund necessary initiatives. I’m even going to put some math behind this prediction — I believe layoffs will reach about 40% net in the next 5-10 years.

Prediction: Proprietary Data Will be Expensive

Access to proprietary is getting hard to access, so therefore the cost of it is about to go up — significantly. Take Reddit as an example — companies used to be able to mine the site’s data unchecked. Not anymore. You’ll start to see signs companies locking down their data, and matching up their interest in creating proprietary data sets generated by AI. Publicly available data is going away, and it’s not coming back.

Prediction: Provide Proof or Lose Deals

The premium on proof points, or evidence, that companies can deliver the results they claim to deliver is about to go up — especially if they’re selling AI-based tools. Get ready to show case studies and customer testimonials, or lose out to competitors who can. With the ubiquity of so many AI products, it’s getting harder to distinguish one from another. Companies will need to differentiate with licenses, for example.

Prediction: Productivity Will Increase and Team Sizes Will Decrease

There’s about to be a large explosion of small-scale 1-20 person companies in “long tail” and lifestyle business models.

How to Prepare for the Future

To stay ahead of the curve, I’ve listed some practical steps you can take. How to execute these steps will be the subject of future posts.

Embrace GPT Assistants

Have a suite of GPT assistants at your disposal. Train them to automate your daily tasks. Those who adapt will thrive, while those who resist might find themselves out of a job in the coming decade.

Build Aggregated Databases. They are your Golden Ticket

Start creating aggregated databases of your calls and emails. Platforms like Otter, Zoom, and customer support tools can help you automate tasks and enhance productivity. The more you can automate yourself, the better prepared you’ll be for the changes ahead.

Develop AI Problem-Solving Skills

As AI becomes more prevalent, honing your problem-solving skills becomes crucial. Think like a developer or understand the basics of object-oriented programming. You don’t necessarily need to code, but understanding how these systems work will be essential.

Final Thoughts

The year 2024 promises exciting advancements, but it also challenges us to adapt. By preparing now and embracing the changing landscape, you can position yourself for success in a future where innovation and automation are the new norms. Stay curious, stay adaptable, and get ready for a transformative year ahead!

Earlier this year, Outreach.io (sales engagement platform) released a memo, which you can see below, that raised many eyebrows. It referenced Google and Yahoo’s latest efforts to curb spam. Here’s what you might have missed beyond the headlines, and where you might need more clarity.

Starting in February 2024, Gmail and Yahoo will enforce new requirements for bulk senders, including authentication of emails, enabling easy unsubscribing, and staying under a spam threshold. The changes will impact how outbound prospecting is conducted, particularly for bulk email senders. The key changes include email authentication, one-click unsubscribing, prompt honoring of unsubscribes, and maintaining a low spam complaint rate. To comply with these new rules, sales and marketing teams need to implement specific strategies and tools.

What’s Important to Know

“Bulk senders” aren’t the only audience affected. This applies not only to senders using Google and Yahoo services but also to lower-volume senders and Gmail recipients. You can’t circumvent these rules by using a different service or domain. The spam email threshold is 0.3% (1 of every 1,000 emails). Exceed this, and you risk having your user account or all emails from your domain blocked.

Prepare and update your authentication to ensure that your headers match or DKIM is in place, and make your content easy to subscribe to and engage with, as well as easy to unsubscribe from. The enforcement date begins on February 1, 2024.

Here’s What Businesses Should do to Adapt

• Implement Email Authentication: Use Sender Policy Framework (SPF), DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM), and Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC) to authenticate your emails. This ensures the legitimacy of your sending domain.
• Incorporate One-Click Unsubscribe Links: Add easy, one-click unsubscribe options in your email sequences. This is essential to comply with the new rules and respect recipient preferences. When recipients choose to unsubscribe, ensure their requests are processed within 48 hours.
• Maintain a Low Spam Complaint Rate: Craft compelling outbound email sequences to keep your spam rate below the 0.3% threshold set by Gmail and Yahoo.
• Regularly Monitor Sender Reputation: Use tools like Google Postmaster to check your organization’s sender reputation and address any abuse complaints.
• Align Sales and Marketing Strategies: Ensure that both sales and marketing teams are aligned in their email outreach strategies, considering the cumulative impact of emails sent from the same domain.
• Adopt a Personalized Approach: Move away from the “spray and pray” methodology. Tailor your messages to suit the recipient’s interests and needs.
• Be Cautious with AI Assistance: While AI tools can aid in email composition, ensure they don’t inadvertently increase spam flags.
• Consider Separate Domains for Different Campaigns: To manage sender reputations effectively, you might set up separate domains for marketing campaigns and cold outreach, bearing in mind the associated challenges.
• Check Your Spam / IP / Domain Ratings and Credibility: Check Google Postmaster tools: https://postmaster.google.com/u/0/managedomains

These upcoming changes by Gmail and Yahoo mark a significant shift in how outbound email marketing and prospecting will be conducted. Adapting to these changes requires a more targeted, personalized approach, emphasizing authenticity and respect for the recipient’s preferences. By implementing these strategies, companies can continue to engage effectively with their audience while complying with the new email standards.

What does it all Mean? Experts Weigh-In

“This is not the great email apocalypse. Just like sales acceleration tools helped sales teams increase their bandwidth for sales, email tools helped marketing teams. However, just as sales teams need to tighten up their sales motions, marketing teams need to focus their email outreach, understand who they are reaching out to, and why they are reaching out. There are ways to scale this up, but you’ve got to be smart about it.” – Steve Eror, Signals

“Bigger, fewer, better — this is the new mantra for marketers in 2024. Take the “hits” in automation and put the priority on creating quality content that people want to tuck in their back pocket for later. The idea of “one size fits all” is over. Marketers have to be more careful about what content they send and to whom they send it. So plan ahead. Define your ICP (ideal customer profile) and overall strategic goal way in advance of launching a campaign. Drive engagement based on recipient needs, versus your own wants. This is much more challenging to do, but will be more effective in the long run.” – Gabi Barragan, Wrench.ai Co-founder

“ISPs have always monitored email volume, complaints, engagement, and authentication from marketers. Maintaining a high IP and domain reputation, as well as low complaints, is critical to landing in the inbox. It is time for marketers to get serious about implementing DMARC to protect the domain’s reputation. Review your DNS records, tighten up your list, ensure your content is relevant, and monitor your reports!” – Chris Arrendale, CEO and Founder, CyberDataPros

Since the juggernaut of the ChatGPT debut,  I am seeing all kinds of content that are clearly being generated by AI. As I noted this, my thought was: “Being efficient is very different from being effective.”I now find myself saying this a lot as I talk with clients and prospects about the growing ubiquity of AI and how they can best harness it.  

There’s no question that AI-generated content is streamlining the content creation process. But the ability to spot and filter it is also gaining steam. 

This also means that a lot of people are using generative AI to scale the same mistakes they’ve already been making – but with automation. 

The trick to creating effective content with AI is not that it makes it easier for a marketer or salesperson to generate it, but to create content that’s unique and highly relevant to the recipient. The recipient doesn’t care about your elaborate prompt and the subsequent message. The recipient cares about their problems and headaches; they care about the solutions to solve them.  

If you’ve made generative AI a part of our content creation process, how much is the recipient’s pain point figuring into your messaging? Your message may sound great, but is it truly moving the needle with engagement and conversions?

I’ve spoken with teams that have been surprised that AI-generated copy has not impacted their bottom line. My follow-up questions have been: Was your content personalized? Was it geared toward recipients’ roles and challenges? Did your content reference a possible solution? 

The answer has generally been “no”. The teams I’ve spoken with typically spend more time troubleshooting their AI prompts than personalizing the output, and the latter results in much better engagement metrics. 

AI-generated content will obviously improve with time. But now that people have had a couple of months to test the latest tools, it should be more clear by now if generative AI has in fact created a marketing and sales lift – or not. What do your numbers say?  

Even if you’re not seeing an increase in your conversion rate, an increase in engagement may indicate that an AI content tool is making it possible to create more effective messaging, not just saving you time. 

So the question for all of you using generative AI: Are you seeing just efficiency increases? Or, are you also seeing evidence of effectiveness? Generative AI, if you’re using it well, should mean improvements in both areas – not just the former.

Here’s another question that I get, and see frequently elsewhere: “What will be the impact of AI on marketing this year?”

And then there’s the follow-up question: “What will be the impact of AI on marketing in five years?”

Advances in AI come every single day. It’s not slowing down.

You’ll start seeing a surge in personalization, with marketing campaigns tailored to individuals.

The novelty of generative AI will start to fade, and the focus is going to shift to effectiveness and refinement.

In other words, it’s not just about the copy you create with Generative AI, but how (if?) it impacts your KPIs.

Is your AI-created copy and content increasing your open rate? Do you see an uptick in leads? Are you closing deals faster?

In five years (probably less), competition will intensify and content will become commoditized. Standing out will require deeper personalization and relevance.

Marketing will undergo a significant transformation. I know I keep saying this, but I’ll keep saying it because it’s going to happen. Don’t get caught off guard or left behind.

Imagine delivering bespoke campaigns to your prospects and customers. Imagine being on the receiving end of an email or ad that’s been created just for you.

Imagine campaigns with dynamic content tailored to individual preferences — specific preferences that your AI tools quickly detect and for which they can make campaign recommendations.

Marketers who succeed will have figured out how to “talk” to each member of their target audience, and to do so at scale.

Are you a business owner or entrepreneur looking to improve your go-to-market launch process for better results? If so, you’re not alone. Many companies, from mature organizations to super new startups, are constantly searching for ways to optimize their product launch process to increase sales and improve customer satisfaction.

However, one of the biggest mistakes companies make is treating all of their prospects and customers the same. This approach is not only ineffective, but it can also come across as disingenuous and unauthentic, which is one of the hardest things to fake in today’s world of ubiquitous AI.

So, what’s the solution? Data. Data is the key to understanding your customers’ needs and behaviors and creating a personalized experience for each individual. However, data is often siloed in organizations, making it difficult to access and utilize effectively.

But, as a business owner or entrepreneur developing a product or minimum viable product (MVP), you may be in a position of power without even realizing it. A lot of people collect data that they don’t know how to use, sometimes relying on demographics to target their audience.

Instead, businesses should focus on behavior-based data first. People are who they want to be behind a browser, and the context of their interaction with a product or service is more important than their demographic information. By identifying and tracking thousands of customer traits that cover behaviors like browsing preferences, habits, and event preferences, you can create a model that generates predictions based on collected traits. You can then start to understand the key traits that predict a purchase, or a final “No, we’re not interested.”

As you grow your customer data set, you can start to rank the weight associated with different behaviors and traits. This allows you to understand your customers’ needs in context and provide them with a personalized experience that addresses their specific problems and pain points.

If you want to improve your go-to-market launch process and achieve better results, start by understanding your customers’ behaviors and needs; don’t treat all your customers the same. Utilize data to create a personalized experience for each individual, and you’ll be on your way toward optimizing the messaging you use to launch a new product. And, remember, when it comes to AI, think of it as statistical analysis on steroids, and focus on behavior-based data first.

Sales prospecting is hard. First-time outreach is not for the faint of heart. There’s a pervasive — let’s call it dislike — for cold callers. Curiously, the warring generations (Baby Boomers and millennials) both agree in their aversion to answering the phone to cold callers, whether at work or at home. 

Aside from simply ignoring the cold call, people’s manners go out the window: a ton of them answer and hang up, say they’ll call back but don’t, some even prank you, and of course, demand to “remove me from your list!”  

It’s not surprising it’s led to the belief that cold calling is dead. It’s not. But it has certainly evolved.

Prospecting is still one of the pillars of your pipeline

Sales teams can’t really afford to remove this tool yet from their prospecting toolbox. What are the replacements? Social media DMs? LinkedIn outreach? Emails? Robo-prospecting? Pre-recorded messages? 

These methods can and do work, but with mixed results — it depends on what works most effectively for your prospects, which takes trial and error.

And none of these methods have the finesse of a human on the other end of old-school cold calls. At this time, while we’re all on limited contact with people, cold calls might be appreciated and come back in style, especially when it’s done right. Everyone’s craving contact — yes, even introverts. The cold call just has to be done right. 

Think of it as a challenge to sales teams: a cold call is not for everyone. Prospecting brings out the best sales professionals who have conversation and people skills. (Side note: the best sales people also know how to listen.)

You have a script, yes, but this isn’t a template you write and send out in blasts via email or LinkedIn. This is a one-on-one conversation with your prospect. 

And unless you already have a robust pipeline of pre-qualified leads, you can’t get out of prospecting. 62% of leaders say building a pipeline is harder than closing a pipeline. And like all aspects of building a pipeline, cold calls aren’t exercises for improv. It takes planning and discipline. 

A thick skin, too, of course. Take your high from your wins and let that fuel your next dials. 

Along with good practices. 

The fundamentals of sales

Cold calls can fail, yes. That’s true for any other sales and marketing tool. According to Gong.io research, “the percentage of reps attaining quota on the average B2B sales team has steadily declined over roughly the same time frame. Once standing at 63%, it’s now down to 50%.”

Any sales tactic can fall flat. When it does, it’s not because it’s an outdated or hokey method. Witness the worst FB ads, cold emails and landing pages you’ve seen. Those are digital and current and they still fail. 

Likewise, cold calls fail when the sales rep fails at the fundamentals of sales. Dismissiveness that cold calls are outdated and dead is quite dangerous: it makes you lose sight of what made it work in the first place. 

Classic: Targeted and personalized

Targeted and personalized. These are the fundamentals of a cold call. It hasn’t changed. If your sales team knows their target personas, they nail the pitch, making their target listen and actually care about what’s being said from the preface to the call to action. They understand and personalize the value proposition for each persona’s role psychology. 

When done right, this catering to that persona’s needs peels away the prospect’s objections and builds strong rapport that leads to success.

Evolution: Multi-channel

Single channel is done, multi-channel is in. It’s the new fundamental of sales. If you want to call something dead, this is it: single-channel prospecting. Of course it doesn’t make sense if you stick to one tool when you have a whole toolbox. Using each tool by itself is outdated and inefficient. 

Prospecting in today’s age of digital transformation means you can capture your target audience’s attention before you even make the call. For example, sending an email first as an icebreaker, an introduction to request or schedule the call. 

And afterwards, too. You can easily blend traditional prospecting with modern touches: combine initial emails (or LinkedIn messages) with real gifts/gift cards and handwritten notes utilizing online delivery services and gifting platforms. 

That’s multi-touch, multi-channel outreach, and companies do see ROI in more meetings and better response rates. 

Think strategically and creatively about how to catch — and keep — your target persona’s attention long enough for them to be convinced to say yes. Use multi-channel prospecting with consistency throughout those channels. 

Fortunately, we now have better sales technology and AI to help make this quicker, better, more effective. Less painful on both sides of the line. 

Prospecting + AI = powerful cold calls

Prospecting means targeting very specific buyers in an account. 

This is where AI comes in: sales teams can get relevant, full-picture insights on who to call, the right phone numbers of the right people, and who exactly they are — their roles and pain points — so that the sales rep can have a personalized script before and during the entire outreach. 

AI also helps populate that list with warm, marketing-qualified leads in the first place. 

This is what differentiates winning cold calls from failed cold calls. We need to stop dismissing cold calling, and instead find and use the right tools to make every cold call an effective part of a multi-channel campaign. 

I won’t write a how-to for cold calling here. Xant has a great framework of 6 Ps. 

• Preface – Provide an introduction
• Personalize – Share something to build rapport
• Position – State why the prospect should care
• Pain/Product – Uncover the pain or explain a cool feature and key benefit
• Proof – Reference a customer success story
• Prescribe – Recommend next steps

And I like their wrap-up of what can make or break a cold call: “Reps shouldn’t say the same script every time, and it’s often odd when reps try to bring up things that are too personal to their prospect. This limits chances for a successful lead generation.”

You can see the importance of personalization and customer data in each of the six Ps so you can stay on the fine line of impressive and not crossing to creepy territory.

Your prospects want their problems solved, make money, and look good while doing that. AI can give you the insights you need to communicate how your product or service can do both for your buyer. 

But don’t force it — give value instead

You have data and insights, but use that to build connections instead of jamming a product down a prospect’s throat. That never works. Good salespeople can hold you riveted right there on the opposite side of their booth at the supermarket or on your doorstep while they talk at your doorway. That hasn’t changed. 

They do that when they speak to you. It’s the same over the phone. Cold calling is effective when done correctly, non-robotic, conversational, magnetic, non-salesy. Remember that today’s buyers have more information at their fingertips too: more than 70% of the buying decision occurs before speaking with a salesperson. 

Cold calling is essentially outbound, but it works best when employing inbound methodology by meeting our prospects halfway through their problem-solving process. Where are they in the buyer’s journey and what are they looking for at that precise moment when they pick up the call? 

With customer data and behavior insights gathered and updated by AI, we can give value. 

