Monday, October 10, 2016

A Simple Approach to Document Your Content Marketing Strategy

simple-approach-document-content-marketing-strategy

I write this fresh off a trip that took me from Cleveland to Helsinki with a brief stop in Copenhagen and then to London.

It’s been almost 10 years now since I’ve been speaking on the topic of content marketing in and around Europe.  Over that time, content marketing has become a driving force, maybe THE biggest change I’ve seen in the approach to marketing around this continent.  It is slowly evolving from a product-centric to a more audience-centered strategic approach.


#Contentmarketing is evolving from a product-centric to audience-centered strategic approach says @joepulizzi.
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And yet, just as we’ve seen in the United States, marketers in Europe tend to overcomplicate the idea of content marketing. There is still a belief that we need to be everywhere our customers are on the web.  That we need to be on all social platforms (like it or not). That we need to be distributing our stories 11 different ways every day. That we need to create viral content (don’t get me started on that one).

When I take the stage telling marketers in Finland and the United Kingdom to slow down, to choose channels carefully, possibly desert publishing on some social media sites, and to simplify their strategies, I often get pushback.

“Too simplistic,” I hear.

“My management expects us to publish on every platform,” I hear again and again.

“We need immediate results” is a common pushback.

All I can advise is that you should zig when everyone else zags.

Let your competitors waste their time and resources publishing more and more content, while you go out and build a loyal audience that will reap rewards for years to come.

Remember, more content does not mean more assets.  The asset is the audience, and the content is what gets you to the asset.


The asset is the audience … The #content is what gets you to the asset says @joepulizzi.
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A simplified approach

If you are a marketer who has a handle on your content marketing approach, this post will serve as a review.  For everyone else, you can use this to help you document a content marketing strategy that you can present to your team and continue to refine.

You need to answer the following questions as you proceed with any marketing approach, but they will be particularly helpful for a content-first approach.

Answer big-picture questions

These broad questions must be answered to start your documented strategy:

  1. What is the challenge? What business challenge (specifically) are you trying to solve?
  2. What is your dream outcome of this approach?
  3. What is the risk if you fail?
  4. Who is involved? What permission do you need from your managers to participate?
  5. How much will you spend?
  6. What if things go wrong? What is your plan if you don’t achieve your goals quickly enough, if there is a customer complaint, or if other problems arise?
  7. How long do you have to show success?

These are broad questions for a reason. They are intended to get you into the right mindset before you start to talk about any type of content creation.

Get more specific

  1. What’s the specific need to reach the objective? (e.g., create leads, have better customers, generate higher-quality leads, make direct sales)
  2. How big of an opportunity is it? Is this opportunity big enough to warrant spending your time and/or money?
  3. How will the initiative align to your business objectives? With your existing marketing?
  4. What are the risks? What sources could prevent you from achieving the goals? Which of those things can you control and minimize the likelihood of their occurrence?

Detail your audience

Now that you have a feel for the problem you are trying to solve for and the reason to create content in the first place, you can begin to focus on the persona.

  1. Who is the target audience? (only one)
  2. What content or information do they need as it pertains to this plan?
  3. How will this help your audience with their job or life in some way?
  4. Why would your audience care about this? (Do they?)
  5. What unique value proposition (UVP) do you offer this persona? What differentiating value do you bring to the table?

Develop your content

You want to highly scrutinize the content.  If the information isn’t truly differentiated, with limited competition, there is little chance you will break through and gather attention.

  1. What is the content niche you are planning to cover?
  2. What other companies provide this kind of information? Do you even have an opportunity to become a leading resource in this area? How do you find out?
  3. Can you purchase an existing external asset instead of developing a new one?
  4. Where will you find the stories in this content niche? Who in the company has the expertise to help? What internal assets and other content do you already have?
  5. What resources (staffing and otherwise) will you need?
  6. How will the stories mainly be told (audio, video, textual)? Remember, you want to focus on one key content type and one key distribution platform (a blog, a magazine, an event series, a podcast, a video series, etc.)
  7. What key design issues will make or break the program?
  8. What platform makes the most sense to distribute the content?
  9. Will this be a new content brand or woven into an existing product or company brand?

Distribute and measure

  1. How will the information be found by the audience?
  2. What current assets do you have to distribute the content? What partnerships can be leveraged? Is there paid budget available?
  3. How will you know the initiative is successful?
  4. What subscription tools will you use to capture audience information?
  5. What key assets need to be created to capture the necessary data?
  6. What other departments should you bring in to maximize impact?
  7. What technology are you missing for enabling collaboration and measurement? What are “must-haves” and what are “nice-to-haves”?
  8. What internal communication will you need to make sure the program gets and keeps buy-in?
  9. How quickly, considering the buying cycle, can you tie the initiative to sales, cost savings, or customer loyalty?
  10. What internal issues need to be worked out so you can tie the subscribers to revenue?

Create the business statement

While there are more questions to be asked, answering the above will uncover the opportunities and gaps in your overall plan.

Now, you can take this information and create a business statement, which will serve as an elevator pitch for the overall project.  Here’s an example.

Problem: The mechanical engineers (our key buyers and key leads) gathered from our traditional marketing processes often come to us very late in the buyer’s journey. Even if the sales team can break through and get a meeting, we are trying to win the business solely on price and not on value. Thus, yield has been significantly impacted over the past 12 months. It has become a significant management concern.

Solution: If we can build a loyal audience of mechanical engineers by developing an amazing awareness experience for our brand, we will be able to bypass the RFP process, increase the quality of our leads (pulling leads from our subscriber base), and earn more business without competition or product discounts.

Our own engineers are some of the smartest around designing industrial soldering equipment (ISE).  Currently, three publications cover the design/build process of ISE, but none solely focus on ISE.  We believe, if done right, we can become the leading informational resource in this area, build a loyal subscriber base of mechanical engineers who design/build in this area, and then build our lead flow from the subscriber base after a series of behaviors take place and we hit the appropriate lead score (subscribe, engage, download, attend webinar, etc.)

After reviewing all possible content avenues, we believe that a blog/e-newsletter combo would be the most appropriate. The initial plan is to create two blog posts per week (Tuesday and Thursday, with a Saturday e-newsletter) until we see a minimum of 5,000 subscribers to the e-newsletter.  Once achieved, we will increase frequency to three times per week.

The incentive to sign up for the newsletter will be a free sample template for the design/build process.  This was already developed by another department, and we have its approval to redesign and share it as an extremely valuable download.

We believe that the 5,000-subscriber mark is achievable in six months with adequate promotion leveraging our current database and partnering with outside media organizations. Considering a buying journey of six months, we believe that we’ll start to see yield impact at about the eight-month mark of the program, with the ultimate goal to increase average yield per sale by 15%. Considering the budget and resources needed for this program, we believe that with new business and the overall yield impact, the program will generate 5.5 times ROI in a 12-month period.

What you just read is the kind of one-page report you would present to your management team.  Obviously, you’ll add things like a content marketing mission statement, team structure, distribution plans and more. But in this case, the goal is only to get your strategic thoughts on paper so that you have a solid business plan and hypothesis for moving forward with this opportunity.

And remember, this plan is not set in stone … it can and should be updated regularly.

Good luck!

Want to receive daily insight to help you create and regularly update your content marketing strategy? Subscribe to the free CMI newsletter.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

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From Newbies to Seasoned Marketers: How to Measure Your Content Marketing

measure-content-marketing

What is one of the biggest challenges facing content marketers today? If the blog traffic and conversions at CMI are any indication, measurement and ROI are two nuts that marketers are trying to crack. But this is no surprise. Justifying marketing spend has been a struggle since the beginning of time.

But content marketers face a more specific challenge because the payoff is not immediate. In fact, it typically takes at least 18 months before you see bottom-line results. If you are in an industry with a long sales cycle, it often takes longer to tie content marketing to revenue, making short-term ROI even more elusive.

As Scott Severson says:

Content marketing is a lot like working out. You’re not going to see a payoff in a week, but if you commit to doing it regularly over time, you’ll see amazing results. Bottom line: There is tremendous ROI in consistently developing great content for your audience. And, unlike other forms of marketing, content marketing pays dividends far into the future.”


Unlike other forms of marketing, #contentmarketing pays dividends far into the future says @scottseverson.
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First things first: What are you trying to measure?

Regardless of whether you are getting started or trying to prove ROI on a long-standing program, you need to have consensus on what success looks like. This may seem obvious, but only 44% of B2B marketers, 43% of B2C marketers, and 30% of nonprofit marketers know what this is.

