One-to-one marketing, personalization, segmentation, hypertargeting, consumer-first marketing—whatever it’s called, the goals of nearly every marketing strategy are virtually the same: to understand customers as individuals, reach them on their terms, and communicate in a way that makes them feel like they are interacting one-to-one with your brand and its products and services.

How is it done? As a consultant and a marketer, I’ve heard clients ask that same question over the last 24 years. It was an important one back in the 1990s and remains relevant in 2018.

It Starts and Ends with Data

Today, we have terabytes of data on customers and the tech stack to support it. This includes data management platforms (DMPs) to manage data and help with audience planning and segmentation; marketing automation to facilitate engagement, split testing platforms to optimize creative, and so much more.

The challenge now isn’t “not enough,” but rather “too much.” How do you make sense of the data you have, use it effectively to improve the context and relevancy of your messages, and then collect more data in order to evaluate which are effective, and ultimately allow you to iterate on and advance your marketing efforts? All the while determining which platforms you really need?

One-to-one marketing is a fairly advanced digital marketing technique, which is why doing it well is still elusive for enterprises small and large. The first step is to develop a roadmap and start to chip away at it to create a more detailed understanding of your customers. I advise thinking of customer data in buckets, which includes:

• Demographics: the basics like age, gender, employment status, job role, and income
• Location: where they live or work
• Lifestyle: a summary view of their personal preferences and choices
• Behavior: how they interact with your brand and why they choose to consume when they do

The goal of your frontend segmentation is to be as detailed as possible within each bucket, and then combine your buckets to create detailed customer personas. Marketing to a new mom working in a major metropolitan area who values trendy fashion should be different than the 64-year-old retiree in Kansas who looks for discounts. Segmentation will get you there, and developing and deploying a personalized message platform will help you execute your strategy.

Conversation Leads to Conversion

Think about the last time you worked with a salesperson in real life. Maybe it was buying a car or a house, or shopping for a new snow blower at a home improvement store. Part of your buying decision was likely based on the expertise of the salesperson and his or her ability to make you feel confident that you were making the right choice. If they accosted you as you walked through the door and tried to force the product on you that they wanted to sell instead of the one that actually met your needs, you’d turn around and leave as quickly as you could.

For most people, a better experience includes a conversation with that salesperson. If that interaction with the salesperson ended with you buying something, odds are that they asked what you needed and listened to your responses, thereby matching your preferences with the product that best fits your goals.

This is why you segment your audience. Just because the interaction happens digitally instead of in-person doesn’t make the conversation any less important. In fact, that back-and-forth, aided by data and segmentation, is even more important in virtual environments where you don’t have the benefit of reading a customer’s reactions. It’s the conversation that ultimately moves your customers through the funnel and leads to the conversion, not just a campaign.

Creating the Playbook

Effective segmentation can be a challenge. You’ll need to work with data to create your customer personas, create a customer journey map that captures the details of each step in the customer lifecycle, build an effective marketing strategy and campaigns to reach them, choreograph all of the channels where you may reach them, and then capture the data again to redefine your customers even more. It’s how you answer the who, what, when, where, and why associated with your customers. And it’s how you go from obscurity to awareness and from cold lead to new customer.

It’s worth noting that working with data and building an effective segmentation plan requires the expertise of data scientists and database marketers—it’s not an appropriate fit for the intern you decided to conveniently repurpose for your playbook.

The clients I’ve worked with who have been the most effective at marketing segmentation all have a playbook in place. It’s not necessarily something you can find online; there is generally no template for it. It’s unique to your business and your customers. That playbook should be a living, breathing document that evolves with you, the people buying your products, and the ever-changing marketplace.

As the outspoken Jason Kelce of the World Champion Philadelphia Eagles recently said, “It’s the whole team, it’s the whole team!” I’d challenge you to think about your own marketing as a team approach. It’s an enterprise-wide effort with the playbook at the center; leading you on the road to victory.

To learn more about building your 1:1 marketing playbook, please contact the Branding and Marketing Division to start the conversation.

We’re about 10 years past marketing automation’s advent, so most business leaders are familiar with the ROI to be gained in automating top- and mid-funnel marketing touchpoints. But while 40-50% of companies have invested in an automation platform,¹ a staggering 85% percent of B2B organizations report not using their platform to its full potential.²

The propensity for underutilization starts even before purchasing an automation tool for your business. I recently met with an old colleague who confided that the B2B tech start-up he works for was trying to address their lead generation pipeline problem, and they had identified “marketing automation” as the solution. So I started to ask questions about their marketing maturity and process. Almost immediately red flags popped up, and it became clear that they weren’t ready to launch into the RFP process to select a marketing automation vendor.

“Slow down” or “not yet” are often unpopular phrases in business, but sometimes slowing down and considering the business challenge more carefully is what is needed to avoid costly errors in selecting technology.  I know first-hand as a marketer how easy it is to geek-out on improved visibility and reduction in tedious tasks promised by marketing automation. I was a beta customer power user for Hubspot in their infancy. I trained our marketing programs team on Eloqua. I love the closed-loop insights and enhanced productivity the technology provides, but I’ve also experienced that the effort to stand up and direct a marketing automation platform is often underestimated.

It is more complex than configuring a new system and pressing a button to start generating and nurturing leads. While that statement sounds patronizing, and most marketing leaders understand there’s more to it than that, almost every organization I’ve worked with has blind spots to areas of their marketing lifecycle that need further development. And a piece of new technology will not solve those gaps.

Put simply: Strategy and planning cannot be automated.

Before you make your marketing automation investment, consider what the technology will not solve for you:

• Knowing in detail who your ideal buyer is. And in more complicated sales cycles, who the influencers are. This requires research and auditing both internally and externally.
• Knowing what your audience responds to at various stages of decision making. Marketing automation can facilitate testing to understand this better, but the hypotheses of what tools/content to test require expertise and must be input into the system.
• Building the communications roadmap. What are the mini actions you want your lead to take before they’re ready for human contact from a sales team? What is your sales team telling you about the objections and education challenges they hear when they first get someone on the phone?
• Creating the content. Not just the emails and landing pages themselves, but the offers, tools, insights, demonstrations, validation, education, coaching, etc. that will build up to the ultimate action you want your audience to take. Additionally, you should plan to regularly reevaluate content to keep it fresh and relevant.
• Developing the content and workflows in the system. This is taking the entire plan that you currently have in place “manually” and enhancing it, personalizing the right content and touchpoints for the right type of lead.