The aim is not to sell, but to give value. With research and initial outreach, cold calls are no longer cold but warm enough, with your prospect receptive to you setting the stage for the next steps in the sales funnel, as long as your SDRs employ relevant, insight-driven scripts for an effective conversation during the call. 

Operate with a mindset of a team player and a scientist

What’s clear is that cold calling won’t be effective unless a sales team has done their homework — targeting personas, targeting a cold list of prospects who fit those personas, and collaborating with marketing to get the messaging right (which should be about prospects and their pain points, not about the salesperson). 

Prospecting is a lonely job, with every SDR going through their list on their lonesome. But it’s a team effort within and across teams to share insights and test communication methods and marketing tactics that work best for their prospects.

We’re all scrambling to adapt to a new world, one that’s turned upside down. Marketing has changed in the interim, and perhaps permanently. As with anything, some companies adapt quickly, while others find it more challenging to pivot. We can look to those doing a superb job right now to take lessons and help us adapt our own strategies and plans. 

For some companies, it’s business as usual in some ways. But at the same time, it’s not at all business as usual at all. 

Crisis marketing has evolved to include goodwill marketing. There are delicate nuances marketers should consider and apply to their messaging.

Priorities change

Suddenly, things that mattered a lot, now matter little. The vacation we’d been planning on this summer may have gone up in smoke, but that’s of little consequence when what matters most is staying healthy. 

Everyone’s movements are a lot more restricted. Even stepping outside has to be absolutely essential. If you’re still working, commuting to the office to work — unless you’re an essential worker — is no longer part of the day. Standard operating procedures have radically changed. 

Restaurants that have pivoted to a takeout model, or grocery stores that limit consumers and require social distancing. Everyday errands are put off or take more time and are tinged with a dystopian feel, given the masks we need to wear and precautions we need to take. 

Well-being over profit

Even with the tone-deaf promotions we still receive from some brands, it’s heartening to see other brands rise up as efficient and empathetic leaders in communication and public service. 

They’re role models in retaining their customer base, and in some cases attracting more customers through their goodwill and proactiveness in taking care of their people — and beyond. 

British Airways (BA) immediately comes to mind, furloughing 30,000 of their employees with pay. The travel industry has ground to a halt, but BA will not have temporary layoffs like some companies in Europe have done. Unlike US airlines with billions in bailout, European governments have none for their airlines. Virgin Atlantic owner Richard Branson will invest $250 million into Virgin Group companies to protect jobs. 

Brands also announced closing their stores to discourage shoppers from venturing outside their homes, supporting community health and safety. Apple, Under Armour, and Urban Outfitters are among many brands that closed stores but continue to pay their employees. 

Compassion and honesty

Compassion and honesty are also the new standards. From the Harvard Business Review: “People will remember brands for their acts of good in a time of crisis, particularly if done with true heart and generosity.”

It may not be possible for your company/brand to manufacture ventilators or create personal protective equipment (PPE) at scale, or at all. That’s OK. But champion those who are, and craft messaging that is acutely aware of our world, and the fear so many people are experiencing. Read the room. 

Panda Express has Panda Cares and its Community Care Fund, donating $2 million for PPEs in local hospitals in southern California. Millions are being committed to COVID-19 research and response from brands like Nike, Walmart, and the Gates Foundation. The Four Seasons are giving free rooms to doctors, nurses, and other healthcare professionals and personnel. 

Facebook has a $100 million program for small businesses impacted by COVID-19. 

These giants and their millions aside, you’ve probably heard of local businesses doing their part, donating free meals and drinks to frontliners. They may not be in the news, but you can bet people are taking notice. Local neighborhoods also have Facebook groups where businesses can post about calls for donations or volunteers. 

This is a time for community, and your community will notice which brands and businesses answered the call without cringe-inducing, obvious motives, like free subscriptions that don’t differ from free trials with payment at the end. 

Offer real help and support, not products. 

Consistent relevance 

Baltimore’s Hotel Revival has turned its first-floor bar into a donation and distribution center to support the Baltimore Service Industry Fund and the Baltimore Restaurant Relief Group. 

Kroger updated their store hours across the country especially for sanitation and for elderly/vulnerable shoppers. 

News about the coronavirus is free online on The New Yorker. 

Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian bought billboards in Times Square to post information about COVID-19. In the same vein, Guinness posted a message of longevity and well-being instead of the usual celebrations and pub gatherings for St. Patrick’s Day. 

You need relevance and creativity in how you position your brand on the side of the good, by actively taking part and/or sending out relevant messages. Stress the guidelines we’ve been asked to adopt, like social distancing and staying home. 

Stress “feel-good” content. Lots of people need a break from the world. Give them some levity, when you can. A prime example: Amazon made kids’ shows free on Prime Video. Pun intended. Flipboard is also curating all the virtual tours and live streams you can take. 

This is the time to overcommunicate, but do it right

Do your research like usual. 

In addition to reading the room, also monitor what’s going on inside of it. Continue tracking customer/user behavior to gain insights about your audience in real-time. 

It may not be possible to build a dashboard to measure sentiment and consumption trends (that would be ideal), but you can survey your customers to get their feedback or invite them to share their stories. If you already have brand advocates, you could start there first. Do a temperature check; don’t just make assumptions. 

And don’t forget to plan for when we are on the other side of this, because we eventually will be. 

Be visible. Be vocal. 

Our inboxes have been blowing up with notices on how the brands that matter most to us are responding to the crisis. It’s important to keep the lines of communication going. Don’t rely on just one statement to be your response. Stay in touch with people. 

Email and post on social media more frequently than before. As for the latter, social media algorithms streamline feeds: people won’t see all your posts, and if you post once a day, you won’t be visible at all. 

Get comfortable with straddling the line between helpful and promotional. It’s part of instilling confidence in customers, which is important in this time of so much uncertainty. Telling your customer base that you’re taking control of what you can — like Crate&Barrel, Macy’s, Target, and other big stores do when they tell customers about their health and safety guidelines — means a lot. 

Subtlety works, too.

If your brand matches a voice of subtlety, you can use subtext in your messaging, so long as you are acknowledging the new reality we live in. 

You might have seen Peet’s Coffee’s ad about coffee shipped to your door within 24 hours of roasting. No mention of COVID-19, but the subtext of getting great coffee right at home is there. 

Crisis marketing is goodwill marketing when you lead with empathy

Can you help? There’s a time when you can talk business and a time when you should definitely shut up. The most tone-deaf marketing messaging flying around is travel promotions. 

Times of crisis are when your goals are no longer on the board. It’s not about you, unless it is: for example, if you happen to manufacture sanitizing wipes. 

What can your brand address, to truly help? Because that’s what you should offer. It doesn’t even have to be heroic. Look at Peet’s posting about their 30% discount for new subscriptions to their coffee delivery. Coffee delivery is a bigger deal these days before, it helps the brand stay relevant, and there’s a good chance they’re attracting new customers while they’re at it. 

Right now, it’s about humility and helpfulness during crises larger than business, larger than us, and our goals. It’s about building and participating in the community.

In today’s crowded marketing landscape, simply broadcasting your message and hoping it sticks is no longer effective (and if it was, count yourself lucky, and don’t bank on it happening again). To drive real engagement and sales, you need to establish deep connections with your audience. This is where affinity scoring becomes crucial.

Affinity scoring uses the power of AI to measure the “hidden” similarities between your brand and your customers. It reveals a numerical score from 0-100 (much like a lead score) that quantifies the strength of relationships – for example, between a description of your product and a customer’s LinkedIn profile (or publicly available data). The higher the score, the more your brand resonates with a particular audience.

This technique enables you to identify your ideal customers and fine-tune your messaging to be hyper-relevant to them. It also equips you to uncover emotional triggers and values that you can align your brand with.

For example, say you work for a mortgage company that generates an affinity score of 85 when matched to John Doe, a contact in your CRM. This indicates John has significant familiarity with mortgages – perhaps he even works in the industry. You now know that financial language will resonate with him, and therefore you can craft targeted outreach (like a marketing or sales campaign) highlighting how you’ll save him time or money. You have data-driven evidence that you don’t have to nurture John in order to educate him on your pitch – you can meet him where he already stands, so to speak.

The psychology behind this is simple: people are more receptive when you mirror their interests and frame of reference. Just like building rapport in personal relationships, establishing common ground makes your audience more open to your influence.

And here’s the best part – affinity scoring methods are driven by cold, hard data, not mere gut feelings. Benchmarking against empirical evidence of what resonates can significantly lower the risk associated with your marketing efforts.

To implement this, start by breaking down your brand into discrete elements like mission statements, emotional triggers, and functional benefits. There are now, more than ever, AI tools that can help you measure the affinity of these elements with prospects across your total addressable market.

The resulting insights allow you to segment your audience, identify mismatches between brand and audience perceptions, and optimize both strategic positioning and tactical campaigns.

Winning attention in nearly any given industry demands true audience insights. With affinity scoring, you have a powerful data-driven tool to cut through the noise and make meaningful connections.

When it comes to marketing and sales outreach, the general wisdom is that the closer you are to targeting an audience of ideal customers, the more likely you are to convert them. The more you convert, the more money you make. This seems pretty straightforward – if you can figure out who your ideal customers are.

Segmentation or lead scores?

Segmentation is one way to categorize customers for more focused targeting, but it’s easier said than done because there are many ways to categorize customers – from demographics to psychographics to geography (and so much more).

In our experience, the most efficient and effective way to segment customers in order to maximize profit potential is by lead scores. How do you define a lead score? A very basic definition is this: It’s a number assigned to a customer that reflects the likelihood they will act in response to a specific message or product offering. The higher the number, the higher the likelihood the customer will engage – and buy.

A customer’s lead score can also change, based on the product or message. When we work with clients we ask them to be very specific about the goal they want to achieve with a specific product or campaign. If the goal is to upsell customers on a new product, we will want to identify potential leads more likely to purchase sooner than those who are likely to wait (for a variety of reasons).

Lead scores and the buyer’s journey

The approach to converting early adopters won’t be the same as nurturing late adopters and moving the latter group into a “consideration” stage. Late adopters need more time, more evidence, and likely a drop in price before they’ll act. To no one’s surprise, they won’t be ideal customers if you launch a new product. So how do you identify early adopters?

Predicting behavior to focus efforts

Lead scores can “predict” which customers are likely to take action and those who won’t. Here’s an example: If a sales team can predict who is likely to respond to a cold call or an email, it follows that they can prioritize who to target to optimize their time and increase sales. If you’ve never thought lead scores could make a difference, I’m here to tell you that we’ve seen them work for our clients.

I won’t get into the specifics about how the Wrench lead score algorithm works, but I will say that we’ve made it easy for clients to upload contact and customer lists via a CSV file or a CRM integration. Wrench’s web app provides a straightforward method for uploading product or brand descriptions. From there, the Wrench platform quickly generates lead scores so a marketing or sales team can quickly prioritize who to target.

Lead scores make the most of customer data

Using lead scores, one of our clients found that only 17% of the contacts in their database fit their customer profile. This insight gave the client the information they needed to prioritize high-scoring contacts that were more likely to convert, saving them time and resources. Put another way, if you knew which 20% of your customers were likely to convert, you would know where to spend more of your time and attention and see results faster. Wrench’s Lead Score AI feature can increase a conversion rate up to 5x, and in a highly competitive landscape, this can be a significant advantage.

When the AI buzz settles, we’ll all realize that yes, the robots are not only coming but are actually already here, and here to stay. They may not be ubiquitous yet but they will be. And they’re not our enemies. While that doesn’t make all AI “good,” there’s no denying that AI helps us do things at scale, and can do it well.

Doing it well includes the aspect we usually associate as the downside of AI: it’s, well, robotic. AI-generated content still has a long way to go. But in time it will be less and less “robotic” helping brands generate good (maybe even great) content while employing the advantages of automation and personalization.  

Artificial intelligence on emotional language and cues

AI helps us collect, build, and act on, a huge bank of emotion-related data. And personalization — if it’s going to be effective — must invoke human emotion. 

AI will continue to understand human emotion better, building better, longer brand relationships with customers through its learning and analyzing capability for human emotions and motivations. 

While human teams are still the best balance against AI’s biases, AI scores better than humans when it comes to detecting and deploying emotional language and cues.  

According to Deloitte research, 60% of consumers use emotional language to describe their favorite brand connections and 70% expect feedback as part of a brand relationship. 

Brand relationships mean real connections that come from emotionally relevant and memorable content rather than just purchase or search histories. Cookies used to be the sales and marketing cues, but they’re on the way out. Now all the big data businesses collect can be sifted to create portraits of customers so that they can give personalized experiences in real-time, according to behavior patterns and emotional language and cues.  

AI can collect and make intelligent assumptions based on these patterns and cues to deliver content or experiences that match a customer’s emotional state:

• Browsing too fast: interested but probably looking for something or bored. Can be captured by a lead magnet of an infographic rather than an ebook 
• Deeply immersed in the article or the catalogue: will want more information — or perhaps ready for a buying decision. Might be receptive to a discount.  

Back in 2017, way before their biggest scandal, Facebook had a controversial leaked memo, telling advertisers they can detect — and target — emotions such as insecurity and feelings of worthlessness. 

While that can make you fear Big Brother scenarios of AI taking over and knowing too much, the advantages for more effective communication are there. 

We can prompt responses with the right nudges according to the right emotions. 

That’s where AI comes in. It’s the stuff of science fiction, now in our current reality. 

Emotional insights for empathetic communication

Emotional and psychological principles in marketing aren’t new. Brands have always applied psychological associations to their strategies and their very structure, from their logos to their slogans. 

Famous examples are: 

• Colors for logos and websites. Black for sophistication and reliability. Blue for friendliness and sociability. That explains all the social media platforms and financial institutions in black and blue. 
• Powerful conversion phrases. The psychology of headlines and using evocative words everywhere, from subject lines to CTAs and social media captions. 

Colors and words can be considered cosmetic. They’re what your target audience sees. 

Emotional understanding through your target audience’s actions, that’s new. It’s what your audience does. 

Colors and words invoke emotions. AI tech can recognize, and help us respond to, customer emotions. 

Voice 

Licenses for Israel-based Beyond Verbal are already out. Their emotions analytics software’s patented technology helps call centers to personalize and refine their interactions with customers according to the emotional content of an individual’s voice and intonation. 

Vocal biomarkers recognize how we say something, not just what we say. 

Written content

Ixy, a messaging app marketed as a “personal AI mediator,” tells a user how he/she comes across to others based on her text. This aims to remove our email and chat anxiety. Grammarly recently already added “tone” to their app, telling you if you sound neutral, optimistic, admiring, and so on. 

You can see the possibilities of emotion-tracking not just for customer insights but for better delivery of our own messaging. 

I certainly wouldn’t want to send a neutral-sounding email when I aim to uplift or inspire my customers, would I? 

How good are these emotion-tracking AI getting?

The prevalence of the entire gamut of human emotion online gives AI plenty of data to be intelligent enough. With voice recognition joining the fray, the possibilities and opportunities for more insight just ballooned. Microsoft’s Xiaolce in China, Apple’s Siri, Google Assistant, and Amazon’s Alexa all use social and emotional cues. 

You don’t bond with a robotic-sounding AI. You bond with AI that can understand you, talk to you and make you happy. 

This intelligence of emotional AI has helped develop conversational UI already being used to alleviate loneliness in the elderly and as confidential therapists for soldiers with PTSD and others with mental health concerns.

If you think that’s unbelievable, you have to remember that AI trounces us in pattern recognition. This is an already well-known advantage of using AI in sales and marketing, predictive analytics from all the data patterns AI collates. 

Emotions manifest in patterns: facial expressions, visual and audio cues– all these are patterns AI can track and recognize, and they do. 

Gartner VP of Research Annette Zimmerman says, “By 2022, your personal device will know more about your emotional state than your own family.” This was in 2018. And we’re still on this trajectory. 

AI helps human leaders and teams connect the dots

Humans — (maybe not all of us!) — are really good at being empathetic, nuanced, and cutting through bias (among other things), but we’re limited with what we can hold in our heads, and while the super creative among us can connect seemingly disparate dots and come up with interesting ideas to pursue, it’s really tough to connect 1,000 or 10,000,000 dots! 

Business decisions 

AI gives CEOs and team leaders greater visibility; you need to know where this or that project is. Access your project management dashboard. You need to know the buzzword on this or that niche, your most visited pages, or your customer’s top-selling product? AI will have an answer, even if it takes some dialing in to get to the right one. 

This helps leaders apply their own human empathy and expertise to make critical decisions.  

Project or campaign agility

With use and constant iteration and supervision, human teams can help AI become truly intelligent. In time, every AI tools will have a valuable data bank for the logic needed to match its capabilities in speed and scale. 

Human teams need that intelligence, speed, and scale. AI needs human intuition, empathy, and creativity. When combined, AI + human team is much more effective for all marketing and sales campaigns, with the ability to adapt and truly respond to human emotion. 

Defining every brand’s value proposition

Emotional inputs give brands the ability to make deeper, more personal connections with customers. 