When you are getting started

Unlike traditional advertising where you can see the results quickly, it often takes at least 18 months to start seeing results from your content marketing efforts. This means that it’s tough – if not impossible – to show true ROI at the beginning or your efforts.


It often takes 18 months to start seeing results from your #contentmarketing efforts says @michelelinn.
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Build your business case for content marketing

You first need to set the stage so your leadership team understands what you’re measuring (and agrees that is what should be measured) and knows that the results will take time. While there are many ways to build your case, here are few ideas:

Present case studies and examples of brands that are using content marketing to build their business – and be realistic about how long this will take.

I’m a big fan of our documentary, The Story of Content: Rise of the New Marketing, which explores the evolution of marketing and presents several interesting case studies. You can even download our screening kit to help you use the documentary to have the right kinds of conversations.)

Below is a video from one of my favorite brand success stories, but the documentary covers several:

  • John Deere
  • Marriott
  • Blendtec
  • Jyske Bank

Help the leadership team realize that content marketing has benefits beyond revenue.

Appeal to the leaders’ sense of empathy: Do they like to be interrupted and have information shoved down their throats, or would they prefer to have their questions answered – when and how they want?

By sharing useful information and educating your audience, you are building a better customer who may be more likely to make more confident purchasing decisions, renew more often, and advocate for your brand.

Remind the team that the content you are publishing today will be found in the future – and will continue to drive traffic, subscribers, revenue, or whatever your goals are.

Just like a 401k, your investment in time and money for your content will likely not result in an immediate payoff, but the benefits that compound over time can be enormous.

Scare them.

If keeping things positive isn’t going to work, show your leadership that your competition is showing up while you are buried (or invisible).

Are there keywords you want people to identify with your brand? Do some poking around in Google and find those words where your competitor shows up – and you don’t.

Then type these keywords in for your management team and see their reaction. It’s a great kick in the pants to start the conversation.

Identify your short-term goals

If your team needs to have specific goals in the early stages, here are some ideas:

  • Figure out what matters in the short term to your executive team before your content is able to tie to revenue. Even if these metrics are not technically ROI – they’re ROO (return on objective). For instance, do they care about traffic, social shares, quality back links, or email conversions?
  • Consider justifying your program by comparing it to the costs of traditional advertising. While this study from Kapost and Eloqua is a few years old, I love how it compares the cost of content marketing and paid search marketing.

TIP TO IMPROVE ROI: If you need to justify the cost or your program in the early stages, make sure to budget for paid promotion of your best content (not your products or services) in search and social channels. Having this type of data can help you make better decisions on what to focus on in the future and show the team what type of results are possible.

BuzzSumo is a great tool to help you identify where to spend your money. You can look at all of the content on your domain by simply typing in your URL (minus the http://) or you can type in your domain as well as the general topic you want to cover. You’ll get a set of results that you can then sort by Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

buzzsumo-money-tool

Click to enlarge

Once you have a bit of content and experience

After you have been executing content marketing a while, you may be asked to show more quantitative results. Again, you need to understand what success looks like in your organization and what metrics your leadership team cares about so everything can be tied to these.

While there is no one right way to do this, I suggest looking at costs/investment vs. benefits.

Costs/Investment

How much does it cost to create your content? This exercise can be easy or complicated, based on the level of detail required.

Quick method: If you are using freelancers, this cost can be somewhat easy to calculate. If you are using internal resources, ask people to track the time they spend on projects for a few weeks so you can understand where time is spent and then translate that cost to projects.

More detailed method: In this presentation, Making Better Content Decisions, Laura Creekmore details seven expenses as they relate to content, which is likely more than what you are considering:

  • Percent of your ongoing audience research
  • Time to come up with the idea
  • Time to create one asset
  • Number of people involved for how long and for what cost
  • Time/cost for content structure creation and maintenance
  • Percentage of any budget you have, including things such as hardware upgrades, training, travel, office supplies
  • Time/cost for every person involved in the review/approval process (and consider how often you need to review)

You don’t need to get this detailed, but it is useful to start to understand what your content is really costing. Even if you aren’t doing these calculations to justify your overall program, having an understanding of this information can help you make better decisions on where to prioritize your efforts.

TIP TO IMPROVE ROI: Michael Brenner suggests one hidden expense in many organizations:

Sirius Decisions has reported that as much as 60 to 70% of content goes unused. Any content that never gets used is 100% waste. You need to not only track content production, but also usage.

In short, figure out what content isn’t getting used and stop producing that type of content immediately to reduce expenses.

Benefits

Of course, you not only need to look at costs, but you need to look at the money your content is generating for your business.

You need to continue to do two things:

  • Understand which goals are most important to your leadership team and report on those.
  • Communicate that the benefit of content marketing builds a better customer, not just revenue.

The benefit of #contentmarketing builds a better customer, not just revenue says @michelelinn.
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Next, you need to associate the value to each of these goals.

For instance, one common goal of content marketing is building an audience/subscribers, which is something that can be measured. I like this explanation from Pam Neely in the article, How to Calculate Email Subscriber Value (and Why it Matters). She presents this simple equation (the blog goes into more details):

Month’s revenue earned from email list divided by number of month’s subscribers = revenue per subscriber

TIP TO IMPROVE ROI: As mentioned, the great thing about content marketing is that you likely have content created ages ago that is still contributing to your goals. Don’t only look at recent content but look at historical content as well. At CMI, we have many posts that are more than two years old that still drive substantial traffic and new subscribers. Take your analysis a step further, update and republish those popular pieces. From my experience, these pieces take minimal work, yet they bring in a fresh audience that converts very well.

TIP TO IMPROVE ROI: While the ideas above are great for getting you started and provide some quantitative suggestions on how to prove the worth of your program, here is another way to look at your efforts: What would the impact be if your content were not there?

Bringing it together in a report

Once you have your measurements down, it’s useful to keep everyone in the loop about the progress of the program. Here is a simple editorial status report that you can adapt for your needs. A couple of things to remember:

  • Continue to report on the metrics that the team agreed are important.
  • Only collect the data on which you will take action.

checklist-editorial-status

Click to enlarge

I’d love to hear from you. Does this help you measure your content more successfully? What other roadblocks are you facing?

(Editor’s note: This post is adapted from my contribution to Uberflip’s eBook, The Ultimate Guide to Content Insights.)

Want to keep up to date on content marketing trends and tools to persuade your leadership team? Subscribe to CMI’s free daily newsletter.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

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This Week in Content Marketing: Audience, Not Content, Is the Real Asset

pnr_episode151-01

PNR: This Old Marketing with Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose can be found on both iTunes and Stitcher.

In this episode, Robert and I discuss the results of CMI’s 2017 content marketing benchmarks report and confirm that content marketing is, indeed, all about building an audience. We also talk about Rolling Stone magazine’s new buyer, and debate who should be in charge of content creation. Rants and raves include a book review and the demise of Mental Floss’ print publication; then we wrap up with an example of the week from Sainsbury’s. 

This week’s show

(Recorded live on October 3, 2016; Length: 1:08:40)

Download this week’s PNR This Old Marketing podcast.

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1.   Content marketing in the news

  • Singapore-based music start-up buys 49% stake in Rolling Stone (09:37): U.S.-based Wenner Media announced the sale of its stake to Singapore’s BandLab, which plans to focus on “expanding Rolling Stone’s business in new markets, and propelling the brand’s global evolution,” according to TechCrunch. While Robert is fascinated by this example of a music product company using a content brand to drive sales, I believe the potential to ramp up your content capabilities quickly through an acquisition should be a no-brainer for anyone in the media business.
  • Content marketing takes a turn for the better: New 2017 research (16:31): Last week, CMI released its new B2B Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends report, which demonstrates that enthusiasm and momentum for content marketing are definitely on the rise. I’m greatly relieved to see the industry turning the corner on the “trough of disillusionment” we were stuck in last year, and I discuss two particular trends that the research attributes this shift to, while Robert opens a discussion on what marketers will have to do to maintain the necessary quality standards and production schedules to keep up with such a high demand for content.
  • Content creation: Whose job is it anyway? (40:00): Ad agencies are increasingly embracing content marketing because of its potential to help them build audiences for their clients, rather than buy them. But who they feel should be in charge of that content is a less clear-cut decision, according to a recent article on the U.K.-based Mediatel. While we aren’t convinced that the traditional agencies are well-prepared to make these types of high-level content decisions yet, we absolutely believe that those who specialize in content will need to have a seat at the table when they are.  