Failure to document the insights and the rollout plan prior to investment means that all those amazing features you were pitched by the automation vendor cannot be realized for your organization. I’ve seen Fortune 1000-sized companies spend hundreds of thousands of dollars per year on their marketing automation tool to use it as a glorified email marketing system (and sometimes build WYSIWYG landing pages with forms).

The most underutilized marketing automation features are lead scoring and targeting communications (both email triggered and dynamic web content) based on web tracking.³ Lead scoring fails if you have only a generic understanding of your buyer. This should go beyond the most obvious industry and job title questions that can be added to a lead gen form. Looking at your top customers, retroactively piece together all the touchpoints and activities – both marketing and sales team activities – that occurred prior to sale. By measuring content consumption and interest indicators, you can tailor communications for the lead not just based on what they filled out in the form or clicked on in an email, but also based on where they go on your website as a returning visitor 2 weeks, 4 weeks, 6 weeks later. You can also be more judicious about when the lead is assigned to your sales team, which optimizes their time to be spent on leads that are more engaged and informed.

But neither of these features can be implemented and optimized without the human insights to craft the communications criteria. And paramount to the success of this entire venture is the content itself. The need for a constant stream of relevant, interesting, and persuasive content is one of the biggest roadblocks to a program’s success, as companies are often willing to invest in the tools, but not in the creative manpower.

The reality is that many organizations begin considering marketing automation when they feel their marketing team is overtaxed. Addressing these core considerations in-house requires even more time and headspace from an already overburdened marketing team. This is why 63% of companies outsource marketing automation strategy planning.⁴

Trellist’s full service capabilities from Consulting to Marketing and Branding to Digital and Enterprise Technology allow our teams to work as an extension of our clients to ask the right questions that will set them up for success, build the tactical plan aligned to real data and insights, and create workflows and content that will improve the marketing and sales funnel. If you want to learn more about our experience in marketing automation and content marketing, please contact my colleague Neil Dougherty to begin the conversation.

¹ https://azslide.com/demand-generation-adoption-survey_59aac2441723dd8b061f4f1a.html

² https://www.siriusdecisions.com/blog/eight-is-not-enough-increasing-adoption-of-marketing-automation-platforms

³ http://customerexperiencematrix.blogspot.com/2013/10/which-b2b-marketing-automation-features.html  

⁴ http://ascend2.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Ascend2-Marketing-Technology-Trends-Survey-Summary-Report-161011.pdf

While social media has forever changed how businesses and customers interact, social media marketing as a whole is constantly evolving. To ensure your brand’s content garners likes, comments, and shares, your strategy must shift with the industry’s latest trends.

2017 was indeed a year of change, innovation, and, most importantly, growth for the Social Business pros at Trellist. Here’s what we were able to accomplish for our clients across healthcare, financial services, chemical manufacturing, and other industries:

 

In addition to those highlighted metrics, we analyzed clicks, likes, comments, follows and more activity to understand what changed in 2017 and get a better feel for what’s coming in 2018. Here are a few of our key observations:

• LinkedIn and Instagram grow faster than Facebook. Facebook continues to be the industry giant thanks to its massive user base and robust advertising platform, but other channels have begun to grow faster than Facebook, which could be approaching a saturation point.
  • LinkedIn was the fastest-growing channel for our clients in 2017. The professional social network has become a powerful tool for brand advocacy, talent acquisition, and eCommerce. In 2017 alone, we saw a 66% increase in engagement on LinkedIn. Across all social channels we manage and monitor, LinkedIn followers grew the most at 56% by year-end. In 2018, we expect to see continued growth in followership and engagement, aided by new tools and features for marketers as a result of Microsoft’s late-2016 acquisition.
  • Instagram was purchased by Facebook in 2012. While new features have been steadily announced and rolled out since the acquisition, 2017 was a pivotal year for Instagram.
    • Our clients saw success using Instagram as a platform to reach more users per dollar and decrease cost-per-click.
    • When we first wrote about Instagram Stories a year ago, no one was certain if the feature would be successful in rivaling Snapchat. Instagram Stories surpassed Snapchat in daily users and launched Stories Ads, a novel way to advertise products, increase brand awareness, and drive traffic to websites.
  • While LinkedIn aligns itself with Business-to-Business strategies and Instagram with Business-to-Consumer, their growth signals significant shifts in the social media landscape.
    
    
• The continued decrease of organic reach. While our clients’ organic reach held steady throughout 2017, Facebook continues to throttle how many users see brand posts for free. This underscores the need for a consistent paid social media strategy across all industries.
  
  
• Content consumption becomes increasingly mobile. This year, mobile sessions surpassed desktop, increasing each month. Content and text should be optimized for mobile first, as we predict mobile will continue to surpass desktop browsers as the most popular place to consumer content.

Social media continues to be a disruptor. While significant changes within the landscape are rare—such as a new channel launching—new features for customers and advertisers alike result in customers using platforms in new ways. As a result, evaluating annual trends and testing strategies based on expanded functionality and trending behaviors becomes critical to brand growth.

Click here to see more of our work and contact us.

How does a manufacturing organization deploy a corporate digital strategy without turning its business upside down? For large, enterprise organizations, it makes sense to start with your biggest pain point. In other words, what part of the organization has the most opportunity to improve and impact your go-to-market efficiency? Let's evaluate an enterprise B2B through four distinct lenses:  (1) Operations, (2) Customer Interface, (3) Business Processes, and (4) Data Access.

Harvard Business Review's recent cross-industry study shows that on average, less than half of an organization's structured data is actively used in making decisions and less than 1% of its unstructured data is analyzed or used at all. (What's Your Data Strategy, HBR.com, June 2017) Increasingly, unstructured data is the majority of new data a business can harness and use to inform its business decisions. Examples of unstructured data include Emails, Word Processing Files, PDF files, Spreadsheets, Digital Images, Video, Audio, and Social Media Posts.

Establishing a single source of data about customers, suppliers, sales, and products will create the solid foundation needed to provide deeper insights into your business. This foundation enables an organization to achieve compliance, regulatory, quality, and governance standards. Starting with this data foundation, a company can then assess its data integrity, ease of access, and standardization for gaps and inconsistencies. When the gaps are closed, it becomes much easier to provide enhanced data analytics, predictive modeling, and visualization of business insights – all of which are needed to improve competitive position and profitability.