We recently discussed the need to adjust your value proposition, and emotional factors can help with that, giving sales and marketing teams prompts toward emotional cues that can help communicate value and great user experience in all strategies and campaigns.  

Are you screening and strategizing for emotional states? 

It’s another facet of buyer intent: emotional state. What do your customers usually feel when they interact with your brand? And how do you want them to feel? I agree with Richard van Hooijdonk: “If a marketer can get you to cry, he can get you to buy.”

That’s enough to trigger a whole slew of ideas. 

As with any ambitious initiative, start small with a pilot, and build out a program when you know what works; incorporating emotion can be tricky so it’s best to test usage. 

And don’t neglect to be transparent with your customers on how you use their information, including emotions. 

You need human teams. Emotional AI is effective aid for human teams when it’s built by emotionally intelligent humans.

We’ve all heard the stories of how badly AI can get things wrong. Just witness MS Word’s spell and grammar checker. And the content bubble that forms around you on Facebook and other social media platforms.

Perhaps now more than ever even lay people can notice the power of AI. We’re stuck at home and using our smart devices to work, study or play. More of us will also notice AI’s peccadilloes.  

Algorithms are only as good as the humans who create them. And humans can try, but can’t prevent, having their own biases. AI develops its own, which can lead to wrong decisions that can be disastrous if the humans who make them rely solely on AI data and don’t balance the biases. 

This is AI’s weakness. Machine learning can angle toward a bias as it takes in information. That’s natural. But the fact that AI can get things wrong shouldn’t prevent us from using it. To the contrary, we need to continue using AI so we can be aware of what can go wrong. 

We discover, anticipate and intercept. 

AI should never be 100% in control. It shouldn’t be. Especially in marketing and sales where your goal is to communicate with human customers. We still need humans (human-in-the-loop) to make decisions, and judgment calls, and to pick up and execute on nuances. 

Understanding the weakness of intelligent systems

It’s important to understand AI so we can utilize it properly and avoid potential faultiness. 

AI does research on a scale humans can’t. That’s why we need it. 

We only need to remember that AI researches what we tell it to, and it uses data already available unless we teach it to build better data sets from more data inputs. 

AI is naturally biased. Why? Because AI functions and builds its knowledge through avenues with inbuilt bias. 

Data

AI starts and ends with data. It uses data to deliver data. 

The issue is that data will always be dated and influenced by other data. This is where your AI might inadvertently become biased because we have data that backs up biases, from the innocuous to the egregious.

Interaction

Siri and Alexa are both AI that leverage user interaction to become a smart assistant. Even Gmail depends on interaction to know what emails people open and deem safe. 

In March 2016, Microsoft launched Tay, a chatbot for casual and playful conversation. Within 24 hours, users turned Tay into a racist by feeding it with racist remarks. 

This type of machine learning is perhaps the most prone to bias, and it needs consistent tempering to truly be intelligent. For instance, it’s annoying when Gmail insists on marking an email as unsafe, even though you know it’s safe, and smart homes can be annoyingly presumptuous in turning off the lights at certain times or when you haven’t moved, right? Do you need to flap your arms now and then when you’re reading? 

Personalization

More widely known now because of recent scandals, you can get stuck inside an information bubble when algorithms dependent on personalization go unchecked. 

Also known as “confirmation bias,” it uses your likes, opens, purchases, and shared content to confirm the content you want. The AI algorithm will keep feeding you that same content, related to your “confirmations” and queries. 

From a business perspective, a big store can lose sales if its AI keeps pushing baby items to a man who bought baby clothes once. For a baby shower. For someone else’s baby. 

Goals

This is where Google has finally cracked down. It used to be that pages with the most views and clicks dominated the search results, even though they were low-quality resources for the queries. 

Goal-biased AI serves up content that achieves goals (clicks and revenue from clicks) instead of useful content. Machine learning can drift toward stereotyping simply from aiming for click-through behavior. 

AI unchecked leads to faulty conclusions

Knowing the biases above, it’s a big mistake when organizations assume their data is already complete and accurate for their market. This leads to the AI data naturally developing bias from relying on data of the organization and its customers’ past behaviors and inputs.  

In turn, this leads to the greater threat of decisions being made or content being pushed based on this biased data, leading to lost opportunities, overlooked weaknesses, or outright embarrassing situations. 

According to DataRobot research, 42% of AI professionals in the US and UK are “very” or “extremely” concerned about AI bias. 

I’m quite surprised that the percentage isn’t bigger. 

Balancing AI biases

Perhaps the concern isn’t as high because AI’s help is tremendous in comparison to its potential faults. Companies that use AI saw a 50% increase in their leads, according to Harvard Business Review study in 2016.  

AI takes care of a mountain of data retrieval, analyses and organization that would take a human team years or even decades to accomplish. It gives marketing and sales teams clear insight so they can establish real connections rather than praying for luck with guesswork. 

Every business should maximize the benefits of their AI technology through consistent and proactive human direction as a check against biases. 

Feed your AI a balanced diet of information

Truly intelligent AI needs as many varying inputs as possible. Combining these results gives better insights. For example, Wrench doesn’t just look at an organization’s data, but looks outside and around, for complex, and always updated insights. 

You need human involvement

Sales and marketing teams are meant to use AI, not to be replaced by AI. Even chatbots are fed by human content creators. 

A prime example of humans saving the day is Google’s “Smart Compose”, introduced in May 2018. Smart Compose “predicts what users intend to write in emails and auto-completes sentences.” Six months later, developers recalibrated it to stop suggesting gender-based pronouns. You can get “you” or “it” but never “him” or “her.”

They recognized AI weakness in historical, biased data: i.e., prompts for meeting an executive and using “he” or “him” because AI assumes the executive is male. 

It was a human research scientist who prompted the change. He typed, “I am meeting an investor next week.” and saw Smart Compose suggest this follow-up question: “Do you want to meet him?” The investor was a woman. 

While not all errors are equal, getting gender wrong, especially in a high-stakes context, can be very poor form. 

AI data alone should not determine decisions

While humans are not ideal decision-makers because of our own biases, neither is AI. The insights your AI delivers should help but should never be the only determining factor in decisions. 

Consider cinematic AI, which can only access data on previous blockbusters and can completely miss the potential in films that don’t match the criteria of what AI has found to be “blockbuster material.” Where would we be if human producers only made decisions according to AI’s suggestions? 

Consider the AI of most sales tools. Aside from the obvious bias through historical sales data, lead scoring can also make organizations conflate lead generation and lead scoring. AI spits out the leads that fit customer personas, and then companies make assumptions that these are their ideal customers. 

Sales and marketing teams can immediately recognize the need to confirm and bring about lead readiness first. 

Historical sales data is also only a minor, dispensable detail, since human teams understand the changing market as it happens, and can therefore send the right outreach and advertising to convert those whom AI lead scoring deemed unsuitable leads. 

The human aspect

We have AI, too. So to speak. Gut instinct, a shortcut we don’t even notice, intuition for those quick decisions and conclusions we can make without even thinking about it. This comes from experience, human creativity, and empathy. It comes from company values, personal integrity, and market dynamics. 

Your sales team’s ability to read between the lines of a dubious customer’s comments — that’s not something AI can do yet. All this information is — to use a current buzzword — transmitted from human to human, and is not accessible to AI.   

But we could really use AI because we, as humans, are not the best decision-makers. We just need to understand that the AI models we create can be just as faulty. We need to remember that the integrity of AI stands on foundations we ourselves build. Sometimes these foundations are solid, and sometimes they’re little more than mud. 

As we, as a society, continue to evolve as a whole, so will AI. And there’s no denying the power of AI in processing the data that is available to it. 

So human teams should continue to utilize AI. AI bias can stick to little-suspected places, where you think AI should be or is doing well. In using AI, we should seek to discover biases and consistently correct them, teaching AI to be better. That’s how it should be.

In the realm of B2B marketing, continuously refining demand generation strategies is necessary. Insight Partners’ July 2023 white paper, “B2B Demand Gen Benchmarks – Your Top 3 Questions Answered,” yielded some valuable strategies for enhancing B2B marketing efforts, which are worth resurfacing as planning for 2024 gets underway. Here’s an overview of key insights, distilled for practical application.

Building a Strong Organic Demand Base

The cornerstone of effective B2B demand generation is SEO content and leveraging B2B Software Review Sites. It’s about creating content that engages your audience and performs well in search engine rankings to attract organic traffic. Additionally, B2B Software Review Sites emerge as pivotal platforms for establishing trust and increasing visibility. (HubSpot lists some good ones here.)

Utilizing Paid Digital for Traction

An essential strategy includes integrating paid digital channels, including paid search and social media. This method provides immediate traction and, when scaled appropriately, can effectively broaden your reach. The focus here is on intelligent targeting – reaching the right audience with precision. (Here’s a good read on paid ads and targeting the right folks.)

The Role of Events and Trade Shows

Hosting events and participating in relevant trade shows is another key strategy brought up in the white paper. Though these can be costly, face-to-face interactions are invaluable for forging strong relationships, enhancing brand presence, and directly engaging with potential clients. Events offer unique opportunities for personal connection and brand promotion, especially in an era where remote work is widespread and in-person interactions are not as ubiquitous as they used to be.

Conversion as a Primary Focus

A critical shift in strategy is placing a greater emphasis on conversions…but what’s interesting, is where. The goal is to transform website visitors into engaged leads and ultimately into loyal customers, from initial interest to final action. This means keeping leads engaged and building trust. (Here’s a good read on creating content for every stage of the buyer’s journey.)

Consistency in Messaging

The paper highlights the importance of maintaining consistent and relevant messaging throughout the buyer’s journey. Every interaction with potential customers should reflect a unified message that addresses their specific needs and challenges. Consistency in messaging is key to building understanding and trust with your audience. This is easier said than done, which is why taking the time to build a messaging framework can be enormously valuable. (Check out this article on tips for creating a messaging framework.)

Implementing the strategies above involves more than applying tactics; it requires adopting a holistic approach that aligns with the entire buyer’s journey, from initial engagement to conversion. By incorporating these insights, marketers can expect to see an improvement in their demand-generation efforts. Now’s the time to think ahead to create more effective and efficient marketing outcomes in 2024.

The world has changed in such a short period of time. There is no playbook for what we’re going through, except for the sensible thing of acknowledging this time in our marketing and sales strategies.

We’ve got to keep going, but we’ve got to it differently, reading the room and adjusting our message and outreach to match our customer’s needs. 

Life might not go back to normal anytime soon. There’s been talk about how the country will have a new normal, and it will probably “resume” in stages over an extended period of time. What this means for us is we can’t stick to crisis management.

Pre-COVID and post-COVID 

Crisis management is for achieving some modicum of stability amidst incredibly choppy waters. When it has no end in sight, adjusting replaces managing. We accept this new environment we need to work in (we have no choice), so we need to think about ways we can prepare to face it with competence now and later on. 

Later: the post-COVID era. What we knew pre-COVID might no longer apply. Marketers and sales reps need to consider this and think of strategies to keep businesses shipshape for the other side. 

The nautical references can’t be helped. This is turbulent water we’re currently navigating, and helping brands stay visible and relevant is like steering the ship to safety. 

And like a ship in the middle of a storm, we feel buffeted by so many factors. Marketing and sales goals for brand messaging and dissemination currently feel trivial in the midst of all the government updates and posts about safety and health, and concern for the frontliners and the vulnerable. Can you still do marketing? Yes. But not like usual. 

Adapting to changes

Your customers will change. 

Marketing and sales teams can get really familiar with what their target audiences want, and AI can help track customer behavior, building your personas into robust data banks for predicting and answering your customer demands. 

That familiarity and expertise on your audience takes months or years to build. At this time, and whenever a crisis hits, it all goes out the window. Your customers will change, either slightly or significantly. So your understanding of your customer should also stay agile to the changes and evolve. 

This isn’t really new: agility is essential in marketing. What you planned from customer data in June won’t necessarily be effective in July, even if it’s still summer. 

Nobody might care right now 

With their priorities changed, how relevant do you think your messaging would be? All the PR releases and marketing campaigns scheduled need to be re-evaluated for postponement or editing, to match what your audience considers important right now. 

Tone-deaf promotions reveal the brands that didn’t bother, with the ads or email campaigns rolled out despite current events. That’s a waste of money and resources. People won’t even see that content because it’s incongruous with the current landscape. If anything, it’s damaging because people remember ridiculousness. 

If you’re really unlucky, your content might get screencapped, posted on Twitter with a witty caption, and go viral from there. 

What do they care about? 

People are low-key (or outright) panicking right now. They may need distraction, and they might need relevant information and real help in addressing things that can alleviate their anxieties. You need to be part of the solution, or at least part of the public consciousness right now, sharing the same thoughts and concerns. 

As an example of the latter, Chevrolet has ads reminding everyone to stay home: “We’ll find new roads tomorrow.” 

It doesn’t have to be about donating money. It can be content related to your service or product but still relevant, like the simple reminder from Chevrolet, an article about clothing materials one can turn into protective gear from a clothing retail store or a how-to guide on financial savviness from a financial adviser or financial institution. 

Granular-level and business-wide modifications

As you adapt to the current crisis with refined messaging, don’t forget to make modifications to the rest of your marketing assets and the customer journey. 

• Phone number and email: With WFH in effect, is your phone number still the same? Or should people email for customer support? 
• Website: Update landing pages with any discounts or promotions related to COVID-19. Checkout pages should have logistics information on shipping priorities and delays, if any. 
• Omnichannel: How’s your messaging on text messages and push notifications? Tone-deaf messaging here is just as awkward as if you ignored the current pandemic in your Facebook ads. 

Keep track of how this crisis is changing your business. Not all changes are detrimental. You might discover something you’ll want to retain moving forward. Start to strategize about that permanent change, making it happen in a way your customers will like, because you were consistent about it, making the transition smooth in all channels. 

Smart and fast for sustained impact

Strategy and consistency mean deep thinking, research, tracking, and planning, and at the same time not taking too long. Relevance is only relevant when it’s timely. 

Identify and implement strategies for immediate value realization

The Four Rs sales framework for COVID-19 from Boston Consulting Group (BCG) gives us time-bound action points we can adapt to for our marketing game plan. 

Applied to marketing, here’s my version of the Four Rs: 

Respond

• Initiate messaging that gives support to your customer’s current needs 
• Monitor news items and social media trends for opportunities in marketing and to see customers’ evolving needs as we all progress through the shelter-in-place protocols and beyond.  
• Keep track of customer behavior to offer timely messages for support and conversion. 
• Optimize your digital spaces for maximum brand effectiveness. 

Reflect 

• Keep doing Respond action points and account for revisions in the business game plans and personas
• Look for solutions and opportunities inwardly and at the competitive landscape as weaknesses and threats start to rear their heads

Reimagine 

• Update marketing game plans and product selling points entirely to match changed/changing user personas and customer behavior
• Track emerging trends in customer behavior and keep doing Respond and Reflect action points to refine SEO and produce content to match customer journeys. 
• Look for opportunities for your digital space and services to scale. 

Rebound

• Scale Respond action points to match the established new customer profiles and journeys. 
• Set up AI and machine learning capabilities for value-focused messaging and features (including pricing) 

The 4Rs move forward and look forward. You need to optimize and deploy, reflect, and scale. Preparedness pays. 14% of companies actually increased profits during the past four recessions. “This, too, shall pass” is definitely not the philosophy to take. Keep building.

How are you doing in your part of the world? How are your family and friends? How’s business going? You may not want to answer that. I get it. COVID-19 is particularly cruel to B2C businesses, but cruelty at a time like this has a way of spreading. It trickles to affect the entire chain of business; B2B companies included.

It’s a confusing time right now, all across the board. On an individual and personal level, people and teams are naturally reshuffling priorities, tasks, projects, and so on. 

We live in a different time right now, and it’s a lot to digest. Plans we set out in December or January are now derailed for the first quarter, the second quarter…and probably the third quarter…and let’s just say there’s a lot we don’t know.

There’s a pandemic. It’s hard to focus. When it comes to marketing and selling, it can be overwhelming to compartmentalize, to shift from your personal concerns (family, friends, quarantine) to professional (addressing customers’ concerns and reassuring them). 

In this post, I’m not offering advice — as marketers, we’ve all probably done and continue to do our research — but know that you are far from alone if you are finding yourself part of a concerted effort to reset the company strategy for the year.

There’s no playbook for what we’re going through. This is unprecedented. We’re living through what could well be a big note in our history for future generations. 

What it means to recalibrate when the sky is falling

It feels that way. But it isn’t. The best thing we can do is not to give in to panic or fear. We’re going to need our wits more than ever. When we’re calm, our clients and audiences are also calm. We all need assurance that those we depend on will forge ahead so we give that assurance. 

We adapt and align ourselves with a world struggling with a pandemic. 

Read the room: check for context 

Right about now you’re probably looking at your marketing and sales outreach plans with a different perspective, and that’s completely right. The content we worked so hard on to nurture prospects and customers through the buyer’s journey now seems…a bit hollow. 