2.    Sponsor (45:45)

  • ion interactive: 50 Ways to Engage Your Audience — Interactive Lookbook: Want a fun way to get 50 ideas for improving content engagement? That’s what this interactive lookbook is all about. Each capability is illustrated as an example of itself. Have fun. Get ideas. Get results. Get the Lookbook.

ion_interactive_engage_cover

3.    Rants and raves (47:50)

  • Robert’s rant No. 1: Robert recently discovered a new book by Mara Einstein, called Black Ops Advertising, which contends that content marketing and native advertising are dangerously deceptive “stealth marketing” tactics, out to fool people into believing that they are more than just sponsored messages and sales pitches. As you might expect, Robert takes issue with many of the book’s contentions, though he does encourage those who love a good marketing conspiracy to read it — with a grain of salt.  
  • Robert’s rant No. 2: Robert is fascinated with the story shared in an entertaining Slate article, which details Paramount Pictures’ self-flagellation after having taken the movie idea of a 4-year-old and turning it into a $115 million write-down. If, as a marketer you’ve ever struggled with content quality and the feeling that your ideas aren’t worthy of being produced, take heart that even the magic-makers in Hollywood aren’t immune to suffering from creative blocks or executing on bad ideas.
  • Joe’s rant No. 1: I wanted to point out a recent Digiday article that discusses a new analysis by NewsWhip, which found that publishers appear to be cooling on Facebook Instant Articles. The decline is likely due to the difficulty media companies are having in monetizing the vast amount of content they publish on the social network — which leaves me with little to say about this complication of building your brand on pay-to-play platforms beyond, “I told you so.”
  • Joe’s rant No. 2: After 15 years, news and entertainment magazine Mental Floss is shuttering its print version, as discussed in an article on Folio. I’m disappointed — though not surprised — that Mental Floss’ publishers felt its business model was no longer sustainable; but the decision also emphasizes how tremendous an opportunity print still represents when it comes to cutting through the clutter — as long as you aren’t looking to monetize your publication through print advertising.

4.   This Old Marketing example of the week (1:00:35)

  • Robert shares an exciting example this week from U.K. grocery chain Sainsbury’s, which came away from the 2016 Content Marketing Awards with the prize for Project of the Year for its multiplatform publication, Sainsbury’s Magazine. Robert admits that, until recently, he didn’t appreciate the full details of this landmark content effort. However, during last week’s speaking engagement in London, he had an opportunity to hear from Seven, the U.K.-based agency that produces the effort, and learned that, not only has the magazine been around since 1993, but it also came about in a somewhat unique fashion: A cook named Delia Smith proposed co-launching a new publication with the supermarket as a way to help people learn to cook better, use fresher ingredients, and work with the latest cookware supplies and techniques. Over the years, the magazine has grown to become the No. 1 cookery magazine in the U.K., with 3 million paid subscribers — which makes it a content marketing effort that actually pays for itself. But, what’s even more remarkable is that according to a 2015 survey conducted by the company, 81% of readers have cooked a recipe after reading the magazine, and eight out of 10 have bought a product from Sainsbury’s after reading about it. Simultaneously serving as a successful marketing vehicle, a proven driver of purchase intent, and a revenue generator, it’s a stellar example of the multiple levels of value content marketing can provide for a business.

sainsburys-magazine-600x377

For a full list of PNR archives, go to the main This Old Marketing page.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

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Author: Joe Pulizzi

Joe Pulizzi considers himself the poster boy for content marketing. Founder of the Content Marketing Institute , Joe evangelizes content marketing around the world through keynotes, articles, tweets and his books, including best-selling Epic Content Marketing (McGraw-Hill) and the new book, Content Inc. Check out Joe's two podcasts. If you want to get on his good side, send him something orange. For more on Joe, check out his personal site or follow him on Twitter @JoePulizzi.

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Friday, October 7, 2016

Minimum viable personas (MVPs)

Skeleton

I hate acronyms, I really do. Acronyms are used by people who are too lazy to use proper words and by those who want to keep others out from their secret little acronym laden club. Seriously, I’m not a computer so don’t talk to me in short little codes that I won’t understand. WTF! (Whoops). It therefore pains me to throw another acronym into an already acronym overburdened world, but alas sometimes a bit of collateral damage is hard to avoid. The shiny new acronym in question is: MVPs – Minimum Viable Personas.

What are minimum viable personas? Well very much like a minimum viable product, a minimum viable persona is a persona that is just about ‘good enough’ to do what you need it to do. A persona that has just enough information and detail. A persona that is useful within the UX design process but which hasn’t had any more time and effort spent on it than is absolutely necessary. A minimum viable persona is like the humble, but essential sandwich. Sure, it’s not going to be the best food you’ve ever tasted, but it’s ‘good enough’ to stop you from getting too hungry.

In my last article I outlined why there is still life left in personas. I also outlined some of the reasons why personas have fallen out of favour with many designers – one being that too much time and effort has often been spent on personas. Minimum viable personas help alleviate this problem by keeping that time and effort to a minimum. Let me explain.

Swiss Toni & Barbecuing

There used to be a great BBC comedy sketch show in the UK call the Fast Show. One of the characters in the show was called Swiss Toni. To Toni almost any situation in life is best understood as being, “like making love to a beautiful woman”. Take making a cup of coffee for instance.

Swiss Toni

“Making a cup of coffee is like making love to a beautiful woman. It’s got to be hot. You’ve got to take your time. You’ve got to stir… gently and firmly. You’ve got to grind your beans until they squeak.”

I desperately wanted to show how creating minimum viable personas is, “like making love to a beautiful woman” but I worried about where this might take me so instead I’m going to save your and my own blushes by showing how it’s “like cooking food on a barbeque”.

What the hell has barbecuing got to do with minimum viable personas? Well, it’s all about good preparation and judging just the right amount of time to spend. Every experienced barbecuer knows that if you try to barbeque your food too soon, namely whilst everything is still madly flaming away (I’m talking about a ‘proper’ charcoal barbeque here) it’s going to end badly. You’re going to burn the outside of your food, and undercook the inside. Even once you’ve waited for the flames to go down it’s very much a balancing act. If you don’t cook things for long enough you’re going to give everyone food poisoning. Too much cooking time and your food will be edible, but horribly overcooked. A good barbecuer knows that the key is putting the necessary time and effort into preparing the barbeque, and then putting just the right amount of time into cooking the food. Not enough preparation and things go badly. Too little cooking time and things go badly. Too much cooking time and things go badly.

Personas are just the same. Create personas without the necessary preparation and homework, without gathering user insights and user research findings and your personas are going to turn out burnt and inedible. Put too little time into creating personas and they’re going to potentially poison the project team with lots of dangerous assumptions and baseless user information. Put too much time into creating your personas and you’re going to overcook them. You’re not only going to needlessly burn time creating them in the first place but you’re going to potentially bombard your team and stakeholders with more information than they arguably need.

Barbecuing

Creating personas is like barbecuing – both require good preparation and just the right amount of time

Just as barbequing is a step towards creating a nice meal, personas are just a step towards creating a great experience for your users. The amount of time and effort you spend on personas should reflect this so rather than spending weeks creating beautiful and exquisitely detailed personas, you should be spending mornings, or even just a few hours creating a set of minimum viable personas. Here’s how.

How to create minimum viable personas

A really great way to quickly create a set of minimum viable personas is by running a 2-3 hour collaborative workshop. Invite a small group of people who know about users and ideally have had direct contact with them. For example you might have someone from sales, someone from support, someone from market research and so on.

If you realise that there is relatively little known about your users then you’ll need to carry out some rapid user research prior to the workshop (unlike proto-personas, minimum viable personas should always be based on good ol fashioned user research). Get out of the office and track your users down. Find out who they are, what makes them tick and what is important to them. Don’t spend too long, but you need to be able to get at least some idea of who your users are otherwise your minimum viable personas will be a work of pure fiction, and designing for purely fictional users is never a good thing.

Persona workshop

A collaborative workshop is a great way to create minimum viable personas

1. Agree your user groups

The first thing that you want to do (rapid user research aside) is to identify and agree your distinct user groups. This is something that you can do prior to the workshop so that you can come to the workshop with some potential groups in mind.

When identifying your user groups look for behavioural differences rather than demographic ones. For example, if you’re designing a product for online grocery shoppers you might have identified that there is a group of users who like to plan out everything that they need to buy before going online. This group of users are likely to be of all different ages and backgrounds, but because their behaviour is similar you should be able to cover them off with just one persona. Discuss and agree your user groups at the start of the workshop. It can also be useful to identify key user groups as you’ll want to focus on these first.

2. Create a minimum viable persona for each user group

Having agreed your user groups, collectively create a minimum viable persona for each user group using the information and knowledge in the room. Start with your most important group and try to spend no more than 30 minutes on each persona so that you can hopefully cover them all off within the workshop.