When Trellist works with its clients on Data Access, the following check list is a helpful tool for a company to self-rank its performance:

• We have a data strategy in place that is actively managed by a leader or team
• Marketing and IT work closely together to deploy the best platforms that ensure data is accessible and relevant
• Our organization has prioritized its data needs to ensure alignment with and delivery of corporate goals
• Our data and insights are manageable, accurate, and timely
• We continually look for ways to reduce barriers to data and time delays
• Leadership is confident in its decision making as it is underpinned by robust data
• Our governance policy ensures that we keep our customers' and suppliers' data confidential and that we act responsibly
• The data we track enables a positive customer experience, better product design, robust sales forecasts, and market insights
• Our platforms are flexible and adaptable for future data needs
• Our teams find the data they need and spend less than 1 hour/ week looking for "lost" files

Collecting and storing files is insufficient as a data strategy. Each document will need to be categorized and stored in an appropriate location. Careful attention is then required in order to make finding and accessing unstructured and structured data easy; typical text search may not be sufficient. Version control and archiving of documents will need to be managed, ensuring access to documents remains in place throughout its lifetime. Finally, establishing authorization protocols to access data is needed to protect security and integrity. A way to visualize this is a tidy filing cabinet with all folders neatly organized and labeled so that information is easily discovered. Out of date information is quickly discarded so only the latest version is accessible and files that need controlled access will be kept in the locked drawers.

In order to leverage unstructured data, it will need to be categorized, parsed for insights, and reformatted so that it can be organized in a way that is searchable. There are multiple software tools to help with this process. These tools provide insights by collating disparate data sources, visualizing trends and dependencies, and creating an easy-to-use dashboard. If you see an opportunity to enhance your data access, Trellist can help your organization transform its data into actionable insights without turning your business upside down.

Want to learn more? Read the rest of our Digital Strategy for Enterprise B2B series covering topics, such as: (1) Operations, (2) Customer Interface, (3) Business Processes, and (4) Data Access. If you have questions or would like to learn how Trellist can impact your business with a Digital Strategy, please contact Trellist Consulting.

Trade shows are the perfect opportunity to mingle with customers and prospects, soak in thought leadership, and bring home an avalanche of new leads and potentially win new business. If you’re planning to exhibit at an industry event, all of these benefits are possible. Unfortunately, it’s easy to miss out on most of these opportunities and watch helplessly as your ROI plummets if you don’t prepare properly.

Exhibiting at a trade show is not a “set it and forget it” proposition. It starts with building a strategy that rolls up to your organizational goals, supported by tactics that some of your fellow exhibitors may not have considered.

At Trellist, we’ve helped clients in the Fortune 1000 refine their approach to trade shows to make a bigger impact, from attracting new prospects at the top of the funnel to showcasing their thought leadership in front of industry decision makers.

The following tips have been taken and distilled down from strategies that have worked for our clients:

Tip 1: Have Clear Objectives in Mind

As they say, you can’t improve what you don’t measure. In order to assess the success of your trade show experience, you must have clear objectives in mind before you ever leave the office. Do you want to position your CEO as a thought leader through a keynote appearance? Is your goal to drive lead-generation through your booth? Are you launching a new product or fielding market research? Regardless of what the goal is, you should have it clearly in mind along with a plan to capture and measure results.

Tip 2: Market Before, During, and After the Show

Your marketing efforts for the trade show should start well before the exhibit hall opens. You should be marketing your presence there through the appropriate digital channels—on your website, through email, social, and the other online watering holes where you’re likely to find your audience. If you’re a sponsor at the show, you’ll likely receive an opportunity to reach registered attendees before the show through a blast sent out by the show organizers, inclusion of your materials in attendee bags, and more. Don’t waste these opportunities.

At the show, make sure you have a publicly posted list of activities and events happening at your booth. This will entice people to come back.

After the show, the real work of engaging and nurturing the leads you captured begins. Continual outreach is important to help reinforce your company’s value proposition and awareness for your products and services. At Trellist, we’ve helped clients avoid much of the heavy lifting around these efforts by helping them build a nurturing strategy fueled by thought leadership content and executing through a CRM and marketing automation tool.

Tip 3: Double Down and Cut Out What Doesn’t Work

There’s no need to attend every industry trade show. We understand that this can be a scary thought for veteran exhibitors used to having a presence at every event, but the alternative is worse: instead of making a big splash at a key show, you’ll be doomed to a lackluster presence at many shows. Rather than spread your budget too thin across multiple shows, the better strategy is to double down on the most important one. Reallocate your budget and use it to capture additional opportunities at that key show that you may have otherwise missed out on.

No one remembers the bit player who served as the supporting actor in hundreds of movies throughout his or her career, but you can be sure the audience remembers the breakout star in last year’s summer blockbuster. That’s the impact you’re trying to make at a trade show.

Tip 4: Location, Location, Location

If you follow the advice in Tip 3 and save your budget for one or two big shows, you’ll have more flexibility with your booth size and location. You don’t want the 10x10 at the back of the hall. Instead, you should target larger booth spaces at:

• The entrance of the exhibit hall
• Near show sponsors and other activities
• Near or in the pathway to bathrooms and food vendors
• Away from your competitors

For shows in the United States, the back left corner of the show floor is a dead zone. Visitors are used to driving on the right side of the road and reading left-to-right, so traffic naturally flows in this direction on the exhibit floor.

Tip 5: Create Energy in and Around the Booth

It’s human nature that we’re attracted to novelty and things that stimulate our senses. You should keep this in mind when deciding how to build and stage your booth. Tactics like interesting lighting, music, giveaways, and demonstrations will get visitors to linger long enough for you to give your 30-second elevator pitch before they’re off to the next booth.

A client ran with this idea by including a small oven in their booth and baked chocolate chip cookies during the entire show. The smell was so delicious, patrons couldn’t ignore it. (Of course, the requisite disclaimer is to always follow the exhibit hall rules for what you can and can’t do at the show).

Tip 6: What Would You Say You Do Here?

So many companies fall into the trap of making their value proposition indecipherable to casual visitors who wander by the booth. What you do should be clearly stated on your booth, so that it catches the attention of even the shyest visitor who may not want to make eye contact with your booth rep. People cruise around trade show floors with one or two “must visit” booths in mind, and simply pick up treats and tchotchkes at the rest. If you have a billboard-worthy slogan that clearly states “we do this for you,” you just may catch a new customer that would have otherwise walked on by. Make sure that statement clearly indicates how you can help them perform better or solve a common pain point in your industry.