While medical facilities the world over are desperate for personal protective equipment, it’s out of touch and callous to keep marketing and trying to sell a product or service without first or also addressing such a critical need. 

So maybe don’t hit the send button on a campaign right now. Or edit your messaging, and definitely do your part in contributing to the global, national, or local community effort. It’s called cause marketing. While the big brands and corporations in Chief Marketer’s article all have the money to fund big outreach and charity campaigns, even small brands can do their part. 

Strategies and plans that we planned for this year will need to be revisited and more than likely, scaled back. It’s not forever, it’s just temporary. Read the room, be relevant, or your message will disappear into oblivion. 

Think With Google has a succinct 5-point media principles for this time we currently live in. Context is number one, and the rest of the four stem from it. 

Context makes you reassess, makes you considerate, and makes you want to contribute. It makes you adapt faster. It helps you act right and treat what we’re going through as the current “new normal.” 

Continue giving support: be there 

A lot of business leaders are asking, ‘What do I do? How do I react? I need to keep doing what I do to make money…but I can’t do it the same way or I’ll lose money.”

Just like you’d launch a new product beta to innovators and then to early adopters (versus laggards), you can apply the same concept to a crisis situation — first, identify “the innovators,” whether they be customers, employees, or peers.

Ask them what they need to adapt. 

Ask innovators what they need to get through this; there’s a good chance what they need will be what others do, too. Because of who they are by nature, out-of-the-box thinkers, they are more likely to have novel ideas rather than be grounded by paralysis.

This feedback is invaluable and can subsequently help you navigate the crisis with empathy, relevance, and the appropriate tone in every message. 

We can’t stop moving forward, we have jobs to do, but we need to be thoughtful and deliberate at this time. 

This is also why Think With Google’s 5 principles are good compass points to direct your priorities and decisions. For marketing and sales teams, this can be a good test as any of the essential abilities to connect with target audiences. 

Every day brings new news, which means constant change. All we can do is be ready to pivot, balancing consistency with brands’ voices and recalibrating that voice at the same time to speak with hope and helpfulness.  

It’s not about completely ditching marketing or sales. We have to do business. Doing business can help us help others. It’s about staying relevant, as always.

As the digital marketing world braces for the significant email compliance changes set by Gmail and Yahoo in February 2024, it’s crucial for businesses to be prepared. These changes are not just for the big players but also for anyone who uses email as a marketing tool. Let’s break down what you need to do to be fully prepared.

Step-by-Step Guide to 2024 Email Compliance

• Email Authentication: Begin by setting up email authentication protocols like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. This is vital to establish the credibility of your sending domain.
• One-Click Unsubscribe: Incorporate straightforward unsubscribe options in your emails. Swiftly honor these requests to align with the new guidelines and respect user preferences.
• Manage Your Spam Rate: Keep an eye on your spam complaint rate; it should be below 0.3%. Creating engaging, relevant email content is key to staying below this threshold.
• Monitor Sender Reputation: Regularly use tools like Google Postmaster to monitor your organization’s reputation and promptly address any issues.
• Align Strategies Across Teams: Ensure that your sales and marketing teams are coordinated in their email efforts, considering the overall impact of your domain’s email output.
• Personalize Your Messaging: Abandon mass, generic email strategies. Tailor your communications to match the specific interests and needs of each recipient.
• Be Careful with AI Tools: AI can be helpful, but ensure it does not lead to increased spam flags.
• Use Separate Domains for Different Campaigns: Consider having different domains for various campaigns to effectively manage sender reputations.
• Regularly Check Your Email Health: Keep tabs on your spam, IP, and domain ratings using tools like Google Postmaster.

FAQ

Q: I don’t use Google Workspaces, am I affected?

Yes. Whether you send from Outreach to Gmail addresses, or to email addresses using Google Workspace email services, you are responsible and will be impacted.

Q: Is my email limit 5000 per day?

Yes, while being defined as a bulk sender impacts all domains, it’s important to be clear that this includes every email sent by your system, including billing notifications, password resets, etc.”

Q: What happens if I fail to comply?

You may be blocked from sending emails from your domain.

Q: If I’m on the receiving end of the spam, how do I report it?

From Google: “Send a message to abuse@ or postmaster@, using the domain where the abuse is happening. For example, if you suspect a user at solarmora.com is abusing the service, send a message to abuse@solarmora.com or to postmaster@solarmora.com. Google monitors these addresses for every domain registered with Google Workspace.”

Q: I don’t send 5K messages, am I impacted?

YES. You’ll still need to follow some basic hygiene and the spam and abuse rates of .3% still apply to you. The following apply regardless of the amount you send.

• Set up SPF or DKIM email authentication for your domain.
• Ensure that sending domains or IPs have valid forward and reverse DNS records, also referred to as PTR records. Learn more.
• Keep spam rates reported in Postmaster Tools below 0.3%. Learn more.
• Format messages according to the Internet Message Format standard (RFC 5322).
• Don’t impersonate Gmail “From:” headers. Gmail will begin using a DMARC quarantine enforcement policy, and impersonating Gmail “From:” headers might impact your email delivery.
• If you regularly forward email, including using mailing lists or inbound gateways, add ARC headers to outgoing email. ARC headers indicate the message was forwarded and identify you as the forwarder. Mailing list senders should also add a “List-id:” header, which specifies the mailing list, to outgoing messages.

Additionally, if you send 5K+ emails a day, you ALSO need to:

• Set up DMARC email authentication for your sending domain. Your DMARC enforcement policy can be set to “none”. Learn more.
• For direct mail, the domain in the sender’s “From” header must be aligned with either the SPF domain or the DKIM domain. This is required to pass DMARC alignment.
• Marketing messages and subscribed messages must support one-click unsubscribe, and include a clearly visible unsubscribe link in the message body. Learn more.

Adapting to these upcoming changes requires thoughtful preparation and a shift towards more personalized, compliance-focused email marketing. By following these steps, your business can continue to engage effectively with its audience while meeting the new email standards set for 2024.

Account-based marketing is like sport fishing. Traditional marketing is casting a net. You get more fish. But in sport fishing, you go after specific fish — big fish. You need special gear and you need to travel — by plane and then by boat — to where your target fish are. 

It’s a lot of work. As a marketer, I’ve come across folks who believe in account-based marketing, and those who are skeptics. To succeed with it means a lot of work and coordination across departments — not just marketing and sales, but operations, customer success, and finance. 

The marketing landscape is shifting in this new decade, thanks to marketers finally implementing martech (including AI) to adapt to customer demands and expectations. The same agility and intelligence we can utilize for hyper-personalization can be applied to account-based marketing. 

Greater business outcomes with ABM 

Is ABM still worth considering? Yes. And many businesses agree. According to ITSMA, the B2B marketing community and ABM pioneer, their third annual study revealed a projected average 21% increase in companies’ ABM budgets in 2020. 

ABM continues to grow, and companies that have already utilized an ABM strategy now allocate 29% of their entire marketing budget to ABM. Of these companies, 73% are planning to spend more on ABM in 2020. 

Overall, ABM spending shows an average increase of 15% this year, cementing ABM’s place as a foundational B2B strategy for marketing. And why not? In the same study from ITSMA, 71% of the companies that invested in ABM reported a somewhat or significantly higher return than from traditional marketing programs. 

This is made possible by martech tools that track key metrics at the core of developing the data necessary to refine a program — so that it’s just right for an organization and its campaigns.

Just like with everything, patience matters, as does being deliberate. It’s a marathon, not a sprint.

Transitioning to and implementing ABM strategies

Most marketing teams and their tools are trained and built for quantity-based lead generation. Compared to the non-linear approach of content creation, driving traffic, lead capture, nurture, and scoring, ABM is more precise and targeted — its quality over quantity. 

So it’s not surprising that there will be growing pains when you shift to and implement ABM. 

Start with a pilot first. Break it down into steps. You don’t have to do it overnight. 

I’m not going to agree with the Martech Today article that it’s not complicated, but they gave good tips that can help you work your way through the process. The strategic KPIs will be different. To achieve them, it takes an involved process that requires your teams to set a game plan and work together to start, implement, and track how things go. 

See what works, see what doesn’t, and then scale from there. 

Patience is part of the master plan. ABM implementation can deliver good results fast, but it gets better as it matures, generating a more substantial impact across your organization’s teams over time.

Decide on the account list to target. 

You and your teams should align on your target account, its size, and your target close rates, among other factors. 

1. Understand what and how much your sales reps can handle.  
2. Fill that account list intelligently, with qualified leads ready to engage with you. 

Get insights from your sales teams about the qualified leads and ideal customer profiles. 

Set up strategies and action points for each key success indicator:

• Speed: faster close rates
• Engagement: increased and longer page views 
• Revenue/Conversion volume: Increased average contract value
• Revenue/Upsells: Larger lifetime contract value

Setting up strategies for the above metrics means strengthening your support for your sales team, with your marketers supporting inside sales. Which brings us to the next item. 

Master multichannel and blended strategies: Your outreach needs to be robust. 

The mix of warm, relevant communication and personalization is perhaps even more important in ABM than in lead gen. Every SMS, email, and phone call should be strategic. 

• Enable your marketing and sales teams to work together through tools and platforms. 
• Employ multiple approaches to nurture each account: one-to-one, one-to-few, and one-to-many. 

Companies are going digital, yes, and you should use martech tools for customer insight and streamlined tasks, but ABM success hinges on online and offline sales and marketing techniques. 

Use AI and personalization for intelligent marketing. 

This is where new tech makes ABM easier… and cheaper. The more your teams utilize and train AI tools for personalization, the more intelligent they get in anticipating and effectively nurturing, closing, and renewing/upselling to accounts on your account list and achieving the metrics I listed above: faster sales, and bigger deals.  

That’s not to say your budget for ABM will go way down. You should dedicate a budget to nurture your target accounts. Because focusing on target accounts saves you money in the sense that current customers are less expensive to cross-sell/upsell to.

This brings us to another part of intelligent marketing: campaign and segment prioritization. 

Martech tools can help your marketing teams keep their segments and campaigns streamlined and organized, with each account getting the right messaging at the right time, all the time, wherever they are in the buyer’s journey — and can keep your teams from not getting their fingers in each other’s pies. 

Combine established ABM tactics and new technology 

Aside from the culture shift and smooth collaboration between your teams, you also need someone whose primary focus is to manage an ABM initiative, track results, and create a knowledge base of what works and what doesn’t. 

Because of all the details and workflows involved, innovative marketing technology can help launch, scale, and run an ABM approach faster and more effectively than ever. 

Quick example: The weather forecast triggers a bunch of coffee gift certificates to your target accounts who go out during their workday, and the ones who stay in get coffee delivered: a charming blend of online and offline nurturing. 

And it’s made possible by technology. Account insights are at play there: you know your target people so you can answer their needs. 

The same study from ITSMA highlights the foundations of effective ABM programs. Companies that saw ROI and revenue growth from their ABM strategies were found to have invested in: 

• Analytics tools (69%)
• Account insights (67%)
• Engagement insights (56%)
• Predictive martech (27%)

22% also plan to add predictive technology to their ABM stack in 2020 to 2021. 

New technology will help you pilot an ABM strategy, then help you organize and test the insights you got from your pilot, and finally turn your team into an ABM team. 

Just as AI and Martech continue to break silos, ABM has the potential to unite your sales, operations, customer success, finance, and marketing teams into one powerful ABM engine.

Sales pipelines everywhere have been hit hard by the pandemic. The previous intakes may no longer apply. Some personas and roles have changed. For sales teams, previous approaches that worked may have also changed.

If you thought sales development teams, who make the cold calls and conduct the initial outreach efforts, had it tough before, well this quarter may be brutal. 

Lots of folks are saying this is the time to pivot, but a pivot is easier to talk about than to do. The goal right now is to keep sales/pipeline disruption to a minimum, or in other words, make the most of a challenging situation. 

Sales needs to stay aligned with marketing, especially now, when there are pivots for initiatives that are more likely to be “out of the box.” Both departments need to work together to maximize the potential of any new campaign, initiative, or strategy. 

Those marketing and sales plans from the start of the year? They may need to be chucked out the window. The current pandemic has changed the circumstances for buyers, and for the salesforce in turn. 

Territories and quota assignments are completely disrupted, if not outright obsolete now with the necessary shift to the “new normal.” 

This new normal is also making buyer behaviors erratic and turbulent, prone to minor or major changes in smaller and smaller timelines. So historical data and existing personas honed from years of sales expertise are no longer reliable. This is where AI comes in. 

Optimize your pipeline with AI and automation

AI also traditionally relied on historical data to make predictions about the future. But we’re in a new world now; the past can only tell us about the past. Today’s AI and automation are equipped to start aggregating new data to begin to make accurate predictions/prescriptions. 

Using AI and third-party data can help sales leaders avoid bad-fit deals. Volatile market trends can and will lead to inaccuracies in the pipeline, unless the pipeline is optimized for agile accuracy to current customer preferences and needs.

AI and data give insight on what customers are still buying, and consequently, more accurate predictions on who else are likely to buy, in which channels, and when. 

Automation can use these insights to help your sales teams build/rebuild pipelines and act fast on good deals and good accounts with the best opportunities. 

Utilize digital apps for internal and customer-facing communications

Apart from using AI and automation tools, bring everything to the cloud. Examine how going digital can help you and your teams cut costs, streamline operations, and increase revenue. 

Team communication

Lines of communication, amongst team members, shouldn’t just be kept open. They should be abuzz from all the interaction passing through them. 

Email is necessary, but only conveys so much. As much as Zoom may get pooh-poohed for its limitations, it still helps to see someone when communicating. Slack is another option, with each team and campaign having its own centralized channel. 

WFH has limitations, but technology can help minimize disruption (and the panic it can spark). 

Lead nurturing and outreach

Everyone has prospects whose circumstances changed when the pandemic started to impact our lives back in March (in the U.S.). But prospects who weren’t ready pre-COVID might be in a prime position for nurturing now due to new circumstances and/or role changes. 

Marketing and sales teams need to requalify these leads and check-in. It’s also an opportunity to learn about new pain points, new priorities. 

How have your customer personas changed? 

Previously cold leads might actually become new prospects and make up for the clients and customers cancelling or pausing deals. 

Email campaigns and social media ad retargeting can bring in both old and new customers. AI can give insight on what prospects are searching for so your sales and marketing teams can augment each campaign with attractive angles and offers. 

Aim to increase revenues

That seems like a bald thing to say, but times of crisis can and do put leaders into default fight or flight modes: they focus on minimizing damage and cutting costs. 

This is the time to continue being aggressive and proactive about increasing revenue. 

Applying AI and automation can help optimize your sales pipeline, cutting costs by avoiding wasted time and effort, and increasing revenue through effective, informed marketing efforts. 

Growth is still possible during a time of crisis — not just survival. Actual growth is also possible and should remain as the big, hairy, not-so-audacious goal, so you and your teams can find and even create the opportunities and maximize them. 

I already wrote about the Boston Consulting Group’s Four Rs. You need to keep building your marketing and sales for sustained positive results. 

Right now, businesses might be in the “Reflect” stage of looking for opportunities but don’t stay there too long. 

Make strides in the “Reimagine” stage of updating your marketing and sales pipelines, and definitely lay paving stones for the “Rebound” stage of using AI and digital automation and apps to scale your wins. 

That’s the stage where you have really recovered from paralysis (“What do we do?!”) and are thinking and acting on adjustments to your personas’ new buyer’s journeys. 

Recalibrate value proposition — and everything else — for sales resilience

Everything above is about recalibrating. Optimizing your sales pipeline makes you look at every detail — from messaging to the actual delivery of your brand’s services and products. 

Before, during, or after your most urgent pivot strategies, consider the big picture

This is the time to revisit your value proposition to match it to the new reality your customers face. I’ve said this above and it bears repeating: What worked before might not work right now and in the upcoming new world post-COVID.

Everybody has bias. It’s a universal phenomenon. That’s why confronting biases in AI models and predictions is critically important now. Avoiding the topic can be more detrimental than dealing with it head-on. Recognizing decision bias helps us, as the most harmful biases are often overlooked.

A critical aspect of bias lies in blind spots, particularly in predicting access to resources like loans or insurance, as examples. In these situations, it’s important to not shy away from information that may carry bias but to seek it out actively. By acknowledging the presence of biased data, we can measure and demonstrate that specific traits, such as ethnicity, are present but not significant in driving predictions. Attempting to exclude biased data only perpetuates a “see no evil” mentality, whereas measuring and including it can mitigate harmful biases effectively.

There are some scenarios where hidden signals within seemingly innocuous data can be ethically applied, such as determining suitability for financial aid or scholarships. At Wrench.ai, we use a client-driven content creation process to ensure that content aligns with brand goals while addressing diversity, equity, and inclusion concerns. In this scenario, we rely on collaborative efforts to incorporate the client’s input, brand insights, customer profiles, regulations, and goals to shape the content generated by our AI platform. This collaborative approach ensures that what we generate not only resonates with a client’s brand but also promotes diversity and inclusivity.