Capture key information for each persona. A good starting point is the following:

  • Name – Give them a memorable name and tag line
  • Goals – What are they trying to achieve?
  • Background – Who are they? What is their background?
  • Needs – What matters most to them?
  • Behaviours – What sort of a relationship with the product would they like?
  • Frustrations  – What are their pain points?

If you have to make assumptions, that’s fine, just be sure to capture those assumptions so that you can check them later on. Otherwise you are potentially designing against false premises.

Proto-persona

An example minimum viable persona by Anthony Reyes

3. Add a photo and some detail

After the workshop you can add a bit of gloss to your minimum viable personas if you like. It can be good to add a photo (just avoid stock photos), include a little extra detail and to clean them up so that they are a little easier to read and take in.

Minimum viable persona example

An example minimum viable persona with a photo and some detail added

4. Use your personas

Whilst it’s useful getting everyone together to discuss who your users are and to build a shared understanding of them, creating a set of minimum viable personas is pretty pointless unless you’re going to actually put them to use. I’ve already written before about how personas are a vital ingredient to design stories such as scenarios, experience maps, user story maps, storyboards and scenario maps. In my next article I’m going to show you exactly how you can put your personas to good use by outlining 5 specific ways to use personas in your project.

See also

Photo credits

Business workshop by The Natural Step Canada
Proto-persona by Anthony Reyes

The post Minimum viable personas (MVPs) appeared first on UX for the masses.



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trendwatching.com | AUTONOMANIA! | Consumer Trend Briefing | OCTOBER 2016


Shoppers lust after digital technologies for one simple reason: because the digital shopper is a super shopper. Knowledge is empowering, choice is wonderful, transparency reduces doubt, relevance saves time.

Think back: consumers ventured online to find they now had the ability to hunt out product reviews and the lowest prices. What a brave new world! But this is all now expected. Soon, shoppers will find their abilities further supercharged as they get access to truly intelligent services which provide them with more powerful and intuitive routes to find the best products, plus automatic (even retroactive) access to the best prices.

Indeed, where the onus has been on the customer making the best decision using the information at their fingertips, now they will be able to shop increasingly carefree, safe in the knowledge that they are supported by CLEVER COMMERCE platforms and services.



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Talking Shop with frog’s Design Leadership Team

In March, frog CEO Harry West announced the creation of a five-member Design Leadership Team (DLT) and explained that this team “will foster more collaboration and connections among each of the designers across frog’s studios, in turn delivering greater value for our global clients as we partner with them to advance the human experience.” Six months in, we sat down with the team to discuss everything from how we are making good on our mission statement, to the qualities great designers share. What follows is a transcript of that discussion, edited for length and clarity.

Let’s start with the obvious question: what is the Design Leadership Team and what does the team do?

Jeff Williams: The Design Leadership Team provides oversight of the design team and discipline, and is a partner to the executive team at frog in shaping and executing on the creative vision for the company moving forward.

Tjeerd Hoek: Yes, that’s right. It is also a collective of the top of our broad bench of creative leadership. Given the ever increasing diversity and breadth of frog’s work, having multiple senior design leaders with deep expertise in a variety of domains, working on different continents, allows us to meet the needs of our clients and our own organization effectively.

Right – great segue into our next question: In addition to your global responsibilities, what are your individual areas of focus?

Tjeerd Hoek: My individual area of focus is on large scale software realization programs. These are big-scale experience strategy programs, where software needs to be created to establish a unified and integrated experience across lots of different touchpoints. I work on these types of programs with all of our studios around the world.

Fabio Sergio: In the course of the last couple of years I’ve been helping to globally expand our Social Impact work, and I will continue to represent a reference point for that community of practice at frog. Experience strategy, which Tjeerd also mentioned, is another area of personal interest and passion, and I participate in this community of practice both globally, and at the regional and local level.

Jeff Williams: I’ve been focusing on running the creative team in the United States from a management and operation standpoint. Right now that includes leaning into our recruiting efforts, overhauling our job descriptions, and building out advancement opportunities for existing frogs on the creative team. I’m also working with a team that is redesigning the frog website to more clearly share our perspective and position on what we do, which will be great for our potential clients and also for potential employees who want to learn more about career opportunities and ways of engaging with frog. And I continue to focus on business development activities.

Ethan Imboden: I lead our Venture Design practice, where we’re developing new modes of working with our clients that align with the new types of innovation challenges they’re facing and the new pace of innovation that they need to hit. The other lens that I bring is hands-on experience in industrial design and more broadly in consumer products. The last piece is on the communications front, where I leverage my proximity to the marketing team in San Francisco by working on media relations, in an effort to provide the world at large a better view of what we do within our company, and in our partnerships and collaborations.

Rainer Wessler: My focus is to grow our presence in the APAC region. This means translating and evolving our brand, culture and offering so that it resonates both with clients and talent in the region. This is a continuous effort, as business and consumer culture changes rapidly. So one constant focus of my work is balancing clients’ desire for our global point of view with the diversity and awareness of local idiosyncrasies they expect.

At frog our mission is advancing the human experience through design. What does that mean to you, and what role is the Design Leadership Team going to play in ensuring that our work meets this high standard that we’ve created for ourselves?

Ethan: I think frog’s best use, and design’s core value, is to drive inflections and reorient the course of organizations and markets. More broadly, design shifts society by reorienting our relationships to ourselves and others. These inflections aren’t created by individuals; they’re created by teams. And these aren’t transactional projects—they’re real collaborations and partnerships that are deep and extend over time.

I think that’s what we’re getting at when we’re talking about advancing the human experience through design: driving powerful inflections through deep partnership and collaboration. And I think we most clearly live up to this mission, and we most clearly advance the human experience for the most people, when we drive impacts that reverberate beyond our client or partner to impact society more broadly. This is work where we’re redefining relationships between people, within and between businesses across industries, and are really working at the level of purpose, of endurance for the business, of resilience in their business model. I think that’s where we end up adding the most value, not only to our clients, but also to the human experience we’re looking to impact.

Jeff: I agree with Ethan and, as part of the Design Leadership Team, some of what we’re trying to do now is figure out how to push forward the excellence of the work that we’re doing to ensure that we are hitting our goals. One tangible way that we’re working toward the goal of advancing the human experience through design is by having quarterly portfolio reviews in the studios. They give us a chance to take a critical look at the work that we’re doing and make sure that the work is not only beautiful, but also to evaluate the work through the lens of outcomes for our clients, their customers, and the people that will interact with the products, services, and experiences that we’re designing.

Tjeerd: At frog we are uniquely positioned to bring real value to the world, because the products and services we create with our clients are in essence tools that allow the people who use them to do new interesting things, and to advance their own capabilities and impact on the world. Our expertise is in conceiving of and building experiences that enable people to discover new capabilities, and use those in meaningful ways: to gain new insights, come up with new ideas, and make those happen to ultimately enrich our world in positive and valuable ways. That is what we mean when we talk about advancing the human experience through design.

Fabio: Yes, I agree, and on that front, there’s definitely something to be said about the current state of the world that we live in, and the role that connectivity has played in turning almost every single product into an opportunity to discuss large, complex systems. What we observe is that designers are called more and more to really have an opinion, and help shape these complex systems, whether in health care, education, political systems, social systems or otherwise. As we take on these large-scale ecosystem level responsibilities, very often you see a lot of different stakeholders with different points of view, who really struggle to find alignment, because they might have different mandates and different agendas. So our mantra of advancing the human experience, or looking at reality through the lens of human experience, is key because it brings everybody together. Once you shine a light from the point of view of a community or an individual, you can drive a vision among different stakeholders by focusing on the experience itself. At frog we can also make visions real very quickly by prototyping ground level ideas and evaluating how they scale back up to big frameworks, strategies and system level thinking. So these are some of the ways designers are uniquely suited to advance human experiences.

I also think designers are inherently a political bunch. Design was born out of an ethos of bringing beauty to the masses through industrial production, which is really where industrial designers began. They were artists who saw potential in industrial production methods to bring what was only available to the elites, to the masses. I think our mission reflects the same desire to change the world through the connected tools we use today. You can actually change peoples’ lives with an app. That’s true; it’s not bullshit. There is the potential to change business models, change society, and question the roles companies play. So designers bring not only the skills and tools that allow companies or organizations to do what they can do, but at the same time, I think we bring a point of view to the table both about what needs to be designed, but also why it needs to be designed. That speaks to our manifesto and our history of making a difference, by making things meaningful through the lens of human beings.