Tip 7: Get Your Best People Out Front

You’re at the trade show for a purpose—to drive your business forward. To do that, you need your best company representatives in, and preferably around and in front of, your booth. They should be engaging with visitors as they walk by, breaking the ice with questions and offering insights. While the glitz and glam of the booth can help stop them, your representatives should have a high level of subject matter expertise to properly represent your brand.

Naturally you’ll think of your top salespeople for this opportunity, which may be the right fit. However, don’t discount the idea of bringing a customer service representative, product designer, or an engineer. Your subject matter experts exist in every department and have something to offer customers. As an added bonus, attending a trade show helps these team members develop a broader perspective on the industry, your competitors, and what matters most to customers.

Tip 8: Don’t Let Leads Linger

Finally, make sure you follow up on leads shortly after the show, ideally in the first five business days after you return. This includes both leads that came through the booth and contacts you made with people on a more personal level during networking events and standing in line for coffee. If you wait much longer than a week, the memory of who you are and what you do will fade. Again, to reiterate our point on marketing after the show in Tip 2, your follow-up and nurturing efforts should include multiple touchpoints, since one “thank you for visiting the booth” may not be sticky enough. Customers and prospects need to see your message multiple times in order to remember it.

Whether you’re a trade show veteran or coordinating your first show, Trellist is here to help turn these general tips into a customized strategy for your organization.

To learn more about how Trellist can help you get the most out of your trade show investments, please contact Victoria Silow. 

How does a manufacturing organization deploy a corporate digital strategy without turning its business upside down? For large, enterprise organizations it makes sense to start with your most significant pain point. In other words, what part of the organization has the most opportunity to improve and impact your go-to-market efficiency? Let’s evaluate an enterprise B2B through four distinct lenses: (1) Operations, (2) Customer Interface, (3) Business Processes, and (4) Data Access.

For this article, we will explore Business Processes, specifically focusing upon a business’ primary objective of getting product to customers. This includes quoting for new business, order processing, production scheduling, inventory management, and shipping. For brevity, this article will not explore secondary processes such as onboarding new employees, regulatory reporting, and the like.

Order fulfillment is comprised of four key processes: demand planning, inventory management, supply chain execution, and logistics. Integration of these workflows is critical. The sales order management software must connect with the ERP (financial) platform, which is integrated with inventory management. Packing and shipping details that flow into the logistics platform will be integrated into the system.

Enterprise systems must be employee-centric where required data is reliable and easily accessed. The solution should also align with corporate goals and accelerate progress toward those goals. Establishing a single, integrated structure will enable your business to:

• Increase tracking and visibility of orders
• Automate the workflows between quote to order to ship
• Tailor business approvals for complex orders
• Improve margins by optimizing and streamlining the process
• Calculate sales commissions
• Deliver on time

Trellist works with its clients to uncover disconnects between platforms, manual or paper-based processes, sub-optimal software utilization, and errors when completing orders. As part of our discovery process, we delve into the following topics to understand better where we can make significant improvements:

• Is your information stored on multiple, disparate platforms?
• Are you meeting your customers’ needs on time and in full?
• Is your data timely and accurate?
• Which processes are manual or distributed throughout the team?
• What is the utilization rate of your CRM platform?
• Are your reporting tools easy to use?
• Can any manager self-serve to gather insights?
• Is your business operating on one version of the truth?
• Do you have on-the-go access to data via mobile devices?

Trellist's technology leaders, skilled application developers, and experienced business analysts collaborate with clients from strategy through implementation of transformative technology solutions. Our capabilities span integration of large platforms, application-platform interface development, CRM optimization, data management, and business analytics. We work across a variety of software platforms and can make recommendations based upon an evaluation of your current systems, current and future needs, economics, in-house capabilities, and support strategies.

The Trellist methodology incorporates a discovery phase to understand your unique business goals and challenges. Discovery is critical to success as it raises the awareness of areas for improvement. The joint project team would then agree priorities that, once solved, will deliver the most value to the business. Trellist can then work up an implementation plan with key milestones and the associated resources needed to achieve results. This approach to a solution provides continual improvement over time, which is less disruptive to daily operations.

Using a consultative approach, we guide our clients on how best to scope your digital project’s requirements for maximum value. Once the project is underway, this consultation will keep the project on track and quickly address issues through robust internal communications and change management principles. If you see opportunities to improve your core processes, Trellist can deliver digital solutions that will bring value to your business—without turning it upside down.

Want to learn more? Read the rest of our Digital Strategy for Enterprise B2B series covering topics, such as: (1) Operations, (2) Customer Interface, (3) Business Processes, and (4) Data Access. If you have questions or would like to learn how Trellist can impact your business with a Digital Strategy, please contact Trellist Consulting.

For many organizations, the benefits of migrating all or part of their infrastructure to the cloud is no longer in doubt. The looming questions, however, center around how and when to do it, and exactly what should be moved to the cloud or remain on-premises. Done right, you’ll reap the performance enhancements and cost-cutting that the cloud promises; done wrong, and your migration will break key parts of your infrastructure and bring the business to a screeching halt.

As a best practice, your migration strategy should include the following components:

• A plan to assess your current performance and requirements, step-by-step details for the actual cloud migration, and a way to manage and optimize once you’re there.
• A method for capturing the data for the apps you want to move before building your plan.
• Deep analysis of that data to ensure that your performance meets requirements—which will make the migration seamless for your customers.

At Trellist, we see many organizations consider a move to the cloud for their website or ecommerce site at two key points in their history:

1. When it’s time for license renewals.
2. During a brand refresh or brand rollout.

Both milestones are good opportunities to reassess and consider migration. Since the cloud allows you to scale up and scale down your available resources to meet your performance needs in real-time, it’s a better option than incurring a fixed cost of a new license for systems you may not need—plus the maintenance and security issues of maintaining your site on-premises. If your brand is undergoing a refresh or rollout, it’s also a smart option since the cloud can help you provide a better customer experience and customer service.

The Cloud Gives Marketers More Control

The right solution can be transformative to your business. As both Microsoft—and—Sitefinity certified partners, the team at Trellist is helping marketers navigate the intersection of marketing and technology to find the right platforms for their brand, without being bogged down by the minutiae that often create a roadblock to successful migration.