While bias can exist in AI models, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution due to our client’s diverse business needs. That said, we’re very much committed to minimizing and addressing harmful biases through transparency, continual monitoring, review, and ethical decision-making. We recognize that bias can unintentionally occur, and that’s why we strive to be aware of our biases and blind spots during our AI model development. Our dedication to ongoing training and retraining of AI models ensures that biases are kept in check and do not become more pronounced over time.

Personalized marketing is omnichannel marketing. After all, your marketing strategy is not personalized at all if your customers have to create their own personalized experience. 

Right now, as you read this, your target customers are online or in stores, on their phones or laptops, in apps or platforms, watching videos on YouTube or Instagram, researching, rating, purchasing, or making decisions on products and services. 

Are you in those channels so your customers can interact and experience your brand?

Mastering personalization at scale can’t be limited to just one channel. Only relevant content is visible to your target audiences, and you also need to be in the relevant channels. 

Relevant: that’s the keyword. Personalized marketing keeps a narrow focus, on content and channels, rather than trying to be present on all channels, which is an exercise in futility with dismal ROI.

Omnichannel personalization for seamless customer experience

Previously, omnichannel meant variety and presence. Brands had accounts on LinkedIn, Google+, and Facebook in addition to their website. These pages went on their business cards and the websites linked back to these platforms. 

An organic marketing strategy amounted to regular posts across Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, and so on. 

Now it’s about a smooth, integrated customer experience. Customer experience pays. Omnisend found that customers engaging with campaigns involving three or more channels spent on average 13% more than those engaging with single-channel campaigns.

Platform pages for the sake of having pages, or as a podium for your announcements, will get you nowhere. Omnichannel personalization means serving your customer on every step of the buyer’s journey, collecting data across channels, and using that data across all touchpoints to deliver a customized, seamless experience.

Think Starbucks and their rewards card. You use it in-store, you can check your balance and reload it via SMS, the app, or the website. The card updates in real-time. You can reload while in line and then use that card when it’s your turn.  

Your customers are either looking up coffee shops near them or already in line. It’s the marketer’s job to figure out where the customers are as they move through the stages of the buyer’s journey and deliver relevant content for a seamless experience. 

They could be asking questions on Quora. Or they might ask directly on Facebook, on the business page, or through Messenger. They might already be shopping and seeking out your products online, offline, or in reviews. 

In omnichannel personalized marketing, the goal is to figure out what would make your brand relevant at every stage, from how easy you make it for them to get to know you, to their time and experience as your customers.

Recognition 

They might not know you yet. Or they might have an outdated, incorrect perception. 

This is where advertising campaigns and influencer campaigns work in getting you seen and recognized. 

You don’t have to stick to online channels either.

Fifth Third Bank (previously MB Financial Bank) in Chicago had previously gone after big clients but re-established trust with the small to medium businesses in their hometown by featuring their local branch managers in print, radio, and digital media ads. 

Next, they launched a direct mail campaign, with those local managers addressing the small business owners. 

This combination of public and targeted messaging generated a 205% increase in sales leads. The local branch managers were real people, they were local. The local business owners saw them in the ads and by the time they received the mail, they had already related to the faces in the ads and recognized Fifth Third as relevant to their business. 

With the personal mail, Fifth Third just charmed them even more, establishing new customers. 

So many businesses often jump to direct, personal messaging without first introducing themselves in the channels their customers inhabit. That’s creepy and invasive. 

No matter how nice your cold emails are, people remember and build trust with faces. 

Recognition from public messaging, ideally using real faces from your company or influencers your audience already knows, can go a long way in getting your direct mail or emails opened once you send them. Recognition is an essential part of omnichannel marketing. 

Customer Support and Customer Success

Your omnichannel personalization strategy should always aim for customer success, online and offline. 54% of millennials say they will stop doing business with a brand because of poor customer service. 50% of Gen Xers and 52% of Baby Boomers agree. 

Sephora, Oasis UK, and Neiman Marcus, among other brands, go above and beyond with customer service, mixing in-store assistance and the lightning-fast convenience of mobile apps. 

In-store assistants are armed with tablets for customers to use their app and virtually try on makeup, and clothes already set in their sizes, and to pay from anywhere in the store without having to line up at the cash register. They can even order out-of-stock items to be delivered straight to customers’ homes. 

Timberland uses tablets in a slightly different way: utilizing NFC (near-field communication technology), customers can use the store tablets to see information about products when pressed against signage throughout the stores. 

No need to ask staff for information! (Timberland probably has data that many of their customers are introverts.) 

In the same way, Orvis has data that their customers are affluent and over 50, and may not be comfortable with technology, but are very receptive to modern tools. Orvis employees also have tablets and can help customers browse and get details about specific merchandise, complete online and in-store purchases, or order any out-of-stock items. 

The focus is not on the channels but on your customers

The examples above all highlight the customer experience. With the amount of ads and content we face every day in every channel, people won’t remember any product features you advertise, but they’ll remember if you know them and treat them well. 

• If you share their values (notice Fifth Third’s advertising with the face of their local managers, who would relate to the local business owners as “just like you”). 
• If you recognize them as individuals. 
• If you understand how it feels to interact with your brand. 

You don’t want to be remembered with frustration because of a disconnected service across channels, or derision from wrong and irrelevant messaging. 

Personalized marketing needs to be omnichannel to serve your customers as they move across channels. Invest in your customer’s experiences. It pays. Aside from customer loyalty, Omnisend found that 86% of consumers are willing to pay up to 25% more in exchange for better customer experience. 

• Match your social media strategy with your web strategy. 
• Your emails should support your social, mobile, and app strategy. 
• Your app and website should deliver the same smooth experience. 
• Build yourself up in a channel where you’ve lost ground; promote a new and improved app or mobile site.  
• All of them should update each other according to customer actions and data. 

How creative and attentive you are to your customer experience across all touchpoints can determine the customer switching from your competitors’ offers to yours.

Personally identifiable information, or PII, is self-explanatory and it’s nothing new. It hails from the age of mail-order catalogues and memberships. PII is data you use to identify — and serve — your customers. 

PII is the bedrock of marketing. Today, marketers still collect PII, in fact, lead magnets are meant to collect customer names and emails at the very least, and you can ask for and get much more if you make your customers eager for the exchange of their info for something equally valuable to them.

Customers directly provide PII to marketers and businesses. 

We’re all poised in the upcoming eradication of third-party cookies. Only first-party data will be allowed. PII is first-party data. Every marketer would do well to build and maximize the collection and use of their PII. 

A quick recap on PII

Customers demand personalization across all channels, and marketing has shifted towards being hyper-relevant so it answers that demand. PII, combined with behavior prediction, has gained more importance. 

There are two types of PII, linked information and linkable information. 

Linked information

Any piece of personal information that can be used to identify an individual. 

• Login details
• Full name
• Email address
• Home address
• Phone number 
• Birthdate

And more sensitive identity information you might enter in financial/government portals: 

• Social security number
• Passport number
• Driver’s license number
• Credit card numbers

Linkable information

This information needs to be “linked” or combined with another piece of information to identify, trace, or locate a person. On its own, linkable information doesn’t identify a person. These are the usual segments we target. 

• Gender
• Age demographics (30-40, 25-45, etc) 
• Job position and workplace
• Country, state, city, postal code

Non-PII data

Known as anonymous data, non-PII can’t be used to identify specific persons, but they’re still useful for measuring KPIs like page visits or for insights on customer touchpoints, what people interact with on-site and offsite, and so on. Yes, these are cookies. 

Non-marketers get paranoid when they see ads that match their cookies, but no, Google doesn’t know you. Non-PII data include, among others: 

• Cookies
• IP addresses
• Device IDs
• Device types/screen sizes
• Browsers 
• Time zone

PII is specific and targeted, and always the most consistent identifier in huge batches of data. Marketers need PII to personalize at the most basic level of being able to address, greet, and send marketing messages to customers. 

Beyond that, PII-based data also tracks the customer journey, giving rich insights to run personalized omnichannel experiences. 

As a quick example, the Wrench platform uses PII — when customers provide it — to analyze patterns of customer behavior in order to make personalization recommendations for top-line messaging, and the best channels to use.

When combined with a robust marketing strategy and AI technology, PII and non-PII data deliver powerful, accurate messaging to the right people, at the right time, every time. 

More power, more caution, and discernment

Marketers must be ethical about how they source PII. This is highly sensitive information that requires stringent compliance with data ethics and privacy regulations. 

In the past marketers could play fast and loose with how they sourced PII and how they used it — that’s no longer the case. The GDPR, CCPA, and other privacy laws now curb and guard against the misuse and leak of data. 

Determine what data you need 

How much and how little, exactly, and the minimum amount of data you actually need for your strategies and processes to be effective. 

No silos

Personalized marketing is fluid, so department silos are history. Ethically sourcing data requires marketers to work across teams (IT, legal, finance, etc). 

Trust is the point and the only point

The more goodwill a brand develops with customers, the greater the likelihood that they become and remain willing to relinquish more PII.  

As personalization technology becomes more sophisticated, it will be possible to make behavior predictions based on fragmented data points — making super personal PII unnecessary.

BUT, there’s no time like the present to have a set process in place for how your brand handles and uses PII. Companies that figure out their PII process now will be in a better position to step up their use of it and assure customers that they are doing everything they can to safeguard the customer info they do have (and use).

As a seasoned AI startup with half a decade’s experience under our belt, we’ve engaged in countless discussions about the implications of AI’s growing influence in both the global and business arenas. While AI’s impact is wide-ranging, our expertise lies primarily within the business sector, and it’s in this area that we’ll put our primary focus. It’s indisputable that we’re in an era where AI significantly shapes our societal and professional landscapes.

In light of this, we thought it timely to revisit and republish an article from 2019. Our belief remains steadfast: AI harbors the potential to drive transformative change for the better. However, we’re also mindful of the complex questions that arise as AI becomes more deeply entwined with our lives. We’re eager to explore these issues in future discussions.

Despite fears of AI causing extensive job displacement, we’re optimistic that AI will serve as a valuable tool to augment many professions, rather than eradicating them. We hope you enjoy this revisited piece, and as always, we welcome your thoughts and engagement.

*****

There’s a lot of fear around AI’s threat to disrupt a wide swath of jobs (even life as we know it), and there seem to be a lot of good reasons why this will be the case. But there’s also no need to panic. Just as the Industrial Revolution disrupted countless jobs, a significant amount were also created. 

This is already proving to be the same case with the evolution of AI. 

What will AI render obsolete?  

For the most part, AI removes middlemen. With the use of user-friendly and AI-powered platforms, customers can now customize anything according to their own needs and preferences, while personalization data helps marketers reach them. 

Customers and businesses can now meet in the middle with better and better accuracy. Because of that, AI will make low to mid-level positions obsolete. “Any task that can be learned” is the broad category most experts agree would be completely automated in the next ten years. 

Machine learning will get more sharply honed and deliver better efficiency for routine tasks in such roles as insurance underwriting, research and data entry, and most aspects of customer service. 

According to Gartner, AI will eliminate 1.8 million jobs, but will create 2.3 million jobs. 

A different kind of work

Certain sectors will be hit harder, sooner – if not already, like manufacturing cutting down on “head count” with the use of robotics technology – but we can expect big changes across all industries. More than eliminating jobs, AI will create jobs, and enhance and complement the jobs that will remain. 

The changes can even go unnoticed, like auto-generated reports and email management, but they’re happening across industries and enabling management to “go lean” and cut labor costs. We’ve all witnessed the widespread replacement of cashiers – at supermarkets and casinos – with automated technology. 

On the other hand, more and more knowledge workers, notably marketing and customer service teams, will weave AI into everyday processes for faster, personalized campaign implementation and responses. 

Every revolution and innovation changed the way we do business, but business kept going. This time is no different. Some jobs would be replaced, but there will be more jobs, different jobs. 

AI needs human ingenuity. Machine learning still depends on human input. There will always be exceptions to rules already established in AI, and no matter how much data they analyze these exceptions need human intervention and refining. 

AI will need monitoring and training. And this is where human intelligence comes in, making sure AI doesn’t bungle up. Tasks that monitor, train, and maintain the speed and accuracy we expect from AI will become the new jobs of the new digital era. 

Adaptability

Companies should focus on the necessary culture change and adaptability to AI-related opportunities or threats. 

The opportunities? Pioneering, and gaining an edge over your competitors through early adoption. The world is always in awe of explorers. Millennials compose more than 50% of the market now, and unlike Gen Z who were born into this new technology, millennials remember dial-up, taking a number card and waiting for it to be called, and other outdated, inconvenient, expensive, and inefficient methods of getting the services or goods they want. 

They appreciate convenience, cost, and time-efficiency. That’s why they love Uber and AirBnB. The mere adoption of AI and personalization to make your customer service faster and better would endear you to your more technically savvy market.  

Sales is no longer transactional, but personal instead, focusing on customer relationships and experience, something that AI bots won’t be able to achieve. What companies save on labor should go into training and tools to help their teams transition from the old way to the new way of work. 

The threats don’t apply much if companies and employees are willing to train and shift to different work that evolve with the help of AI, e.g., bookkeepers or legal secretaries shifting to consultancy or specialized services, using AI. 

Augmented and empowered

Yes, using AI. Jobs will not survive despite AI – jobs will be empowered and augmented by AI. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) forecasts growth for many jobs AI is expected to affect: accountants, web developers, dietitians, financial specialists, among others. 

These industries will benefit from the data analysis and reporting AI can deliver. AI will take over the repetitive and mind-numbing tasks, leaving the experts to focus on their clients and business growth. 

Judgment and decision-making would still be on humans, but the steps and processes necessary to reach decisions will be reduced or replaced altogether with insights. The result? Friction and human error removed in the value chains. Billions recovered in hours of productivity, and trillions in generated business value. 

According to Kai-Fu Lee, AI guru and author of AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order, jobs that involve “creation, conceptualization, complex strategic planning and management, precise hand-eye coordination, dealing with “unknown and unstructured spaces” and feeling or interacting “with empathy and compassion” are safe from AI obsolescence. 

Of course. Trial lawyers. Bartenders. Concierges. But even these jobs can get help from AI. The question isn’t whether a job is safe, but the possibilities AI can have for even these jobs. It’s fun to imagine. 

Think of today’s video games. The game makers of the 70s-80s worked solo, easily programming static and moving pixels at home. But today’s games with their fancy graphics and audio and complicated storylines meant to make it through to hard-to-impress gamers require multiple teams, an entire village to complete a single game – and that’s not counting the support teams whose jobs stretch years beyond the release of the game.  

That’s what AI can do, and what AI will require: more technology also means more humans for execution and implementation.

“Persona” is in “personalization.” That’s obvious (and cheesy) I know, but most of us know by now that personas are incredibly helpful in informing teams who their main customer types are, their pain points, and their goals and desires. Most marketers have a history of using and targeting personas in campaigns and strategies. 

The more recent shift to behavior and data tracking was only made possible by big data and recent strides in AI technology. With our ability to collect, track, and analyze consumer behavior, are personas still relevant? Absolutely.

For a quick example: personas have emerging new motivations when disaster strikes. We’re currently living through a huge part of history. Future generations will study this period of COVID-19, currently punching nations everywhere in the gut. 

Doing personas the right way

Doing personas the right way gives your teams — all teams, not just marketing and sales — the information that enables them to empathize with your target market, and thereafter create truly effective campaigns, offers, content, and experiences relevant to your target market’s needs and motivations. 

More than ever, right now with the way things are unfolding, your content and outreach need empathy. 

AI can only do so much, you still need to feed your machine learning platform with correct information. Your entire organization also needs this information. This is what personas do. 

• Product and design teams need the persona brief for everything from huge aspects like features and competitor research to smaller details like fonts and colors.
• Sales and marketing teams need the persona brief for their strategies. 
• Finance needs the persona brief for guidance on feasibility, pricing, and marketing investments
• Customer service needs the persona for their reply templates and style and tone. 

You get it. Every team needs customer personas. 

Creating personas is like a litmus test of how well you know your customers and how well your products match them. 

Get really specific 

For the uninitiated, or those who have already eschewed personas, here’s a recap of the attributes you usually determine. The common denominator of each and all attributes? They’re specific and granular. 

• Demographic – The needs and preferences of each demographic differ, either vastly or subtly, so your marketing for 25-35-year-old men is different from your materials for 25-35-year-old women, and so are your campaigns for 45-60-year-old men, even though it’s the same gender. Likewise, there can be minute differences in your language for 45-50-year-old men, as opposed to men in the 51-60 age bracket. 
• Job Position / Role – This is where personas become people: they’re stay-at-home mothers, busy employees, small business owners, GenX, and so on. This is the “description” of your personas, and what they get up for every morning. 
• Interest in product – Connected or related to their roles and current events, what do they want for their personal or professional life? What role will your product fill there? 