Ethan: I second what Fabio is saying: there’s a great sense of accountability that we all feel as individuals, and one of the roles of this team is to gather and channel those feelings, which is something we take very seriously. It leads to a lot of constructive debate within all of the teams globally across frog, and we listen to that. We have our own debates and we try to make sure we reflect forward the vision of meaningful contribution that we’re hearing from within and that we know to be appropriate ourselves.

Rainer: I think that today we also have opportunities to advance people’s experiences by changing how our clients’ organizations think, work and decide – even beyond the projects we work on. Through our project collaboration and by evangelizing frog’s tools, methods and a strong customer focus along the way, I believe that we leave them in a better spot to make the right decisions for the people they serve.

What is it that makes a designer great at their craft, and what are some of the qualities that great designers share?

Jeff: One of the qualities that great designers share is an endless curiosity—not being afraid of a really, really difficult, challenging problem and everything that surrounds it, and really wanting to understand the bigger picture. And with that also comes a great deal of empathy. And I think that’s another quality that great designers have, is understanding how people are affected. That’s why we put such a heavy emphasis on the research that we do and the user centered approach that we take. And I would say that there is, without a doubt, the quality of a constant desire for excellence of craft, where ‘good enough’ is never enough. I think that is something that we see in frogs, and it is also something that we look for in potential frogs that we interview: are they constantly trying to push and improve their individual craft and their process? What are they adding to their toolkits and how are they evolving how they approach their work? Curiosity, empathy, and a constant striving for excellence are the three main qualities that you need to be a great designer, and it’s also important to have the ability to be a great collaborator and a team player.

Fabio: Yes, that’s right. Something else I’ve been reflecting upon in the recent past is how design has scaled beyond the craft of design as making things, to the role of design as a way to innovate. In this case I’m specifically talking about design thinking, which is an amazing tool that I can’t say enough good things about, but at the same time design thinking as advertised has created a disconnection between the design craft and the design process. And as a result, I think it has created the wrong perception that design as a process can be easily learned, in obstruction from design as a craft. So, in a way, I think we also need to speak proudly to the amount of time required to develop design crafts, whether interaction design, visual design, industrial design, design research and so on. There are hard-earned skills that take years to develop.

Tjeerd: I have a story that I’ve always told to illustrate this point: I think every creative person has been in the situation where you’re staring at an empty piece of paper or at an empty screen on a computer, and now you have to make something. You have insights in your head, you maybe have some ideas, but now you have to actually create something out of nothing. Being able to go through that type of pressure and really create something is, I think, an essential aspect of the design craft and also speaks to the grit of the people that we have at frog. Both the designers and frogs in other disciplines—we’re all regularly facing that moment and have to deliver in those moments.

Ethan: I really like this image of facing the blank page, or screen, or space. And I’m just sort of restating, I think, where Fabio was taking us, but I see the designer’s dichotomy as this: on one side there is design thinking and process, which is an ability to ingest and act on information, and on the other side the designer has to shut down logical processes to a degree and act on intuition and experience. frogs are very polyvalent; they have an ability to oscillate, in a very intentional way, between a creative lawlessness and a productive rigor. The lawlessness enables the lateral thinking to discover and explore non-obvious alternatives, and the rigor helps them separate the signal from the noise and realize the solution in the world. It’s a challenging dichotomy to have in your head, and it’s a challenging one to find in others. But I think it’s absolutely critical that designers have this mode-switching.

I also think designers who are most successful in their craft acknowledge the massive gap between an idea and a realized product or service, delivered into the world, and they value execution at least as much as conception. So they know that the only magic that matters is what the magic that makes it to market, and what gets left behind on the cutting room floor ultimately wasn’t magic. Knowing how to navigate the path from idea to execution is at least—maybe even more—critical than having a brilliant idea in the first place.

Rainer: I think that being able to disambiguate a blurry client ask is an essential skill to acquire as you grow as a designer. Using a mix of facilitation, provocation, prototyping and research skills you can both capture people’s imagination to reframe a problem but also ultimately drive towards consensus. I believe that we tend to underestimate the value clients attach to our power to create alignment. So these would be my additions: A tolerance for ambiguity combined with the ability to shape the work and create focus both for clients and project teams.

This last question is about how you guys are aligning your individual backgrounds and areas of expertise to lead frog into the future. How is that actually working so far? And what is the vision for how you stay aligned as you lead frog forward?

Jeff: I think what is working really well is that we’ve set up a framework that allows a little bit more time and energy to be provided at a regional level. So each of us has our global responsibilities, but we also focus on the needs of the specific region where we live. In the US for example, where Ethan and I have our regional area of focus, Ethan remains involved in Venture Design, which is such an important area of our business, but he is also getting much more involved in development activities across the region. What is working really well between us is that I have a heavy interest in the more operational side of running the creative team, and so our skill sets and our areas of interest are aligning very well to take advantage of what we love to do, and where are strengths are, in order to provide what’s best for our region.

Tactically speaking, we’re gathering as a group via weekly phone calls, Slack channels and other forms of constant, daily communication. We’re all transitioning into this new role, but our previous roles are, in many cases, roles we’re still playing. So I think we’re still figuring things out but, overall, it’s going incredibly well.

Tjeerd: Yes, and it’s important to recognize that we’re not starting from scratch as a collaborative team. Many of us have been working together for many, many years, and we’re building on the success of the chief creative officers that came before us: Mark Rolston and Hans Neubert. The company has always given us the opportunity to have regular gatherings of the creative leadership, and so we’re building this new Design Leadership Team on a foundation of familiarity with each other, on a foundation of friendship and also with a real understanding of each other.

Fabio: Yes, I profoundly agree with both what Tjeerd and Jeff have said. And it’s also true the creation of a Design Leadership Team is a recognition that, due to the nature of the challenges that we’re taking on, you need more than one person and one set of skills and expertise to lead the design discipline of our firm. And sometimes there will be different points of view and also different philosophies, which is fine. Actually, I think we all share the point of view that it’s not about having all the same ideas or sharing the same opinion—it’s harnessing the positive tension between different opinions that leads to innovation, to change, and ultimately to something more interesting than you might have had before.

Ethan: I think there is an amazing overlap in vision and intent among the members of this team, but there’s also a great diversity of experience. So we need to act collectively and globally but, to Fabio’s point, we’re also able to meet our teams where they are—deep in their craft, face to face, and hands on. And that’s only possible because of our plurality, and our diversity of experience. That’s why we have both the time and the ability to engage deeply, and I think that’s a new benefit of this collaborative approach to creative leadership at frog.

 



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How to save luxury brands (and American capitalism)

screen-shot-2016-09-15-11-10-57-amElizabeth Segran has a nice essay in Fast Company: The Decline Of Premium American Fashion Brands. What Happened, Ralph And Tommy?

As a teen, Segran admired ads by Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein. That’s over.

Today, at 33, none of these brands interest me. They conjure up images of outlet malls.

The problem is widespread

I’m not the only one who feels that these iconic American brands have lost their luster. Many are on a downward spiral, hit by sluggish sales. Ralph Lauren is facing plunging profits resulting in the shuttering of retail stores. Coach is in a similar boat, having lost significant market share. Michael Kors recently devised a strategy of cutting back on discounts, since markdowns appear to have killed the company’s cachet. Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger, which are owned by the same parent company, have seen decreasing sales in the U.S. market.

Luxury brands are, in short, a mess.

Segran consults several experts and they roll out the probable causes:

Luxury brands:

■ were pushed by Wall Street to grow
■ growth forced offshore manufacture and this created diminished quality
■ searching for larger markets lead to production overruns
■ overruns forced brands into the bargain and outlet channels.
■ finding Ralph Lauren in a discount bin at T.J. Maxx made it seem a little less luxurious

Other factors

■ new brands rose with a new, more social, sensibility, Everlane or Warby Parker

But something is missing here from this account. We are looking at a fundamental change in sensibility.

screen-shot-2016-09-15-11-10-57-amConsider the Ralph Lauren ad that Fast Company used to illustrate this essay.

Almost everything is now wrong with this image. But not one of these errors in the image is remarked upon.

Errors in the image: 

That this picture has a center to it.
(Younger consumers are social animals. They are networked creatures. They are distributed souls. Practically, for content creators, that means dump the “focus” and go for “foci.” See recent work by Fitbit and Android for the social “foci” view, and my thoughts here.)

That the center of the picture is a white male, apparently WASP and privileged.
(Do I really need to explain the rise of diversity and what it means to the models we want to see in our ads?)

That the male in question has a woman wrapped around his arm.
(This too should be unnecessary, but everyone is now a feminist. And this posture is absurdly subordinate and subordinating.)

That this woman has the strangest look on her face.
(It’s an expressive that appears to say, “This is all I want from life, to be by my man.” I mean, really.)