We’ve seen marketing teams use the cloud to unlock their workflow. There are new waves and versions of content management systems (CMS), empowered by the cloud, that essentially eradicate internal workflow processing bottlenecks—even for globally-distributed teams. By moving this workflow from an on-premises environment to the cloud, it reduces traffic internally. It can still be done with a single sign-on, so it looks like your environment and implements the same security protocols. This makes it easy for your team to use the CMS to do everything a marketer needs to do to support an ecommerce website—from managing content and tracking traffic to analyzing performance and shaping the customer journey.

Migrating to the Cloud in Action: Two Examples

At Trellist, we help organizations move to the cloud to support a variety of business goals. The following two examples may help you envision your own cloud migration and how it can help you reach your objectives faster and more cost-efficiently:

Trellist has been the prime developer for an international swimsuit company, increasing online revenue over the last 5 years by over 400%. As their online revenue grew, there was increased demand on their internal infrastructure, where they hosted both enterprise systems and the ecommerce website. We helped to stand up a new cloud environment and successfully migrated the ecommerce website and its processes to this scalable environment. We established a secure and seamless method of data transfer between the ecommerce website and the enterprise systems, which are still hosted on premise. Moving customer-facing applications, like their ecommerce system, provided a scalable model without additional need for internal IT resources while reducing infrastructure costs.

Trellist is also the prime designer and developer for a new corporate website and ecommerce site for an international aerospace parts and chemical compounds distributor. The new websites will be hosted in a cloud environment to reduce costs and gain scalability as the websites grow. We helped to build a new cloud environment for the new websites, scalable to the business’ demands. We also set up and configured all Sitefinity website content management software and deployed the new website into this environment. Together both the cloud environment and Sitefinity provides a seamless experience for their internal, international marketing team to make updates to the website and market to their end customer.

Is a Migration to the Cloud in Your Future?

The most effective cloud migration will be the one that meets the specific needs of your organization. The beauty and promise of the cloud is its scalability, always-on availability, better security, and streamlined workflows for your team. If you’re at one of those key inflection points in your organizational history—either a license renewal or brand rollout—it may be time to consider migrating your websites or ecommerce sites to the cloud.

The two use cases highlighted here are good examples of the benefits you can expect when working with Trellist for your cloud migration. Some of the benefits are inherent to the migration itself—such as better scalability and security, seamless content management for your team, and the reduced costs associated with no longer managing your resources on-premises. However, the real value will never be realized without the right migration strategy, implementation, and ongoing optimization.

It’s like having a fast race car ready to tear around the track without someone who knows how to drive it. If you’re ready to move to the cloud, Trellist can help you realize its promise for better performance and an unparalleled customer experience at a lower total costs of ownership.

To learn more about our approach, contact Nick and Primus

How does a manufacturing organization deploy a corporate digital strategy without turning its business upside down? For large, enterprise organizations it makes sense to start with your biggest pain point. In other words, what part of the organization has the most opportunity to improve and impact your go-to-market efficiency? 

Let’s evaluate an enterprise B2B through four distinct lenses: (1) Operations, (2) Customer Interface, (3) Business Processes, and (4) Data Access.

In this second article of a four-part series, we will explore the Customer Interface. Within your business, this includes Sales, Marketing, Product Managers, Applications and Technical Support, Customer Service Representatives, and similar titles. When we interview our clients to discover their pain points, we find they are able to describe the companies they sell to and have sufficient data to analyze their own sales performance. They are also able to describe the market, competitors, and macro trends that impact their position. However, access to—and analysis of—unstructured data that provides insights into the customer buying process is often limited.

Being able to analyze your customers’ purchasing behaviors and interactions can guide your touch points at every step in the sales process. Providing insights and value at each stage can not only set your offering apart from competitors but also lead to up-selling, cross-selling, increased loyalty, and stickiness for your brand. Medallia’s analysis quantifies the value of exemplary customer experience and shows how it can double your revenue when compared to a poor customer experience. See The Value of Customer Experience, Quantified August 1, 2014, HBR.org.

Our goal is to help you realize an unsurpassed customer experience that delights and achieves loyalty through knowing, fulfilling, measuring, and continuously improving real-time service that creates customer value better than your competitors. Here are some topics we ask our clients to rank when we are considering how best to digitize their Customer Interface:

• Focus on the customer first and prioritize customer experience in aligned marketing and sales strategies.
• Real-time customer data is available to us.
• Utilize personas and journey mapping to understand purchasing behavior, define the content, and determine in which channels to engage our targeted audiences with a value proposition that resonates.
• Digital strategy includes the important value chain players & partners.
• Content marketing is the cornerstone of our campaigns and varies based on customer/prospect activity, i.e. their position in the buying process.
• Technical questions on product application, pre- and post-sale, are quickly addressed and captured for future analysis.

Understanding the depth and utilization of the above capabilities provides a foundation upon which to build. A digitally enabled Customer Interface delivers accurate information in a timely manner, is easy to use, and provides your customers the opportunity to self-serve–all of which enhance their experience with your organization. If you see opportunities to improve your customer experience, Trellist can help you optimize the use of your tools and platforms, as well as ensure culture adoption through change management, business process development, and data analysis. Our recommendation is to start with a self-funding pilot project that tackles a critical internal need to ensure that quick wins can maintain momentum and adoption. Our next article will explore how to digitize Business Processes in order to deliver value.

Want to learn more? Read the rest of our Digital Strategy for Enterprise B2B series covering topics, such as: (1) Operations, (2) Customer Interface, (3) Business Processes, and (4) Data Access. If you have questions or would like to learn how Trellist can impact your business with a Digital Strategy, please contact Trellist Consulting.

How does a manufacturing organization deploy a corporate digital strategy without turning its business upside down? Where is the best place to start? How long will this take and what’s the price tag? How much revenue lift can I expect? At Trellist, we are asked these questions on a frequent basis from our clients. The answer, as you probably expect, is “it depends.”

Let’s first define a corporate digital strategy as a means to establishing a unified, connected information system that enables an organization to access one version of the truth. This system encompasses content on your products and services, customer buying insights, product availability, manufacturing capability, and new product development information. Unfortunately, there is no blueprint that works for every organization as the complexity of operations, internal skills, and market conditions vary greatly. However, there are best practices and methodologies that can be followed to ensure you get value from your investment. This series of articles will explore how to organize—and stay on task—for future success with your digital strategy.