For example, you sell trips on chartered boats along Cabo San Lucas and the Riviera Maya. People are staying home to be safe, and they have more time to look at your content. They can’t go, but their minds are there, flying off to sunny places. So even if they can’t leave just yet, you can still entertain and educate them about places they can go later, when things are back to normal. In the meantime, you give them something nice to look forward to or reminisce about, to take their minds away from the current situation. 

• Need for product – Connected and related to their interests and current events, what do they need? How well does your product answer that need? 
• Location – If you have physical stores or local services, location has a big role in your personas. Even if you offered digital services, your language should be determined by this attribute. Local slang and local beliefs can endear you to your target audiences.
• Shopping habits / Financial ability – Doesn’t need to be explained. With attractive discounts, you can attract income levels lower than your usual personas and expand your customer base that way. Targeting higher income levels also means your product, marketing, and entire customer-facing content and services have to achieve a certain high standard. 

But limit your personas

Businesses used to have pages of their personas in their brand and style Guides. Pages upon pages describing their five personas. 

To truly understand your personas, limit them to two or three. Five is okay, but that’s already hard to keep track of in your head, and would unnecessarily eat more resources for targeted campaigns and strategies. 

Do your research

Research helps you narrow down your personas, correctly identifying shared behavior and motivations among your target customers, and creating more accurate, umbrella personas. 

Customers don’t even need to tell you directly. Your target customers are all over the internet, making reviews on Amazon, asking and answering questions on Quora or Reddit, and participating in hashtags on Twitter or groups and communities on Facebook. 

A persona is a combination or aggregation of those behaviors and motivations, so one or two personas should represent the larger group.

Truly understand what makes them tick. What makes them buy? 

The point of personas is really empathy. And according to Dale Carnegie, empathy is influence. That’s right, you can influence your target customers to love you and choose you if they perceive you understand them. 

So you need to know your ideal customers, or it’s nigh impossible to create an effective production and marketing strategy, from branding to content, whether you use AI and e-commerce or traditional methods like salespeople and billboards, newspapers, and radio. 

Some consider personas to be outdated because personas are largely associated with segmentation, which is admittedly no longer an effective way to reach customers. 

Yes, personas segment your customers, but segmentation is not the point. It’s not about having segments and sending different messages/promos to each segment. 

It’s about understanding each persona to create effective strategies for each persona. 

What makes them tick? What makes them buy? Stay-at-home 30-40 year old moms might love bargains for this product but would be suspicious of that product if it sells under a certain price. 

Personas also predict behavior. 

It’s this understanding, which AI data can augment, that helps you create effective strategies and deliver the right content in every part of the buyers’ journey.

Listen to what your customers and sales teams tell you

To start, the C-suite and the customer-facing teams (sales, marketing, customer support/service) already have a strong sense of the personas, backed by data. 

But the real answers are in your customers. Try a moderated research session. Solicit feedback from your customers to confirm, update, and continuously refine your personas. Even the smallest details can inspire your next campaign. 

Sales teams also know what sells at which periods, and to whom. This is why it’s important that the sales and marketing teams are completely aligned instead of siloed. If you’re only starting out and can’t afford to do moderated research sessions yet, your sales teams can provide you with the information to prime your persona pump. 

HubSpot has a simple tool that can help create a persona, but it only requires qualitative input. At Wrench, we can take customer data as the starting point for identifying personas. Either way, you can’t sharpen the identity of a persona without a starting point. 

Intelligent assumptions, competitor analysis, and stakeholder interviews: these are low-cost ways to start off your personas, but it’s always best to speak to get the facts from your customer base. 

Steer clear of the mistakes of most companies who assume they know their customers and still keep using those assumptions to drive their marketing outreach. 

Don’t neglect user experience personas

Your target marketing personasare out there, and your user experience personas are already on-site. They’ll either love you — or hate you if you don’t treat them right. 

Again, it’s all about empathy and predicting what each user experience persona would want and need from your site and channels. User experience personas help you deliver customer success. 

It’s one thing to sell/convert a lead, who becomes a customer, and it’s another to keep that customer for the long-term with a user experience they can rely on because you consistently deliver.

Going to let you in on a dirty little secret about messaging.

I see businesses of ALL kinds making this one mistake. Not just small mom & pop shops. I’ve seen Billion dollar companies making this exact same mistake.

They’re building stadiums, jets, incredibly huge things yet they still trip over their own feet with this.

Ready for it?

Coming in with a one-size-fits-all message.

I know this isn’t much of a surprise. I wouldn’t bring this up if it didn’t keep happening.

All the time I see companies go out with messaging that’s so broad it’s for absolutely no one. They’re not talking directly to the people that can form a movement and help amplify the message.

Instead, they just go one size fits all. Because it’s easy.

This is the simplest fix you can make as you’re testing messaging. The simplest thing that you have to do. We need you to come in and develop your “inner circle”. That group that will tell you exactly what they think.

Who are you going to talk to that will give you the good and the bad, and who may already get it?

Persuasion angles are nothing new, but they are important when considering how to craft personalized messaging for marketing and sales outreach. Persuasion angles aren’t exactly Marketing and Sales 101; they are a good dimension to incorporate in outreach efforts when you have a more sophisticated sense of your persona’s needs/behaviors. 

Perhaps the most well-known persuasion angle is FOMO, or fear of missing out. You’ve probably grown up seeing it in infomercials. With the simple phrase, “before it’s gone,” thousands of people would reach for their phone to order an item before it disappeared. 

FOMO is simple. It’s effective.

Why does it work? It plays on people’s response to scarcity. When you think something will be gone soon, you go and get it. 

And scarcity is just one of the persuasion angles you can use for marketing.

The psychology of persuasion

We can’t talk about persuasion without mentioning Dr. Robert B. Cialdini’s book. Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion was published in 1984. Several decades later, its principles are still the bedrock of sales and marketing. 

In the book, Cialdini talks about the 6 Principles of Influence. Time and again, these principles are proven to make people take the action we want them to. Aside from scarcity above, the other five are reciprocity, commitment/consistency, social proof, authority, and liking. 

Reciprocity

This is one of the foundations of content marketing, because delivering free and valuable content will endear you to your target audiences. The psychology behind this: people like to pay off debts, or simply, to give back when they get something in return. 

People are more likely to choose your service or buy from you if you’ve already helped them beforehand. 

For example, let’s say you have lead magnets of free guides. You get people’s emails. You consistently deliver more tips. Or perhaps they see your helpful videos on Facebook. They know who you are, they know you know what you’re doing, so they choose you and buy from you. 

Commitment and consistency

Marketers work this principle two ways: in themselves and in their customers. 

Brands need to deliver a consistent message, although what that consistency looks like will look different from one brand to another, and a lot of that can depend on a brand’s niche. For example, brands selling cookware or ingredients might post a recipe three times every week, like clockwork. Or a professional might post a Live video on Facebook or Instagram on a fixed schedule. 

On the customer’s side, marketers offer small, risk-free commitments. A 20-minute free training. A free guide. A week-long trial. Or Netflix’s famous 30-days free offer.

Someone who has watched your 20-minute free training is more likely to sign up for your webinar. Someone who downloaded your free guide may engage with you, allowing you to find out how to pitch to them further down the sales pipeline.

And free trials and free days almost always convert to subscriptions.

Social proof

The root of the referral system. Or in the digital age, the review system. Also known as, “Everyone’s doing it” and the “wisdom of the crowd.”

When you go to WordPress, they make it a point to tell you that they power 28% of the internet. A restaurant, a law firm, or a plumbing service might boast about “Hundreds of 5 stars from Yelp.”

People trust you when other people already do. People also interact with you when other people already do. This is why you get a snowball effect of interaction once you get your community started.

According to research, 41% of respondents said the most important factor in engaging with a local business’s Facebook page is seeing customer reviews or ratings. 

Authority

Another version of social proof: the proof from an authority figure. Influencer marketing taps into your niche’s influencer’s existing followers. It’s an effective, powerful strategy that can help you grow your target market, if you partner with the right person.

Witness brands paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to celebrities and micro influencers on Instagram. 

Liking

Liking encapsulates all you do for marketing and sales. You want your target market to like you. You use data to make your marketing messages effective, relevant, and likeable. You use social media to post likeable content. Not “Like” as in Facebook or Insta Like, but real, honest-to-goodness humanity that makes them interact with your brand just because they identify with you or understand that you get them and their needs. 

You see likeability used in campaigns like Burger King’s and Wendy’s snarky Twitter accounts. And of course, in About pages where you share your humanity with your audience. Your story and history can make people convert. 52% of site visitors go to your About page. They want to know more about you. 

The art of using persuasion angles

Visual harmony for attraction

The visual aspects play a big role here. A marketer’s social media posts and emails should all look good, not for the sake of looking good, but to effectively attract and persuade. 

A lot of tactics go into this: the golden mean, the psychology of color, fonts and styles, and even formats: photo, video, graphic or meme, which also change depending on the persuasion angle you’ll use. 

For example, commitment/consistency is usually minimalist in design to keep the focus on the CTA buttons. Look at Netflix’s simple homepage. 

On the other hand, authority is best accomplished with striking photographs or videos featuring the influencer. 

A/B tests and using AI for data collection and analysis of customer behavior can give you insight on what your audiences respond to when it comes to visual assets. Do you get more engagement with videos? Do you get more clicks using this or that color scheme? 

Using words to remove friction 

This is where AI and martech tools like Wrench can help so much, giving you insight on what words to use. 

In the first place, martech tools and AI can help you accurately create your personas to ensure marketing and sales work in sync for the personas and the content.

• Persona: Who is the customer?
• Buyer stage: What do you say to them? 
• Persuasion: How do you say it? 

Ultimately, insights help you with persuasion. It’s not what you say, it’s HOW you say it. 

For example: 

“The perfect solution to your problem” 

• Names the problem and then provide the solution.

• Buyer stage: Awareness and Comparison
• Persuasion angle: Reciprocity

How is that reciprocity? Because the marketer offers a demo of the solution to show you a concrete way it can help you. This content/persuasion angle is particularly effective when marketing services and tools. Messaging might also feature copy like: “You’ll save money” or “Don’t pay more” or “You’ll save time.” 

Crazyegg, InVideo, and so on — they all offer free trials or free reports that support their claim of being the solution provider.  

OR, if your audience already knows the solution, show them what they should be looking for by naming the pain points and the product benefits that solve them.

Limited time-offers that belong to the scarcity persuasion angle also don’t easily work unless they come with the persuasion of risk-free commitment. 

The scarcity isn’t enough. People don’t want to feel rushed. But they will take it on if there’s no risk involved, or if the commitment gives them MORE, like a huge discount, or an exclusive access to, let’s say, a webinar or video chat with an influencer. In that case the scarcity teams up with reciprocity and authority.  

Using humor and storytelling to convert now or later

Humor and storytelling are part of the Liking persuasion angle. Your audience are more likely to like and remember you if you entertain them, or evoke their emotions through storytelling.

Laughter makes you happy, and you always have a soft spot for brands that make you happy. 

While humor evokes happiness, storytelling is proven to engage your audience so much better and more effectively than facts alone. Dates and names on an About page are hardly interesting, but add a nice story of how the founder founded the company, and you’ve automatically got more clout. 

Case in point, Apple was never more persuasive than during the height of Steve Jobs’ charismatic storytelling behind his success and every new development he made. 

Persona, proposition, persuade

Persuasion angles are powerful tools to use for your sales and marketing teams. They add more relevance and power to every content you deliver at the right moment to the right people.   

However, remember to collect and analyze insights on your personas, and get absolute clarify on your value proposition, so that all your persuasion strategies are aligned.

I talk a lot about AI in the context of marketing and sales, but we know that every industry and function will be impacted.

Over the next several posts, I’ll address how AI is impacting HR specifically — how job seekers land new roles, and how employers identify candidates that are a good “fit”.

Here’s what I’m addressing first: the ubiquity of GPTs in the hiring process. If you’re using one, you don’t have to stop. But ask yourself: Are you differentiating yourself?

In part 2, I’ll provide my tip on how to use AI tech *and* stand out from the crowd.

A huge opportunity for AI and HR is using data on peoples’ communication styles, skill sets, company culture, etc., to identify the right roles for the right people.

And if you think this is limited to just the hiring process, think again. You can use a company’s culture to predict ideal customers (we already have).

It shouldn’t be the case that you need to switch jobs to make more money.

Employees spend a lot of time getting trained and learning and applying new skills, building relationships, and developing instincts. And when they leave, it’s a big investment for employers to find and onboard replacements.

Data won’t just tell you if a job candidate is right for a role. Data can also provide insight on compensation and other benefits that are a “good fit”.

There are a lot of different ways that people would prefer to get compensated. Money is only one of them.

Interns are an overlooked resource. Rather than looking for a candidate with the most experience, or thinking you can use a GPT to replace one, look for an intern who shows enthusiasm for your company and the work that needs to be done. Here’s why: If you look at the performance metrics associated with a job, people with a passion for a gig will outperform people with experience and training.

Find an intern who is really into your company, and your products — then watch them outperform.

Within every organization, there are technology champions and those who like to move more deliberately, even slowly. When time is of the essence, and you need to implement an AI tool — while tackling resistance — create a focus group to give everyone a voice and find common ground.

There’s a quote by Maya Angelou that everyone in sales, marketing, and every walk of life should know.

It goes like this:

“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

That’s reality. No use denying it. 

Everybody’s got so much going on. We’re bombarded with choices. Emails. Noise. 

When all’s said and done, the only thing they’re left with is the impression you made. This has been true forever. 

But when you ask someone, what do they do? They tend to answer with the technical answer and not the kind of emotional benefit of what your work accomplishes. 

Messaging is the exact same way.

When you’re communicating with your audience, most companies are doing the exact opposite. 

They start with the bullet points.

Instead, be like the Nikes and Apples of the world. 

Start with what I would call that emotional benefit. 

How did you make them feel?

Every piece of your communication should reflect that. 

Once you’ve tapped into that, people will immediately start giving you permission to capture more and more of their attention.

“Be quick, be there, be present.” That’s from Google when they first coined “micro moments” in 2015. With the age of assistance, that’s exactly what marketers should do with micro-moments, offering fast and relevant answers meant for those spare moments when your target customers are actively looking for what you offer and the chance for conversion is high. 

Micro-moments are something we all experience, and it’s become the ubiquitous way we consume the internet on a daily basis — while in line at the supermarket while waiting for our train, or Uber, or during a lull at work.  

How widespread it has become is the result of the evolution of our smart devices. You might even look up Amazon deals while waiting for the soup to boil, either tapping on your smartphone or making a voice request to Siri or Alexa. 

It’s vital for marketers to understand this phenomenon and how it can be leveraged for marketing strategies and tactics. 

Meeting consumer needs at every moment

The previous age of information just churned out information. Admittedly, people were in love with the new and improved Internet and its ability to give information. Wikipedia, Reddit, and blogs were born because we loved information, and because it was “easy” for content creators to generate that information. 

This also meant we had predictable online sit-down sessions. We were physically, literally glued to our computer screens. For marketers, information was the first intake in the funnel: the consumer needed information, and marketers developed strategies and tactics to hook the audience with information and hopefully convert them while they’re hooked. 

It was the age of stories, of really magnetic content so that your target consumer doesn’t navigate away to another website. 

That’s history now. Gone. 

In recent years, our smartphones meant marketers lost their audience’s attention. News abounded about our diminishing attention spans. YouTube and Facebook had five-second ads. 

Consumer behavior and expectations have changed marketing forever. Every message, every ad, competes for your target audience’s attention. 

The age of assistance: only relevant content is visible

Today, the age of information has evolved to the age of assistance. Marketers only get attention by being absolutely relevant and helpful during short interactions when their audiences happen to be receptive to content — and these moments are small and fragmented. 

Thankfully, we also have richer, better data and tools for analyzing and using that data to anticipate consumer search intent, and design and deliver content around it. How well you answer to the micro-moments can define your marketing strategy’s success. 

Intent-rich moments and new customer behaviors

The micro-moments according to Google are: 

• I-Want-to-Know Moments – Customers want answers to questions on their minds.
• I-Want-to-Go Moments – Customers want directions, maps, and local search results, regardless of product information 
• I-Want-to-Do Moments – Customers want practical, specific guides to specific tasks: cooking/recipes, projects/tutorials, tips, techniques, how-to videos or illustrations
• I-Want-to-Buy Moments – Customers want to purchase and want the best deals and offers

All four correspond to three consumer behaviors that have emerged right along with the speed of information through smartphones, according to Lisa Gevelber, Google’s VP of Marketing for the Americas. 

• The “well-advised” consumer. They look for the “best.” This is how they make decisions. Mobile searches for “best” remain strong after increasing by 80% from 2015 to 2017. 
• The “right here” consumer. People expect personalized digital experiences– including their location at that moment. They look for recommendations “near me” and prefer mobile sites that customize messaging according to where they are, like “free delivery within Brooklyn.” 
• The “right now” consumer. People rely on their smartphones to get things done at that moment, whether it’s a last-minute reservation or a purchase they’ve been mulling over all week. 