That there is a steely eyed friend.
(what is this guy dressed for? A trip to his place in the country, the ancestral home, all brick, beam and ‘old money made material’?)

That the surrounding group glows with youth, ethnic specificity, and privilege
(the first motive for luxury consumption used to be upward aspiration. A consumer culture fanned the hope that we too could rise in the world, into exalted social realms, away from the ordinary, “common,” “coarse,” “little” people. But this idea is now openly ridiculed.)

Attention, sellers! The single most important idea driving your market place is dying. This idea of status is dying. It is now a recipe for ridicule.

So let’s be clear. Yes, there are plenty of “internal” reasons why luxury brands are struggling. And thank you, Elizabeth, for discovering them. But there are external, cultural ones, as well.

These cultural changes are not recent. These have been in the works for several decades. And it is a perfect storm as we rethink our ideas of privilege, status admiration, upward aspiration, sexism, and the adoration of the wealth and privilege.

imagesWhat to do? How could luxury brands have prepared themselves for this cultural disruption? At the risk of repeating myself, the single simplest strategy is to hire a Chief Culture Officer. For instructions, read this book ➼.

There’s a ton of talent out there. A few names come to mind. Tom LaForge, Barbara Lippert, Steffon Davis, Ana Domb, Philip McKenzie, Sam Ford, Joyce King Thomas, Michael Brooks, Jamie Gordon, Monica Ruffo, Rochelle Grayson, Kate Hammer, Drew Smith, Rob Fields, Parmesh Shashani, Shara Karasic, Ujwal Arkalgud, Tracey Follows, Eric Nehrlich, Bud Caddell, Barb Stark, Mark Boles, Mark Miller, Helen Walters.

(For a longer list, see this Pinterest page filled with candidates.}

If only Ralph Lauren had had anyone noted above as their Chief Culture Officer. How much share holder value would have been protected? How many careers saved? How much more fun would it have been to work at Ralph Lauren?

American capitalism has become a bit of a punching bag. There are so many cultural disruptions in play. A crisis now haunts CPG and Hollywood. So that’s three of the great workhorses of the American economy. And it’s at this point when we can see a crisis running right through our economy, touching things as diverse as luxury brands, CPG brands and Hollywood pictures, that’s it is time to rethink what we’re doing.

Take a smart person with good credentials, give them resources and give them power. It’s time to make our marketing, design thinking, branding, and innovation intelligence responsive to the simple truth that’s visible to most cultural creatives and virtually every Millennial. It’s time to make the organization as responsive to culture as it is to everything else in the near environment. All other options are stupid and embarrassing.

 



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The Agile Manifesto for Designers

UIE Article: Testing in the Wild, Seizing Opportunity

Jared Spool

By Jared Spool

October 5th, 2016

This week, we revisit Dana Chisnell’s article on the benefits of conducting quick and informal usability testing.

Here’s an excerpt from the article:

When I say “usability test,” you might think of something that looks like a psych experiment, without the electrodes (although I’m sure those are coming as teams think that measuring biometrics will help them understand users’ experiences). Anyway, you probably visualize a lab of some kind, with a user in one room and a researcher in another, watching either through a glass or a monitor.

It can be like that, but it doesn’t have to. In fact, I’d argue that for early designs it shouldn’t be like that at all. Instead, usability testing should be done wherever and whenever users normally do the tasks they’re trying to do with a design.

Read the article: Testing in the Wild, Seizing Opportunity

How do you incorporate quick and informal usability testing? Let us know below.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 5th, 2016 at 3:00 pm and is filed under Usability Testing, user research, UX Professionals . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.



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Effective UX Leaders

Beyond the Lab: Gathering Holistic, Qualitative User Experience Data

The Problem with Personas and Some Solutions

UX Leadership Roles: Multiple Paths

Mapping Experiences

UIE Article: Building Products with Story

Jared Spool

By Jared Spool

September 14th, 2016

This week, we present an excerpt from Donna Lichaw’s book, The User’s Journey, published by Rosenfeld Media on using story as a framework to create heroes for your product.

Here’s an taste of what we serve up this week:

Story is not only a tool your brain uses to understand what you see, it’s a tool your brain uses to understand what you experience. In other words, the same brain function that you use to understand what you see in a photograph is the same brain function you would use if you were one of those grandparents using FaceTime. Life is a story. And in that story, you are the hero.

What’s great about story and its underlying structure is that it provides you with a framework—a formula, if you will—for turning your customers into heroes. Plot points, high points, and all. Story is one of the oldest and most powerful tools you have to create heroes. And as I’ve seen and will show you in this book, what works for books and movies will work for your customers, too.

Read the article: Building Products with Story

How do you use storytelling as a tool? Tell us about it below.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 14th, 2016 at 1:45 pm and is filed under Articles, User Engagement, Users . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.



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Boosting Your Rates With Psychologically Validated Principles

Content Security Policy, Your Future Best Friend

Reducing Cognitive Overload For A Better User Experience

Applied UX Strategy, Part 4.1: From Design Team to Design Culture

UIE Article: Measure Customer Experience Design And Make It Accountable

Jared Spool

By Jared Spool

September 7th, 2016

This week, we have an article from Jeffrey Eisenberg on making buyer legends measurable and accountable.

Here’s an excerpt from the article:

Buyer Legends are measurable and accountable by design. That is one of the important elements that distinguish Buyer Legends from any other business-storytelling and customer experience methodologies. A Buyer Legend is not a feel good story; it’s about business, and if your story doesn’t improve on your business goals, then what is the point?

Your Buyer Legend should describe in significant detail what actions you expect your customer to take, many of which are measurable. Pages viewed, transactions, subscriptions, store visits, phone calls, conversions to lead, and even social media engagement are all measurable.

Read the article: Measure Customer Experience Design And Make It Accountable

How do you measure customer experience design? Tell us about it below.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 7th, 2016 at 2:34 pm and is filed under Customers, Experience Design . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.



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Breaking Out Of The Box: Design Inspiration (September 2016)

Breaking Out Of The Box: Design Inspiration (October 2016)

Finding Better Mobile Analytics

Stretching The Limits Of What’s Possible

The Thumb Zone: Designing For Mobile Users

What Is Content Intelligence?

content-intelligence

Jordan Koene, vice president of services and chief evangelist at Searchmetrics, answers our questions, explains what the term “content intelligence” means, and offers practical applications for marketers.

CCO: The subject of content intelligence spans many areas; when you describe it to marketers, how do you ensure that it’s not just understandable, but also relevant?

Koene: You’re dead on. Virtually every definition you see of content intelligence poses as many questions as it answers because it spans so many topics.

Fundamentally, the only way for a marketer to understand whether a specific content marketing strategy works is to start with the data. Take your historical data and compare it with competitive data to identify leading metrics. Then you produce content. Then you use data to analyze the effectiveness of that content and work from there.


Start with the data to understand whether a specific #contentmarketing strategy works says @jtkoene.
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Take the untimely death of Prince. There were hundreds, if not thousands of articles from news and entertainment outlets, blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and lots more. If you searched online about Prince in the days following his death, Google would present maybe four or five search results at the top of the page, then load up other Prince information from Wikipedia, Instagram, and elsewhere.

On the other hand Google News served up a lot more in-the-now information, but there you would see that the marquee main headline changed hands many times throughout the day, as Google decided one piece of content was more interesting than another. Examining that data later, you might decide that in a case like a famous person’s death, you shouldn’t go with a straight obit (where competition is fiercer) but dust off recollections of the individual.

In addition to simply analyzing historical data to find out what worked in the past, it’s also critical to understand the human side (i.e., user intent) to predict what may work. The better the tool set, the higher the probability you’ll have a winning outcome.

CCO: What particular marketing problem(s) most call out for a content-intelligence approach?

Koene: Content intelligence solves many problems. One solution we are exploring is analyzing content performance from multiple viewpoints. Historically, marketers have taken a very binary perspective (e.g., “How much traffic is my content receiving?”). Content intelligence must use a variety of methods and metrics to assess performance related to social media, search, paid advertising, desktop vs. mobile, and many other factors. At its core, content intelligence attempts to solve several problems: What to write? Why write it? How does it impact users?

CCO: Can you share some first steps for marketers?

Koene: No. 1 – data. No. 2 – data. No. 3 – more data. Marketers should have a lot of information about how content connects with their users. When I worked at eBay, we used data to understand what gaps we might have in our content output. We found that people want lots of information on products. To fill the gap, we created guides that attract informational searchers — things like how to buy a blender or what’s the best pair of running shoes. Starting with your own data very often can determine where you’re missing a key part of the puzzle.