For large, enterprise organizations it makes sense to start with your biggest pain point. In other words, what part of the organization has the most opportunity to improve and impact your go-to-market efficiency? Let’s evaluate a manufacturing B2B enterprise through four distinct lenses: (1) Operations, (2) Customer Interface, (3) Business Processes, and (4) Data Access.

In this article, we will explore Operations. Most of our clients agree that a digital strategy for their manufacturing operations will be critical to maintain competitiveness. Their senior leadership is also aligned to this viewpoint. What is missing? A cohesive vision and an executable strategy. Let’s get started on where your opportunities might be so you can build up a set of actions that will underpin your vision and ultimately deliver value to your company.

At Trellist, we work across a wide variety of software platforms and are able to make recommendations based upon an evaluation of your current systems, future needs, economics, in-house capabilities, and support strategies. Here are some preliminary topics to explore:

• What platforms are you currently using across the organization?
• What is the existing level of connectivity and compatibility?
• Can your platforms provide you the insights your managers need to make decisions?
• What are your monthly, weekly, daily, and real-time data needs?
• Is the system easy to use? Does it require your employees to become “power users”?
• Does your manufacturing platform connect with marketing, sales, and new product launch platforms for seamless customer data integration?
• Are your platforms expandable and adaptable for future needs?
• Is there consistency among the data within your systems or are there multiple systems providing competing insights?

Having smooth connectivity across processes can reduce costs during production as well as enhance your position as a supplier. Your customer experience can be significantly impacted by on-time delivery of a high quality product. Moving to cost leadership quickly via automation can also deliver value in a competitive market. However, even more compelling would be to analyze a product’s entire life cycle for hard evidence of profitability at every stage. This is where the magic happens. Analyzing this data will provide insights into design cost, scale-up cost, time to market for a new product, comparisons between “as designed” to “as made,” and value in use vs. earlier product versions. These moves will drive you toward better asset utilization and market responsiveness, i.e. performance factors that far outweigh variable cost improvements.

If you believe Operations is the area where you can gain the most go-to-market efficiency, the first set of actions you take will depend upon your answers to the above questions. Our recommendation is to start with a self-funding pilot project and then tackle a critical need to ensure the quick wins can maintain momentum. Our next article will explore how to digitalize the Customer Interface to deliver value.

Want to learn more? Read the rest of our Digital Strategy for Enterprise B2B series covering topics, such as: (1) Operations, (2) Customer Interface, (3) Business Processes, and (4) Data Access. If you have questions or would like to learn how Trellist can impact your business with a Digital Strategy, please contact Trellist Consulting.

The case for a robust discovery process before beginning design/development projects.

Imagine a house that’s beautiful from the outside but, once you cross the threshold, you find the floorplan is all wrong, the rooms are too small, and the windows are too high to reach.  

It takes time and thought to develop the layout and “experience” of such an interior so that it meets the expectations and needs of the people who enter. No matter how spectacular the exterior is, if the internal experience doesn’t deliver, the whole thing is a failure. 

It’s the same in our business. We’d be doing a disservice to our clients if we started design and development without defining the experience they want to provide. That’s why it’s important to undergo a robust discovery process that sets the stage for smarter design and development choices. 

The objectives of this discovery process are to:

• Understand the brand
• Understand the business
• Understand the audience

Once we understand a client’s brand, business, and audience, everything from that point forward aligns with the client’s unique needs; there is no one-size-fits-all approach.

The discovery process informs Business and User Requirements, the Customer Experience Strategy, and the Brand Platform. The benefit of this is that the different members of the team contributing to the final product remain aligned and grounded in consistent foundations. At each stage of the design and development process, we can refer back to these guidelines to ensure we are remaining true to what we set out to do.



Having guidelines and constantly checking back with them produces a better end product. Clients directly benefit from this process of constant validation, since it ensures that:

• Clients are making the most of their budgets and not paying for features they don’t need.
• Everything in the final product has a purpose that fits their unique needs.
• Goals and deliverables set at the beginning of the project are met at the end.
• The final product fits into the client’s overall communications strategy; reinforcing a consistent customer experience across all channels.

We have found that the last point is particularly valuable to our clients because the results of the discovery process can be used for reference in future endeavors. The customer experience strategy, in particular, can serve as a foundation for other cross-channel communications: email campaigns, landing pages, extranets, print pieces, and any other customer touchpoints.

In addition to ensuring the success of a one-off engagement, the discovery process has far-reaching benefits that extend beyond any single initiative. It’s also an opportunity for clients to take a step back and see their business from the eyes of their customers. With this perspective, it is clear how the house’s floorplan should be laid out, how large the rooms should be, and how the windows should be placed.

Millennials are a growing segment of consumers—making up more than a quarter of the US population—thus forcing marketers to change their game in order to stay ahead. They’ve completely reshaped the marketplace. Check out some of our best tips for keeping up with these 83.1 million consumers:

1. Their smartphone is everything; information has to be readily accessible via mobile
   The quickest way to lose a Millennial audience is a bad mobile experience—poorly designed apps included. The 86 percent of American Millennials who own a smartphone spend an average of 18 hours on their device each week. Meaning, when they are struck with the notion of researching a product, the phone comes out and they start Googling, checking out social media, or texting trusted resources—friends, family, or that one trend-setter who always seems to be ahead of the curve.

   The key is to convey your message quickly and effectively, otherwise interest will be lost. Clean, responsive touchpoints accessible anywhere, anytime is the crux to locking them in after initial interest.

2. Hell hath no fury like a Millennial scorned
   Social media and mobile technology have changed the communication landscape: not only are you able to lose a customer as a result of tone-deafness, but that loss now has a domino effect that simply did not exist before. For example, United Airlines stock dropped $1.4 billion in one day after the ‘passenger removal’ video took over social media. Pepsi had to pull its recent television ad, featuring Kendall Jenner giving a police officer a Pepsi.

   Large scale, viral disapproval isn’t the only thing brands need to be wary of. With popular social networks like Twitter, Instagram, Yelp, OpenTable, TripAdvisor, Google, etc., Millennials are actively sharing their feedback and checking these sites for reviews from their peers when making decisions about travel, product purchases, and everything in between. It’s not enough for brands to say they have the best product or the lowest prices, now their customers have to say it for them.