91% of smartphone users look up information while completing a task and consumers, on average, spend 4.7 hours a day on their phones. That’s a lot of micro-moments you can leverage for conversion.  

A fine example of a company using micro-moments and all three of the consumer behaviors right: The Red Roof Inn gets in front of customers whose flights were canceled. 

• The micro-moment: I-Want-To-Go: People with canceled flights, now stranded and searching for accommodation
• The consumer behaviors: Right here, right now, and well-advised 
• The strategy: Innovative custom flight-tracking technology to process thousands of cancellation data in real-time 
• The marketing: Ads for “Flight canceled?” and “Hotels near” specific airports
• The result: 375% increase in conversion rates and 60% increase in reservations from organic traffic. The tool also won them several awards from The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), Mobile Marketing Association (OMMA), U.S. Search Awards, and Digiday’s Sammy/Mobi Awards   

The micro-moment was “born” in 2015, so it can be considered a new technique, but as you’ll notice from Red Roof’s strategy, the idea is still founded on the very basics of marketing and business: see a need, fill a need. Understanding your customers and anticipating their needs. 

Micro-moments: see or predict a need, fill that need, get that customer

Micro-moments have a huge impact on conversions because 90% of consumers don’t care about brands or don’t have specific brands in mind when they begin looking things up online. 

Even when you don’t get conversions, micro-moments are big drivers of brand awareness. More than 50% of smartphone users discovered a brand or product while doing a search. 

As long as you’re in the right place at the right moment, you’ll get or connect to that customer. You can even take that customer away from your competitors: 1 out of 3 consumers purchased from another brand than the one they intended to because of content they got at the right moment! 

Size doesn’t matter: people searching for something you offer won’t necessarily care about your size in the market. They have a need, and they want to meet it, and if you’re making it easy for them to understand that you can fill that need, then you stand a good chance of converting them. 

In traditional marketing, lead generation is about cultivating leads, but with micro-moments, there’s big potential to deliver content/messaging to users at the moment they’re looking for it — as long as you position yourself well.  

Positioning yourself with micro-moments

Know who your users and customers are. Are they Baby Boomers who look for information more from their tablets and laptops, and less on phones? Are they millennials who pretty much get everything from their phones? Or go deeper — are they busy professionals, regardless of age, who conduct searches while at home with Alexa, or while cooking dinner?  

Target your users right when they’re looking for services or products you deliver. Find the sweet spot of your customers’ need for your services and products. Not everyone can create and launch a tool like Red Door Inn but you can still predict when your customers will need a service or product. 

People Googling repairs: it’s advisable to have a how-to, and it’s also an opportunity for product placement since these customers could also be frustrated enough to be persuaded to get a good deal on a new product instead. That brings us to…

Do your research to understand what keywords your users are using to find information. Use data from existing tools and platforms on search volume, or survey your existing customers for information on their pain points to help you understand the language/vocabulary they use. While you’re at it, ask this important question: 

• Figure out how people find you, both in terms of search queries, but also where they go on your site to get information, where they spend the most time, and the devices they’re using to get there. 

Asking that is always a good thing. You might discover something new. You might even discover black holes in your mobile presence. 

Make sure you provide a seamless omnichannel experience. You can’t even begin to leverage micro-moments if you’re not there in your target customers’ micro-moments. 

• When they’re checking their SMS, they just might click the link to order if you’ve sent a friendly SMS reminder that their moisturizer had run out, based on data from your product beta tests. 
• And if that link redirects them to your mobile site, how fast does it generate the right content for your customer to find what information she needs before, during, and after checkout? 

Meet your users where they are, right that second

Lead generation is always a challenge, but just as everything in this world is subject to change, so is how consumers behave when it comes to making purchasing decisions. Micro-moments are a prime example, so take advantage of this consumer behavior to meet your users halfway.

Before launching into how to interpret a match score, allow me to address how we define one. At a technical level, match scores measure the affinity or likely similarity in meaning between two objects. In the world of AI, objects are usually some form of text that represents how an entity communicates who or what it is. 

Here’s an example of where you would use one: Company A wants to launch a new product, so it will create a compelling message for a promotional campaign that describes its unique offering – and to maximize resources, budget, and efficiency – will only target customers with a match (or lead) score over a certain number. The higher the number, the higher the indication that a customer is likely to engage at some point during a promotional campaign. Those who engage are also likelier to convert, or purchase.   

How can you match likely customers to the new product? The first step is to identify the two objects – we also refer to them as entities – to measure the affinity between the two. In the example above, the first object would be a description of the product, while the second would be a description of the customer, which could be a social media profile, like a LinkedIn profile. Note that if you have a small customer data set, you could do the matching manually. It might take a lot of time, but it’s possible. Let’s say you have a customer data set of one million customers; there’s no other way to do this than through automation (that’s where we come in, as we specialize in using AI for very large data sets).   

I will spare you the technical details, but once we have two entities we can see how closely the language surrounding them shares similarities or affinities.

The power of the match score lies in its inferential power, or its ability to predict the likelihood of a strong match or a weak match. 

For a sales or marketing team, high match scores between customers and a brand suggest that the brand’s message or description will have a positive resonance with high-scoring customers and a less positive resonance with low-scoring contacts. Notice that I did not use the term “negative resonance”; customers may have lower scores because they are not as familiar with a brand, but with a nurturing campaign they could eventually exhibit a higher match score because they are signaling more familiarity with the brand.

 Conversely, high-scoring contacts could indicate that their public personas are more informed about the brand category and would therefore not require the same degree of education as their low-scoring counterparts.

The question most clients have is: “What constitutes a high or low score?” Generally, scores can range from 0 to 100, with a high score being anything greater than 60. Individuals scoring over 60 usually indicate someone who is an innovator or someone who is publicly expressing a higher degree of familiarity with a brand or a product.

Individuals with scores less than 35 can be considered uninterested or unfamiliar with the content of the comparison entity.

The most important thing to note is that scores need to be viewed in the context, which includes the population sample (are you matching warm leads from your CRM or a cold list?) and industry (is your product super technical, or easy to understand?), and possibly other variables. Match scores can provide statistically significant guidance on who to target based on the goal you are seeking to accomplish. Marketing and sales efforts that incorporate match scores are much more likely to be effective because they take into account more informed targeting in promotional and outreach efforts, rather than the typical casting of a wide net, where everyone is considered to be part of the same playing field.

The Cambridge Analytica scandal still makes people paranoid about Facebook, but marketers weren’t really surprised about it. We know how data exchanges work…and that nothing is really free. What was a surprise was Facebook’s lapse in noticing and/or stopping Cambridge Analytica’s misuse of customer data. They paid the price ($60 billion lost) and they’re still paying for it. 

It also changed marketing. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was enacted in Europe, and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) followed, along with other regulations that are now standards of behavior for brands and marketers worldwide (and there are more on the way). 

As marketers, we want to reach our target audiences and touch their pain points, and we want trust. But we also have to deal with the reality that there are customer data gates imposed by privacy regulations (and not sure there shouldn’t be). 

With all that combined, there’s one solution that’s been around for some time: influencer marketing. 

Breaking through the trust barrier 

A lot of people, particularly non-marketers, conflate what happened with Cambridge Analytica with what personalized marketing does: targeting people with messaging and advertisements relevant to their needs and preferences. 

The misuse of data in the scandal and the strategic use of data for personalized marketing are two different animals, but the mistrust is already there. People turn off their data and ad permissions. They have ad blockers. Sometimes they even uninstall a social media platform when they think their data has been compromised. Can’t say I blame them.

With marketers under the gun to use customer data ethically (GDPR and CCPA), they have to pull back from tactics that may scare their customers, and be more creative with the compliant data they do have to reach their target audiences. 

Going the route of influencer marketing 

Influencer marketing remains a powerful way for brands to reach their targeted audiences. Through an influencer, it can be a lot easier to break through the trust barrier. 

Your target audiences are already with the right influencers. They follow these people, either actively with likes and comments — achieving Top Fan status this way — or silently watching the videos without interacting, but watching all the same. 

Influencers take great pride in excellence. If your product or service is excellent, the influencers in your niche will be happy enough to collaborate — or might even do it themselves without prompting. Be excellent and the influencers will find you and talk about you. 

As marketers, you don’t have to wait for that to happen organically. It may take time, especially for smaller brands just starting out. Influencers can help you build the momentum of brand awareness. 

You can save the time and money you would have spent on expensive ads that your target audiences might choose not to even view. 

Influencer marketing is projected to become an $8 billion dollar industry in 2020. Because it works. 

Micro/Nano and B2B Influencers 

Influencers aren’t all “lifestyle vloggers.” Just as data collection for personalized messaging has a connotation of privacy invasion and data peddling that marketers are collectively working hard to dispel, “influencer” has this negative definition of entitled young guns who offer to blog about you in exchange for free stuff. 

Some companies may need to redefine that for their C-suite and/or teams to be on board an effective influencer campaign. Influencers aren’t always millennials or Gen Z people talking about beauty products or game consoles. 

Don’t pigeonhole influencers — there are many types, and more than one type can match your brand. 

Micro and nano influencers continue to rise. The age of micro-influencers started in 2017. They were found to generate 60% more revenue than hugely popular accounts, like celebrities with millions of followers. 

Authenticity is a big denominator

Micro and macro influencers include the B2B influencers you won’t find on Instagram or Snapchat. They’re the “subject matter experts” entrepreneurs list as their gurus (with smaller, but more loyal and ardent audiences).

Neil Patel has already shot up into the stratosphere, but he used to be what you’d consider a micro-influencer in the marketing space, along with Brian Dean of Backlinko fame, and Rand Fishkin of Whiteboard Fridays. 

Similar micro-influencers exist in every niche, whether you’re marketing spices or hair care products. They have ultra-high engagement with customers. They test things out. They create guides. Their videos range from desk videos to professional, polished setups. Their followers may be on the smaller side but can grow to be in the four to seven digits. 

And the common denominator between these influencers? Authenticity. 

People trust them. Influencers are advisors and real customer partners who collaborate on content like case studies and white papers, or speak on behalf of a company at conferences, without appearing that they were asked to do so.  

Oh, they do need to explicitly say if a post is #sponsored. In fact consumers absolutely do not tolerate the blurred lines that we’ve all been used to in advertisements with celebrities. In influencer marketing, brands and influencers (and influencer marketing agencies) need to be really careful that paid partnerships are declared according to ASA/CMA guidelines. 

Customers can easily abandon a sellout. 

So influencers declare their paid sponsorships but still include their genuine thoughts about a product or service. That’s why they retain trust. 

Creator Content

Marketers will want to cash in on that trust, so 2020 will be the year brands fully embrace and utilize creator content to reach their target audiences effectively and with impactful authenticity. These videos get watched, paused, and shared, giving marketers and influencers plenty of data to refine their campaigns and content creation. 

What can you try and expect when it comes to creator content? 

Influencer-run campaigns with genuine and longer brand partnership

Brands and marketers can be understandably reluctant to hand over the reins to influencers. This results in content that may NOT match the influencer’s philosophy and audiences at all. 

On the flipside of that is the influencer with 100% creative freedom who creates content that’s popular with his/her audience, but falls short of the brand’s goals in messaging and impact. 

• Marketers need to create a brief they can send to their influencers, a brief that clearly and concisely checks off the brand personality and specific messaging. 
• Influencers return with a pitch for approval. 

This way, you create content that really resonates with the audience and achieves the messaging the brand needs to deliver. 

Nurturing longer relationships with influencers also means they get to know your brand and display authenticity that they really believe in your brand if they consistently talk about it over months and years. 

A shift from vanity metrics: real marketing data and AI for tracking impact

Martech tools, including CRM, continue evolving to become even more sophisticated with AI technology to keep up with the demands for only relevant content in all channels.  

The benefits are two-fold, which leads to more and more effective campaigns. 

• Marketers and influencers can use data to, well, influence their campaigns and content strategy
• Marketers can easily get analyses and reports to quantify the impact of influencer marketing campaigns. 

It’s no longer the vanity metrics of likes and follower increase.  

From Adage: Marketers will require… “verifiable campaign metrics, including audience demographics, unique reach, actual impressions, and video views delivered. 

In 2020, look for more brands and their partners to measure effectiveness via influencer campaign brand uplift studies, conversion and sales lift reports, and creative analysis in order to compare influencer work more directly alongside other parts of the marketing mix.” 

Video 

Video is big and will stay big. 72% of consumers prefer video to learn about a product, so B2C and B2B marketers also produce the majority of their marketing content in video formats. 

Influencers also create videos for their content. On Facebook and YouTube, ads are inserted into videos, so video is a revenue generator for content creators. 

TikTok exploded in late 2019 with 500 million active users. Marketers are already looking at how they can utilize TikTok, and going through influencers already established on the platform can be an efficient method of penetrating TikTok. 

Brand values 

The top content on YouTube is videos with relevant values from brands and companies, big and small.

Consumers are blind to product features. Millennials and Gen Z are particularly more interested in purpose, both theirs and that of brands they support. 

Influencer marketing is definitely one of the impressive rather than invasive ways you can reach your audience. 

And just like any strategy, digital platforms, and tools can help you with data from start to finish, from mapping your goals before your outreach to tracking the KPIs after your influencers have started rolling out their content.

The basics can often be forgotten or misplaced especially when marketing and sales teams are scrambling to recover or boost numbers in the middle of this pandemic. It’s uncharted territory, and I think by now we’ve recognized the need to adapt and pivot.

As we pivot, the bolts that marketers and sales teams can twist is the company’s value proposition. 

This is the pillar your entire messaging and company branding stands on. You need to match your messaging to your target audience’s shifting priorities, and your messaging is rooted in your value proposition. What is it? Are you communicating it clearly? 

Those are important questions to begin with. Now, in the time of the pandemic comes another heavy punch: Is your value proposition still a hundred percent relevant? Or should you tweak it?  

Clarity first 

There’s no time like the present to have a clear understanding and an even clearer representation of your value proposition, even if you’ll have to change it again six months or a year from now when we’re back in a world without a health or economic crisis.

That’s a very optimistic view. The world will be forever changed, so your value prop is more important than ever. It goes beyond slogans and style guides. It’s what communicates your empathy across to your target audience, and empathy is what people want right now. 

Your value proposition shows: 

• How well you know your audience’s pain points 
• What pain points you solve
• How you solve those pain points: right now, today, in the current conditions

At a glance, in less than ten words, your audience understands what you offer and recognizes that first, you’re talking to them, and second, you’re worth their time and trust. 

If the current and future market dynamics mean you’ll need to adapt and pivot, you need to be crystal clear about the value of your products or services now. Many companies still struggle with this. Startups can sometimes lose sight of it during the launch and the hurdles of consistent success. 

And yet it’s the not-so-tiny detail that can define entire business plans. Only when you have clarity about what you offer can you communicate that vital message in your marketing efforts.

Also called the USP (unique selling proposition), the value proposition is your WHY. In addition to the definitions above, the WHY makes it even more granular: 

• Why should your prospects choose you?
• Why should they buy your products/services? 

Knowing your consistency and weaknesses in how you communicate the above also gives you insight on what you need to adjust as you pivot. 

Pivot next

Depending on context, the value proposition a company has today — no matter how good — might need to change. After all, your prospects have changed their priorities. Does your value proposition still resonate with these new priorities? 

The value a brand stands for pre-COVID might no longer apply in this new world during COVID, and even after COVID. 

Marketers should also keep in mind that people are at home or working from home, and for some, marketing messages are reaching them more easily than compared to pre-COVID times. This means every marketing message sent in any channel is likely to be under more scrutiny. This is where your new and improved value proposition can help you organize your content. 

Proposition and persona agreement 

In grammar and mechanics, it’s subject-verb agreement. In marketing, how does your value prop match your persona? What needs to change? 

The latter consideration applies to both the value proposition and your current personas. Update both. Two distinct personas might merge because of the current remote work setup, and a position might have new roles and concerns now that your value prop should address. 

• What are the top issues your targets face right now? 
• What are the risks associated with those issues? 
• What words do they use to describe or define those issues? (SEO key terms) 
• What are the popular solutions they plan on using? What are the better, less well-known alternatives? 

You’re no longer selling but helping

Even with the understanding that business must go on, it’s crude to keep pushing. You’ve seen stores that no longer post “Come shop with us” but instead announce their online stores “for your safety.” 

• How does your new value proposition help? Communicate that clearly. Is it your COVID response? Add that across all channels.
• What notifications can you proudly send via email because you know they’re valuable to your recipients? 
• Do you employ human-first language and values? 

Some companies have done the “we are here for you” and “we’re in this together” messaging in impressive ways and that’s because they appear genuine — not opportunistic.

What you say in all channels should be relevant

This is the time to disable all irrelevant sequences you’ve set up. The first quarter of 2020 when tone-deaf messages were still sent can be forgiven. But not now. We’ve had plenty of time to adjust where needed. 