Some other areas to consider: Examine performance metrics to identify dead content that needs to be removed from your website. Or compare what content works best for your competitors, and whether yours is superior or needs more work. The best content intelligence combines data and business strategy.


Examine performance metrics to identify dead content that needs to be removed from your website says @jtkoene
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CCO: How about examples of intermediate/advanced steps?

Koene: One of my favorite data projects is called content recall. Content recall uses the same fundamental practices of brand recall. Essentially, you’re examining users’ feelings and expectations related to your content. For example, you may study all the tweets about a particular piece of content. Within those tweets there is significant redundant terminology (e.g., words with similar meaning or words all related to a particular user intent). By aggregating specific terms, you can better understand what users are expecting. Say you track 10 branded, 40 product-related, 50 commercial-related, and 10 competitive terms. By grouping the terms, you may see that while commercial and product expectations are important to users, a particular page should use more competitive terms to attract buyers from your competition. (Without aggregating terms, you may not have detected that pattern.) This can dictate content edits and changes to improve the overall performance.

CCO: Are there missteps you see marketers making? What problems/risks face marketers embarking on some of the projects mentioned?

Koene: One of the biggest mistakes I’ve seen content marketers make is thinking all traffic is created equal and that generating traffic for your content is the primary objective. Simply looking at changes in traffic leaves you with little understanding of user expectations or the emotional response your content generates. Understanding user intent is increasingly important to overall success — if for no other reason than it’s a major focus for Google’s algorithmic efforts. If I reach a search page that has a shopping cart, one would assume my intent is transactional — that is, I’m buying something instead of window shopping. Google has identified similar patterns and associates your content with the expectations of the user. Reaching this level of understanding is far more difficult than the old days of simply understanding the need for content quality.

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CCO: What role does technology play? Is it a supporting role or a primary role?

Koene: Technology helps content owners and managers scale their efforts and become more efficient. Yet adopting new technology is challenging for content creators because it interrupts the content production flow. Technology can transform the content intelligence and content production environment, but it must not disrupt content creation in the name of delivering insights to the user.

Conclusion

In summarizing his views, Jordan offers these five content intelligence tips to help your content marketing:

  • Look beyond internal data.
  • Understand what the user’s emotional expectations might be.
  • Use multiple data points to interpret the effectiveness of content (i.e., social data, search data, internal data).
  • Consider removing content before adding more content.
  • Leverage the content-recall model to understand what users are expecting in your content.

This article originally appeared in the August issue of Chief Content Officer. Sign up to receive your free subscription to our bimonthly, print magazine.

For more strategies that can help your content hit the right speed, sign up for our Content Strategy for Marketers weekly email newsletter, which features exclusive insights from Robert Rose, CMI’s chief content adviser. If you’re like many other marketers we meet, you’ll come to look forward to his thoughts every Saturday.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

The post What Is Content Intelligence? appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.



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Smarter Survey Results and Impact: Abandon the Asker-Puker Model!

FoldsToday's post comes from a source of deep pain. Analysis Ninjas are valued less than I would prefer for them to be.

The post is also sourced from a recent edition of my newsletter, The Marketing – Analytics Intersect. I send it once a week, and it contains my insights and recommendations on those two topics. Like this blog, the newsletter is geared towards being instantly actionable (rather than just theory-smart, which is pretty cool too). Do sign up if you want to deliver a small electric shock of simulation to your brain each week.

TMAI #41 covered a graph that resulted from a survey done by Econsultancy and Lynchpin. I received a ton of responses for it, and great discussion ensued. It prompted me to write this post, essentially an expanded version of TMAI #41. I've added new insights, recommendations, and two bonus lessons on how to do surveys better and a direct challenge to your company's current analytics strategy.

If your heart is weak, you can stop reading now. I promise, I won't mind one bit. I heart you. If you are open to being challenged… then here are the short-stories inside this post…

Let's go and challenge our collective thinking!

The World Needs Reporting Squirrels. Wait. What!

Some of you know that I created the phrases Reporting Squirrels and Analysis Ninjas to emphasize the difference between those that puke data and those that puke insights with actions attached to them.

Here is my slide the first time I presented the concept in a keynote…

reporting squirrels analysis ninjas

Cute, right? :)

While companies, medium and large, often need both roles, I’ve massively pushed for every company to want more Analysis Ninjas and for analysts to have careers where they can rapidly undertake metamorphosis from Reporting Squirrels to Analysis Ninjas (after all the difference in salary is tens of thousands of dollars).

If you are curious, here is a April 2011 post: The Difference Between Web Reporting And Web Analysis.

With that as context, you can imagine how heart-broken I was when Jane shared the following visual from a study done by Econsultancy and Lynchpin. It contains the answers to the question which analytics skills are most in demand…

econsultancy analytics skills

Checkout the y-axis… what do you see as the common pattern across them all?

Just data puking.

One row after another of data puking skills.

Ranked.

Almost nothing that quite captures the value of Analysis Ninjas! N. O. T. H. I. N. G.

I did a random Google search and got this list of analytical skills:

+ Understanding relationships between numbers

+ Interpreting mathematical information

+ Visual perception of information

+ Ability to organize information

+ Pattern recognition and understanding trends

+ Argumentation and logical thinking

+ Ability to create insightful data visualizations

+ Hypothesis development and design of experimentation

+ Strategic thinking skills

And, that is just a random list!

None of these are in demand?

Look at the list in the graph, what kind of purple squirrel with ant legs and an elephant's nose that nobody needs is Lynchpin describing?

This did not happen at Econsultancy, but the data did cause introspection at my end.

And, my first question was the one that is also top of mind of all readers of Occam's Razor… Is the world so dark that the only "analytical" skills that are valued are directly tied to data puking and you should immediately shut down your Analysis Ninja efforts?

Let me share three thoughts for your consideration, then some guidance on how to do surveys right, and end with a call to arms for all of you and the "data people" you choose to work with.

Three thoughts that explain the Econsultancy/Lynchpin graph.

1. The survey design is at fault.

The otherwise well-respected Econsultancy and Lynchpin dropped the ball massively in creating the list of answers for the respondents to choose from.

I have to admit, I believe this is a major flaw (and not just for this question in the entire report). What is disappointing is that they have done this for nine years in a row!

It poses these questions…

How is it that in nine years no one at these organizations realized they were simply asking people to rank data puking answers? Did the survey list the skills Econsultancy and Lynchpin hire for and value in their own analysts?

The graph illustrates data for three years… Was the fact that almost nothing changed in three years in terms of priority not trigger a rethink of the options provided for this question? Anyone reading the report at the two companies creating it should have thrown a red flag up and said hey guys, the respondents keep rating the answers the same, maybe we are not asking the right question or providing the best choices for our respondents to pick.

More on how to avoid this flaw in your surveys, of any kind, below.

2. The survey is targeted to the wrong folks.

They might be the wrong folks to accurately judge what analytical skills and how to appreciate the value of each skill as they rank them. That could explain the results (not the answer choices though).

Econsultancy/Lynchpin provides this description in the report: "There were 960 respondents to our research request, which took the form of a global online survey fielded in May and June 2016. Respondents included both in-house digital professionals and analysts (56%) and supply-side respondents, including agencies, consultants and vendors (44%)."

The survey was 76% from the UK and EU. Respondents were solicited from each company's database as well as Social Media.

Here is the distribution provided in the report:

econsultancy lynchpin survey audience

On paper it looks like the departments are to be what you would expect. It is difficult to ascribe any blame to the folks who got the survey. There is a chance that there is a UK and EU nuance here, but I don't think so.

3. It is our fault.

My first instinct in these cases is to look into the mirror.

Perhaps we have not succeeded as much as we should when it comes to show casing the value of true data analysis. Perhaps all the people involved in all digital analytics jobs/initiatives, inside and outside companies, are primarily data pukers, and none of them have skills to teach companies that there is such a thing as data analysis that is better.

Then, you and I, and especially our friends in UK and EU, need to work harder to prove to companies that CDPs (customized data pukes, my name for reporting) do not add much value, the rain of data does not drive much action. You and I need to truly move to the IABI model were we send very little data, and what little we send out is sent with copious amounts of Insights from the data, what Actions leaders need to take, and the computation of the Business Impact.

The more we deliver IABI, by using our copious analytical skills, the more the leaders will start to recognize what real analytical skills are and be able to separate between Reporting Squirrels and Analysis Ninjas.

Bottom-line… I would like to blame the competency at Econsultancy and Lynchpin, especially because I believe that truly, but I must take some responsibility on behalf of the Analysis Ninjas of the world. Perhaps we suck more than we would like to admit. I mean that sincerely.