3. Millennials don’t want to be “sold” to
   Traditional ads are no longer resonating with the millennial audience. Millennials are cautious, educated, savvy, and motivated to learn more. In fact, their appetite to learn more is to your advantage. Engage them in the conversation. It takes effort to build trust, so don’t take it for granted if you have a loyal fan base.

Once Millennials feel like a partner, they are eager to share and promote products and services of value. Brands such as Netflix, GoPro, Wendy’s, and Pampers have built entire communities using social media. They know the best way to resonate with Millennials is to engage with them—an engaged audience is an invested audience, after all.

Millennials don’t have all the answers, but they do know how to find them. Making sure your brand/company/service is accessible, trusted and forthcoming is the secret to reaching success in this marketplace. Millennials don’t want to be openly sold to, they want to be informed and educated about their options. By continuously engaging Millennials with innovative and relevant information that adds true value, you gain their respect and their business.

Sources: Phoenix Business Journal, Pew Research Center, Fortune, Business Insider, MarketingCharts

A big mistake that people make when creating websites is that they separate the visual design efforts from the UX (User Experience) and content development. They see visual design as putting paint on a finished piece of pottery—something you do at the end to make it look pretty. This approach is missing the power that visual design has to engage users with a website’s narrative.

1. Use white space to control the focus

   White space is the visual space between objects and blocks of text. Websites used to try to cram everything onto the homepage “above the fold.” This antiquated approach forces users to do the work of finding your story—like a puzzle that they needed to put together themselves. Instead, we use progressive disclosure. This technique presents fewer choices at the beginning of the user journey and opens up to more varied options once the user provides input and proceeds down the path. White space plays a large part in doing this effectively.

   By increasing white space and reducing visual distractions, we force the viewer to focus on one thing at a time. We can then control the order and pacing of information, avoiding choices that disrupt the flow of our narrative. When the user decides that they want more in depth information, we start reducing white space, creating more information dense pages, and providing a wider range of interactive options.

2. Use visual hierarchy to keep the user on their path

   Visual hierarchy is the art of controlling what a user looks at first, second, third, etc. When done well, the user will intuitively and effortlessly progress through the path we have set for them.

   Users will generally look at the largest objects first. That said, there are many other ways to give text or objects prominence. For example:

   • Warm colors (reds, oranges, and yellows) attract attention—they tend to “jump off” the page—whereas cool colors (blues and greens) tend to “stay back.”
   • It’s human nature to focus on what’s different. If most of a webpage is text, even a small photo will draw our attention. If most of a webpage is black and grey, the one thing that is blue will get our attention.
   • Images of people—especially of faces—always draws our eye.
   • Shapes or patterns that point, even subtly, move our eye in that direction.

     By using all of these techniques and others, in combination, we give the user a natural flow of how they should be absorbing the information on the page—leading them to a well-defined choice of digging deeper into the story or taking a specific action.

3. Use “surprise and delight” to keep users engaged

   From a UX perspective, consistency is king. Web designers generally provide a unified, predictable experience so that users don’t become frustrated or confused. However, as any good storyteller will tell you, throwing a few twists here and there will help keep your audience engaged. If the story goes exactly as they expect, users start to lose interest. So, as designers, we search for opportunities to inject “surprise and delight” into our narrative. For example, can an interactive element make the experience more customized or give the user a sense of control over the content? Will an infographic explain an important point better than words alone? Will a case study or testimonial add human interest? Will a video or animation tell a more dynamic story? When a user knows that the next click might bring something fun or unexpected, it creates more urgency in taking the next step.      

The most effective websites are built with considerations for who the audience is and how to lead them towards specific actions. By using smart visual design techniques, you can create websites that are both beautiful and hard working.

LinkedIn recently got a fresh new look. The social networking site says it’s the largest redesign since its inception. The company hopes users will find the new design more intuitive and easier to use. LinkedIn claims users were apparently “overwhelmed” by the old design.

Here on the Trellist Insights Blog, we wanted to share what we’ve seen so far as it relates to the changes on both individual LinkedIn Profiles and LinkedIn Company Pages.

Individual LinkedIn Profiles

When it comes to individual LinkedIn Profiles, we’ve noticed an overall simplistic design to engage more members. Searching for people, jobs, companies, etc. is more streamlined. The toolbar puts greater emphasis on actions users can take. Messaging has been revamped and is a lot like Facebook Messenger and now includes a pop-up window.

Banner images are displayed even more prominently and have changed in size. Insights are also displayed more prominently related to who has viewed your content. There’s more emphasis on enhancing your profile, including tips on how to make the most out of your profile. 

LinkedIn Company Pages

There are some fairly significant design changes for Company Pages. First, LinkedIn updates appear more prominently on the page. If you’re a page admin, LinkedIn showcases a quick look at analytics. Page visitors have the ability to select “Updates,” ”Overview” and “Jobs” via tabs.

Page admins still have the option to display a background image to highlight their company/brand, however it’s smaller in size and appearance from the previous version. There’s also an option to update an image under the “Overview” tab that highlights the company’s “About us” section. Last, but not least, when sharing an update, targeting is more obvious in the dropdown menu. 

We’ll be tracking our personal profiles and the Company Pages we manage to see how these design changes will impact overall engagement. If you have anything to add, we’d love to hear from you.

To learn more about our approach to managing social media, be sure to contact us at socialbusiness@trellist.com.

Visual content shared on social media is a powerful asset, especially at conferences and events. Images help boost a brand’s visibility in general, but did you know that social media posts with images receive 94% more views than those without them?

Sharing images on social helps to drive additional booth traffic at big events, while also highlighting a product or service.

The good news is you don’t need to be an expert photographer to do it well. But it’s imperative for brands to take professional looking photos when attending events. Here’s a handy list of tips and tricks for capturing and sharing photos at conferences, trade shows and other events:

1. Lights, camera, action! Lighting is key. You don’t want someone to look washed out or even worse, the person is unrecognizable because it’s so dark. Ensure the room is well-lit or use a flash if necessary.
2. Show us a sign. Don’t cut the words off signage. There’s nothing worse than chopping letters off a product/banner you’re trying to showcase.
3. Eyes open folks. Ensure everyone’s eyes are open in your pictures. Always double check this before posting.
4. Tuck ‘em in. Are shirts tucked in? Are ties on straight? These little things matter! Make sure your representatives on site understand this one.
5. Make your images tasteful. It’s best to keep alcoholic beverages out of social media photos. Leave the happy hour pics at happy hour.
6. Keep their eyes on the prize. Giving away an item? Showcase a photo of the giveaway on social media to drive traffic to the booth.
7. Spell check yourself. Including a person’s name with a photo? Make sure the spelling is correct and his or her current title is accurate.
8. Keep it legal. Last, but definitely not least, ensure any legal considerations are checked before sharing photos on social media. Be sure to follow any social media policies.