• Check and edit all triggers in your marketing sequence for relevance and empathy. Disable the ones you shouldn’t deploy at the moment.  
• Pause, cancel ads, or edit ads for consistency with the rest of your messaging.  
• Soften your CTAs. People simply have other concerns and priorities, and downloading your lead magnet or scheduling a meeting with you is at the bottom of those priorities. 

New, relevant offer, same or more value  

Marketing and sales teams need to find opportunities for real value in their products or services.

Announce extended discounts and financing options/payment plans and push bundled deals that make the deal sweeter and more useful, or create entirely new products, anything that supports the community in the current time.

A well-known example of the latter is Ripshot. They make shots you can bring anywhere (just rip off the seal from the tamper-proof recycled plastic shot glass), and now they’re making hand sanitizers, Ripgel, which they distribute to hospitals free, and sell to everyone else at cost, with the same convenient packaging as Ripshot. 

The benefits: Ripshot didn’t have to shut their doors, everyone kept their jobs, and they’re helping the frontliners. Bonus: they’ll be remembered for this. 

Other events-based and location-based companies are pivoting to virtual. I’ve seen news of job fairs and even dating (matchmaking services) moving to online platforms. That brings me to my next point. 

Pivot to digital capabilities for delivery, for your teams and your customers

What apps are in line with your value proposition? Chances are they’re already out there, just waiting for you and your team to discover and utilize them. 

I’m not talking about delivery of goods either, although that’s an ideal endpoint. Services can be delivered differently, your teams can have a new way of delivering your messaging. For example, shifting from emails to FB Messenger and streamlined chatbot templates. 

Now is a good time to revisit your value proposition (among other things). Just do it with humility and sincerity because then you’re less likely to create messaging that just add more noise. You can shine through the noise by aligning your value prop with the times, and the altered pain points it has created.

Everything we do starts with customer preferences. 

What channels do your users prefer? Which types of communication? How do they like to be talked to?

That’s all kind of well known but where do marketers store their significantly-sized data sets? A CRM. 

Might as well store it in Fort Knox or that drawer that everybody’s got in their kitchen that just holds “everything else”.

With AI, it’s now possible to empower marketers to deliver meaningful personalization at scale.

Instead of spending hours doing client research, we want it to be easier than ever to not just ingest data but understand data.

Data is useless without insights.

Wrench.ai is designed to give you those insights. 

Interested in learning how? Click on the short video below.

There’s no question that marketing and sales teams will increasingly use AI technology for creating and delivering content. It will be disruptive, yes, but it’s not about replacement. It’s about evolving the way companies connect with their customers. 

We’ve talked about the fear that AI is going to take over scores of jobs, leaving humans in jobless limbo (understanding, to be sure, but hugely overblown). We’ve also addressed the fact that AI in a lot of ways is imperfect, and requires human translators to use it in a truly effective way. This balance of AI and human intelligence is even more important in the current time we live in. 

The brands that are doing the best marketing/outreach right now in the time of COVID-19 are those that understand their target audience’s fear and struggle, not just right now with the world turned upside down, but all the time. 

These brands are being steered by marketing experts who know how to operate with compassion and empathy. 

AI can’t come up with that yet, but AI can collect and aggregate data at lightning speed to help human marketers make decisions about their outreach. It’s one thing to decide to be compassionate and empathetic in messaging. It’s an entirely different thing to do so effectively, addressing the top pain points of your audience. 

That’s where AI comes in. 

Putting AI to work: disruptive but effective

The focus of marketing and sales leaders right now is to recover from lost revenue, while working with slashed budgets and furloughed or laid-off employees. 

This is tough. It means doing more with less. AI helps with that, automating and streamlining tasks that drive efficiencies and data-driven insights for every step of marketing and the buyer’s journey.  

Even before COVID-19, marketers have already recognized the disruptive force of AI. It won’t replace marketers and sales reps — their expertise is still the brains we need, not the artificial kind — but AI will change roles forever, some becoming redundant as AI and martech prove themselves the better, faster, and cheaper solution.

You need empathy, yes. You need data, too.

The reality is that we no longer face automation — we’re in it. Eschewing sales and marketing automation means getting left behind. 

In the current pandemic situation, it’s more important than ever for organizations to recognize the importance of human teams, and for human teams to recognize the brilliance of employing AI to create and deliver content on a solid foundation of data-driven insights. 

In late 2018, Marketing AI Institute reported on the Top 25 Use Cases for Marketing AI. It’s not surprising that the most valued uses are those that involve data. And with goodwill marketing and micro-moments on the rise, this is data utilization that still applies in 2020 and beyond. 

One day, even when a COVID-19 vaccine has made the world a safer place once again, brands can’t afford to publish tone-deaf messaging. We’ve just lived through a huge blip in history, and just like WWII did, it will change marketing and sales forever. 

The new normal will be tinged with struggle and suffering for a good long while. What brands need to do is stay on top of how their customers’ needs/pain points evolve, so they can continuously modify their messaging with empathy and relevance.  

You need data for that. And while human intelligence supplies the charismatic (and empathetic) element(s), AI can supply the data.

Some marketers are still bewildered about where to push their AI to its full potential. It’s an understandable dilemma, especially in the face of colleagues whose jobs might be on the line. But now’s the time to streamline marketing workflows and train people to use AI. 

These top 10 use cases (for marketing alone!) should be more than enough to give you ideas on where to start: 

• SWOT analysis of existing online content 
• Choosing keywords and topic clusters for content optimization
• Constructing buyer personas based on needs, goals, intent and behavior.
• Data-driven content
• Insights into top-performing content and campaigns
• ROI measurement by channel and campaign (and overall)
• Behavior-based and lookalike audience targeting
• Website content optimization search engines
• Real-time and highly targeted content recommendations for users
• Content assessment and development with A/B testing

The above insights allow human marketing teams to focus on creating the messaging and content that addresses the true pulse of customers. 

Automation for customer experience and customer retention

The true pulse of customers is concentrated in micro-moments, which only underlines customer experience and the absolute requirement for our content to be there in those moments. 

With the data it collects and turns into insights, AI helps marketing teams understand and predict customer behavior, and plan their content around these patterns for the most effective campaigns and messaging at every touchpoint. 

Seven of the top 10 use cases for AI listed above deal with content marketing, and no wonder, because people will always be looking at content. Right now while we’re all at home, we’re even more exposed to content and how brands talk to us across channels. 

Automation works so that you’re always putting the right content to the right audiences at the right time. Customers are even more keen-eyed about your responsiveness and proactiveness now. You need to connect with them and solve their problems, triggering awareness of those problems along with the solutions you offer. 

And you don’t stop there. AI’s insights for content marketing help you continue to provide valuable and relevant content to not only satisfy but retain customers. 

• Personalization – Make your customers feel like family, using their data for personalized recommendations and quicker checkout.
• Efficient assistance – Chatbots provide targeted, friendly, and timely information when your customers need them. Human teams can follow up with support tickets where chatbots don’t suffice for the customer’s concerns.
• Seamless omnichannel experience – Customers stick to brands they can interact with in channels they use. 87% of retailers agree that an omnichannel strategy is critical. 

All of us have gotten used to a certain level of content outreach and responsiveness. These strategies for customer satisfaction and retention are impossible without automation.

We published this blog post in October of 2019, and the notable difference between then and now is that AI-based tools have only become more ubiquitous. Behavioral segmentation still matters more than demographics (this is not just our humble opinion), and it’s now easier than ever to automate the process of collecting that data and using it to make a bottom-line impact. To learn more, read on to the blog below, and consider joining me for a masterclass on how to find your real audience and how to talk to them with Builder.AI on Thursday, April 27, 2023.

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Behavioral segmentation gets at the heart of what customers are doing, a pattern of past/current actions, and a projection of future actions, versus who they are. 

In other words, using demographics to segment your prospects and customers isn’t enough. You have to look at how the contacts in your customer database act to understand what they want, and what they’ll want in the future. Tailoring your messaging, campaigns, etc., by behaviors (versus demographics) is much more likely to create engagement – and therefore position you to convert faster and at a higher rate.  

So why do marketers and sales teams still focus so much on demographics? Business plans typically have a dedicated section on who your target market is, and perhaps that’s why demographics are so ingrained in entrepreneurs. 

But behavioral segmentation is the better indicator of why your product or service is right for your target market because it tells you what matters to your customers, and therefore what drives their purchases. 

How behavioral segmentation works

Traditional demographics groups your customers by age, location, gender, job position, geography, etc. These aren’t necessarily bad. They can work if you happen to have products for men and women, or, say, geo-targeted discounts. 

When you step beyond that to real engagement, you’d only be guessing if you use demographics. They give you vague signals on what your audience wants and needs, and what you can do to nudge them along the sales funnel. 

With behavioral data, you’d have a more accurate grasp of your customers. 

Behavioral segmentation groups your customers according to their actions (or lack of), which empowers you and your team to plan campaigns/outreach efforts and provide personalized experiences that lead to better engagement, conversions, and best of all, repeat customers. 

A few behavioral segments include the buyer’s journey stage (early adopter versus late adopter), purchase behavior, benefits sought, usage of your service/product, and customer loyalty, among others. 

For example, you send completely different messages to a lead who keeps visiting your landing page (but hasn’t opted-in yet), a lead who has visited your landing page for the first time and downloaded your ebook, and a customer who has bought your products four times already. 

If you treat the above repeat customer as if you didn’t know her, you can bet she’d stop buying (click here for more on that). 

Understanding your customers at a high level

Demographic data doesn’t get you far. On the other hand, insight into your customer’s values, interests, needs, and preferences through behavioral data can help you connect with them.  

This was what drove decades of market research, an entire industry dedicated to asking people what they want and why, and days, weeks, and even years documenting what customers do. Without these complex data points, most demographic data can be useless. 

From “target market,” we’ve graduated to “buyer personas,” and from buyer personas, we now have “buyer intent” and “transaction history.” That sounds more invasive than it actually is, but today’s age of information and convenience leaves trail marketers can utilize to understand their customers on the highest level. Now that we are undoubtedly in the zeitgeist of AI, you can count on AI-infused tools (probably being launched daily) to help automate the process of aggregating data on – and making predictions based on that data – prospects and customers.

From a Marketing Week survey in 2019: 

• “When asked to reflect on recent campaigns, behavior emerges as the most effective method of segmentation, according to 91% of the marketers questioned.” 
• “Nearly three quarters (73%) think behavior has also become a more effective means of segmentation over the past five years.” 

Four years later, I don’t think much has changed. 

Asking the right questions

A deeper understanding of your audience leads to more of the same. Behavior tracking helps you to ask the right questions, like adding “gift” buttons at checkout, or sending a more interactive and effective “survey” through offers and seeing which your customer would pick. 

Do your customers buy your items as gifts? Or maybe they like trying out the flavors you release? Or perhaps they simply don’t want to run out of your products? The answer would drastically change your personalized campaign messaging. Behavioral segmentation matters more than demographics in giving you insight into your marketing campaigns. 

Behavior is THE essential ingredient of customer data 

AI can now pack and analyze transaction data, first-party and third-party data to form a reliable data set, combined with any demographic characteristics, for a complete picture of your customer’s needs and wants. Add today’s sophisticated analysis that can recognize opportunities for your business and you get to ask the right questions and send the right offers, with the double benefits of, 1. Delighting your customers with your personalization, and 2. Conversions and customer loyalty. This means you are at the heart of what your customers are doing, and why.

The World Economic Forum’s “Future of Jobs” report four years ago listed emotional intelligence (EQ) as a top skill for 2020. The prediction turned out right. It’s not surprising, with the current direction of marketing toward AI and, and more recently in this COVID era, empathy and genuine goodwill. 

AI is increasingly taking over sales and marketing data and automation. But EQ is an essential ingredient to balance efficiency with a human factor.

EQ has always been part of marketing. It’s what we applied whenever we addressed pain points. But now more than ever, successful sales and marketing campaigns combine the intelligence and thoroughness of martech and the impact of EQ. 

EQ is your brand’s daily interactions and impressions with your customers

Emotional Intelligence or emotional quotient (EQ) is one’s ability to understand other people and intuit their motivations. From there, EQ also defines how good a person is at reading people’s cues and signals and reacting and/or cooperating from there. 

This is incredibly important in marketing and sales. And some marketers and salespeople have very high EQ, which is part of what makes them love their jobs. It’s what makes them so good at what they do, and adept at engaging and even charming their customers. 

Show a customer’s message to a marketer and that marketer can usually tell what and how you should reply. Show a complaint to a salesperson and that salesperson can respond and turn it around into a conversion. 

This ability to read and respond to people’s signals defines success. 

And while AI and marketing technology can generate EQ-based posts, or data that informs them, your team needs at least one team member (ideally with a high degree of EQ) to review and approve auto-generated posts — because they still come from a machine.

Just like your value proposition, EQ is a pillar of your brand’s consistency in communicating with your customers via content or through direct messages. 

Every interaction and every piece of content you push should show your understanding and empathy of your customers’ pain points and needs and desires. Or you will fail to connect with them in the first place. 

EQ in sales and marketing means deeply understanding your audience

Establishing connections and relationships. That’s really what today’s digital marketing is at its core, and EQ has a big connection to sales and marketing persuasion angles for that reason. 

After all, you can’t persuade someone you don’t understand. And conversely, it’s easy to persuade someone you already deeply understand. 

All aspects of marketing, particularly content marketing, stand on your marketing teams’ ability to read or predict your audience’s signals on what content they want to see at any given moment or interaction.

• Should this email push a discount or another infographic first? 
• Should THIS specific landing page contain a demo video or download, or a comparison long-scroll? 

AI and data can give you insight, and EQ should determine the content you push in response to those insights on predicted customer behavior patterns. 

Emotional intelligence is the core compass of customer experience 

Your sales and marketing teams’ ability to empathize defines how effective your campaigns will be. AI can make good suggestion much when it comes to triggers and calls-to-action, but it’s still humans who need to check and confirm what’s correct and what will work in anticipating your customers’ needs and behavior. 

For example, AI technology can put together a set of captions and hashtags for your YouTube or Instagram videos. But it’s human editors who understand audience pain points and will know what words and hashtags will actually work to get people to watch a video to the end — and follow-through on the call to action. 

It’s not just about algorithms — it’s also about human emotional intelligence.

EQ resolves friction in sales 

Because of that, EQ plays a big role in handling the objections/complaints you expect in the sales pipeline, on the way to the sale, or after the sale.

There are nuances behind complaints and objections. Someone saying “It’s so expensive” doesn’t necessarily mean a complaint about the price, but a need for assurance that the product or service has the desired value and effect. 

The best salespeople know how to get into the heart of people’s needs or pain points, addressing them and turning objections around into a sale. There’s opportunity there to connect even deeper, because you’re being given insight into that customer’s way of thinking.

Human EQ recognizes those opportunities. It’s human input that can help AI recognize these cues. 

But again, it’s not a one-size-fits-all approach, so even with a robust and intelligent automation built with EQ triggers, it will still need human moderation and management. 

As we’ve pointed out before, people expect customization but are simultaneously creeped out and turned off by too much and too little insight. It’s EQ that helps sales and marketing teams stay on the very narrow line of impressive rather than invasive or impersonal. 

EQ is important because we serve humans

Emotional intelligence will and should always be present in sales and marketing, even more so with the implementation of artificial intelligence and martech. As long as we serve humans, we need human empathy to balance the AI biases and impersonality. 

And that’s not just for customers but internally in our teams as well, because leaders with high EQ know how to create a happy working environment. Happy people work better and are simply more motivated and more creative.

SALT LAKE CITY – March 30, 2023 – PRLog — Wrench.AI, a provider of AI-driven marketing and sales solutions, is excited to announce the launch of its new Creative Content AI. This content-generating tool is designed to disrupt the way businesses create personalized content and campaigns for their customers and prospects by making the most challenging and time-intensive steps faster, more efficient, and capable of delivering greater impact across all stages of the buyer’s journey.

The Creative Content AI solution includes multiple features, including automatically researching customer audiences, enriching customer databases, and generating personas. It goes a step further by recommending customer campaign segments and personalized content to create engaging and conversion-driven campaigns. Creative Content AI also generates personalized messaging for individual customers for more effective one-to-one outreach. Creative Content AI speeds up the process by which marketing and sales teams can draft and implement more personalized campaigns and go-to-market plans without sacrificing a personal touch.

“We’ve been generating AI-based personas with messaging for our clients with really positive results for a couple of years, but now we can provide a more streamlined process that makes it faster for marketing and sales teams to create truly effective campaigns that get to the heart of what their customers want. We cut the campaign creation process by around 50%, giving more time back to teams so they can focus on strategy and building customer relationships,” said Dan Baird, CEO of Wrench.AI.

Creative Content AI is now available to current customers through the Wrench.AI platform and a waitlist. To reserve a spot on the waitlist and experience the Creative Content AI solution, contact beta@wrench.ai today.