Bonus #1: Lessons from Econsultancy/Lynchpin Survey Strategy.

There are a small clump of lessons from my practice in collecting qualitative feedback that came to fore in thinking about this particular survey. Let me share those with you, they cover challenges that surely the E+L team faced as they put this initiative together.

If your survey has questions that cease to be relevant, should you ask them again for the sale of consistency as you have done this survey for nine years?

There is a huge amount of pressure for repeated surveys to keep the questions the same because Survey Data Providers love to show time trends – month over month, year over year. It might seem silly that you would keep asking a question when you know it is not relevant, but there is pressure.

This is even worse when it comes to answer choices. Survey Creators love having stability and being able to show how things have changed, and they keep irrelevant/awful/dead answers around.

If you are in this position… You will be brave, you will be a warrior, you will be the lone against-the-tide-swimmer, and you will slay non-value-added stuff ruthlessly. You will burn for from the ashes shall rise glory.

If you are the Big Boss of such an initiative, here is a simple incentive to create, especially for digital-anything surveys: Give your team a standard goal that 30% of the survey questions for any survey repeated each year have to be eliminated and 10% new ones added.

Your permission will 1. force your employees to think hard about what to keep and what to kill (imagine that, thinking!) 2. create a great and fun culture in your analytical (or reporting :( ) team and 3. push them to know of the latest and greatest and include that in the survey.

If I feel I have a collection of terrible choices, do you have a strategy for how I can identify that?

This does not work for all questions of course, but here is one of my favourite choice in cases where the questions relate to organizations, people skills, and other such elements.

Take this as an example…

skills gap question

How do you know that this is a profoundly sub-optimal collection of choices to provide?

For anyone with even the remotest amount of relevant experience, subject matter expertise, it is easy to see these are crazy choices – essentially implying purple squirrels exist. But, how would you know?

Simple.

Start writing down how many different roles are represented in the list.

That is just what I did…

skills gap question roles test

It turns out there are at least five roles in a normal company that would possess these skills.

So. Is this a good collection of skills to list? Without that relevant information? If you still go ahead and ask this question, what are you patterning your audience to look for/understand?

Oh, and I am still not over that in looking for what analysis skills are missing in the company, no actual analytical skills are listed above! Ok, maybe statistical modeling smells like an analytical skill. But, that's as close as it gets.

I share this simple strategy, identifying the number of different roles this represents, to help you illuminate you might have a sub-optimal collection of choices.

There are many other strategies like this one for other question. Look for them!

If your survey respondents are not the ideal audience for a question, what's your job when crafting the survey?

J. K. I.

Just kill it.

If you don't want to kill it… Personally interview a random sample of 50 people personally (for a 1,000 people survey). Take 10 mins each. Ask primitive basic questions about their job, their actual real work (not job title), and their approximate knowledge. If these 50 pass the sniff test, send the survey. Else, know that your survey stinks. JKI.

I know that I am putting an onerous burden on the survey company, taking to 50 people even for 10 mins comes at a cost. It does. I am empathetic to it. Consider it the cost of not putting smelly stuff out into the world.

If your survey respondents won't be able to answer a question perfectly, what is a great strategy for crafting questions?

Oh, oh, oh, I love this problem.

It happens all the time. You as the survey creator don't know what you are taking about, the audience does not quite know what they are talking about, but there is something you both want to know/say.

Here's the solution: Don't do drop down answers or radio button answers!

The first couple times you do this, ask open ended questions. What analytical skills do you think you need in your company? Let them type out in their own words what they want.

Then find a relatively smart person with subject matter expertise, give them a good salary and a case of Red Bull, and ask them to categorize.

It will be eye opening.

The results will improve your understanding and now you'll have a stronger assessment of what you are playing with, and the audience will not feel boxed in by your choices, instead tell you how they see the answers. (Maybe, just maybe be, they'll give you my list of analytical skills above!)

Then run the survey for a couple years with the choices from above. In year four, go back to the open text strategy. Get new ideas. Get smarter. Rinse. Repeat.

I would like to think I know all the answers in the world. Hubris. I use the strategy above to become knowledgeable about the facts on the ground and then use those facts (on occasion complemented by one or two of my choices) to run the survey. This rule is great for all kinds of surveys, always start with open-text. It is harder. But that is what being a brave warrior of knowledge is all about!

If your survey results cause your senior executives, or random folks on the web, to question them, what is the best response?

The instinct to close in an be defensive, to even counter-attack, is strong.

As I'm sure your mom's taught you: Resist. Truly listen. Understand the higher order bit. Evolve. Then let your smarter walk do the talking.

Simple. Awfully hard to do. Still. Simple.

Bonus #2: The Askers-Pukers Business Model.

The biggest thing a report like Econsultancy/Lynchpin's suffers from is that this group of individuals, perhaps even both these companies, see their role in this initiative as Askers-Pukers.

It is defined as: Let us go ask a 960 people we can find amongst our customers and on social media a series of questions, convert that into tables and graphs, and sell it to the world.

Ask questions. Puke data. That is all there is in the report. Download the sample report if you don't have a paid Econsultancy subscription. If you don't want to use your email address, use this wonderful service: http://ift.tt/1E6xzmk

Even if you set aside the surveying methodology, the questions framing, the answer choices and all else, there is negative value from anything you get from Askers-Pukers, because the totality of the interpretation of the data is writing in text what the graphs/tables already show or extremely generic text.

Negative value also because you are giving money for the report that is value-deficient, and you are investing time in reading it to try and figure out something valuable . You lose twice.

Instead one would hope that Econsultancy, Lynchpin, the team you interact with from Google, your internal analytics team, any human you interact who has data sees their role as IABI providers ( Insights – Actions – Business Impact).

This is the process IABI providers follow: Ask questions. Analyze it for why the trends in the data exist (Insights). Identify what a company can/should do based on the why (Actions). Then, have the courage, and the analytical chops, to predict how much the impact will be on the company's business if they do what was recommended.

Insights. Actions. Business Impact.

Perhaps the fatal flaw in my analysis above, my hope above, is that I expected Econsultancy and Lynchpin to be really good at business strategy, industry knowledge, on the ground understanding of patterns with their massive collection of clients. Hence, knowing what actually works. I expected them to be Analysts. Instead, they perhaps limit their skills inside the respective company to be Askers-Pukers.

Both companies are doing extremely well financially, hence I do appreciate that Askers-Pukers model does work.

But for you, and for me, and for anyone else you are paying a single cent for when it comes to data – either data reported from a survey, data reported from your digital analytics tool, data reported from other companies you work with like Facebook or Google or GE – demand IABI. Why. What. How Much. If they don't have that, you are talking to the wrong people. Press the escape button, don't press the submit order button.

[Isn't it ironic. Econsultancy and Lynchpin did exactly what their survey has shown for nine years is not working for companies in the UK: Reporting. The outcome for both of them is exactly the same as the outcome for the companies: Nothing valuable. This is explicitly demonstrated by their full report.]

Bottom-line.

I hope you see that this one survey is not the point. E + L are not the point. What their work in this specific example (and you should check other examples if you pay either company money) illuminates is a common problem that is stifling our efforts in the analytics business .

This applies to E+L but it applies even more to your internal analytics team, it applies extremely to the consultants you hire, it applies to anyone you are giving a single cent to when it comes to data.

Don't hire Askers-Pukers. Don't repeat things for years without constantly stress-testing for reality. Don't make compromises when you do surveys or mine Adobe for data. Don't create pretty charts without seeing, really looking with your eyes, what is on the chart and thinking about what it really represents.

Applied to your own job inside any company, using Google Analytics or Adobe or iPerceptions or Compete or any other tool… don't be an Asker-Puker yourself. Be an IABI provider. That is where the money is. That is where the love is. That is where the glory is.

Carpe Diem!

As always, it is your turn now.

Is your company hiring Reporting Squirrels or Analysis Ninjas? Why? Is the work you are doing at your company/agency/consulting entity/survey data provider, truly Analysis Ninja work? If not, why is it that it remains an Asker-Puker role? Are there skills you've developed in your career to shift to the person whose business is why, what, how much ? Lastly, when you do surveys, of the type above or others, are there favourite strategies you deploy to get a stronger signal rather than just strong noise?

Please share your life lessons from the front lines, critique, praise, fun-facts and valuable guidance for me and other readers via comments.

Thank you. Merci. Arigato.

PS: I hope this post illuminates the valuable content The Marketing – Analytics Intersect shares each week, sign up here .

Smarter Survey Results and Impact: Abandon the Asker-Puker Model! is a post from: Occam's Razor by Avinash Kaushik



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