Every picture tells a story. So share yours and watch it improve engagement on your social channels.

Trellist Marketing and Technology provides intelligent business solutions for global, national, and regional clients across various industries.

It's also a Veteran-Owned Business. In this clip, Trellist Founder and CEO David Atadan offers advice to veterans looking to start a business.

Worldwide, there are over 1 billion people using Gmail – Google’s well-known and well-liked free email service. In terms of Email Client market share, Gmail trails only Apple's iPhone, garnering 16% of overall usage across webmail, desktop and mobile email clients combined. 

As if email marketers don't have it hard enough keeping up with segmentation and automation, now they're faced with over 1 billion people using a Gmail that filters out brand-generated emails into a tab called "Promotions". It's the equivalent of a display ad running on a web page that only gets 10 visits a day – or a political candidate whose position is at the very bottom of the ballot. Unless your email lands in the "Primary" tab, it's effectively reached a dead end.

This type of Inbox filtering is not new – it’s been a part of Gmail for quite some time. But it's a default setting that a large majority of users won't take the time to customize or change. So it leads me to wonder if marketers are picking up on this "Gmail effect" in the Inbox. 



Gmail is taking it a step further now, allowing users to "Gmailify" their email addresses from other providers like Yahoo! Mail or Hotmail/Outlook.com. This gives them the option to experience emails classically served by competitor clients with all of the Inbox features of Gmail. Thus, the Gmail footprint grows larger. And more Inboxes are sliced and diced based on Gmail's filtering. 

All this said, email marketing will surely live on. It's hard to predict its true life expectancy, especially in a time when so many people claim they don't like email and are overburdened by it. For Gen-Xrs, it's a habit that will die especially hard. But for marketers in both the B2C and B2B spaces, it's another reason to expand their channel horizons and start testing more targeted social media content and promotions. 

In fact, that email list will come in handy on social media, as networks like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter allow ad targeting using custom or tailored audiences – a process that matches email lists to active users and generates brand impressions (normally in the form of a promoted post or sponsored tweet) in the user's timeline. 

The latest statistics from Facebook tell us that users average more than 50 minutes per day in their suite of apps (Facebook, Messenger, Instagram). That's plenty of time to serve up a relevant post based on history and interests – whether you're an insurance company, a cloud technology vendor or a corner deli. And while there are ways for users to alter advertising settings in their social media feeds and block ads, few actually do it. Most users have come to expect branded, promoted content in their social feed – which leads to engagement if the content is hyper-relevant to their likes and passions. 

Whether your brand is looking to drive awareness around a new product, increase traffic back to your owned web presence, or influence the buying decision, micro-targeted impressions on social media can give you a similar bang for your buck to an email campaign. Add to it the visual-first nature of social media, and you're in a prime position to make an even better first (or just-in-time) impression.

Email's loss is positioned to be social media's gain.

Last month, Instagram – the popular mobile app for photo aficionados worldwide – launched Instagram Stories. The feature is the app’s response to the Snapchat craze. Stories will encourage users to share photos, videos and text that disappear after just 24 hours.

Some brands have fully embraced Instagram Stories, while others are still getting the hang of this new feature.

The team at Trellist cobbled together this handy infographic of pros and cons for social media managers who are thinking about elevating their Instagram strategy to include the Stories feature.

Check it out below and feel free to share it with your network:

Keep up with the latest in Social Business and Social Media strategy and trends from Trellist at www.trellist.com/social-business. 

SharePoint helps teams collaborate, whether they’re made up of 100 people in one location or tens of thousands of people located across the world. Out of the box, the tool can help users communicate internally and collaborate on projects by storing documents, collecting information, and sharing it with segmented groups. What users interact with is a secure website that gives them the freedom and flexibility to be more productive no matter where colleagues are located.

However, SharePoint’s look and feel out of the box and can often leave much to be desired, leading to low adoption rates across an enterprise. A hard to navigate website that doesn’t look and feel like  what users have become accustomed to can make or break a company’s SharePoint deployment.

While Microsoft has made—and continues to make—great strides with the user interface, users still struggle with SharePoint’s out-of-the-box user interface. What differentiates a SharePoint site that is hard to navigate and underutilized from one that truly impacts collaboration and productivity is great design and user interface/user experience (UI/UX) work.

As users across an enterprise move through a SharePoint environment or site, it helps if the navigation, data views such as charts or spreadsheets, reports, content and forms are branded consistently. Think about your own experience: For example, when navigating through an online store where a payment page looks different than a product page might give you pause, cause a little bit of confusion, or even make you lose trust in the site and abandon your purchase.

The same goes for SharePoint.

With the help of a SharePoint developer, a UI/UX expert, an experienced graphic designer and a set of brand standards, you can design a SharePoint site that’s focused on the user.

The right mix of creative design and technical knowledge can enrich SharePoint and make it even more user-friendly. Enhancements to HTML, CSS, JavaScript, client side object model (CSOM), REST, JSON, and .Net can, for example, incorporate various branding elements or change the way forms look on a page.

List views are widely used across SharePoint to display different types of information, from news items, to documents available for download, to events, and more. The out-of-the-box functionality uses a large un-formatted table to display the title, URL, a description, notes and filters. This bare-bones table includes all the information an administrator needs to properly organize data and set up filters; however, the initial display is completely unbranded and anything but user friendly.

But with the right design, some user interface skills and a bit of JavaScript, traditional list views are designed to show only needed information like a linked title and description. Additional features like filtering are displayed at the top of the page (and also designed to incorporate branded “filter” buttons), instead of within each table entry, making the list of resources much more user friendly. Rather than a interacting with a very wide table which users must scroll left-right and up-down to navigate, the experience is much better.

BEFORE:

AFTER: 

Likewise, lists of links, which are also displayed in an un-formatted, unsightly table with several fields, can be styled to appear as a single list of destinations you’d find on a homepage. These are just a few examples of how you can customize SharePoint for your organization.

BEFORE:

AFTER:

With all of the customization options, it’s easy to over-customize. There are, however, times when the out-of-the-box functionality for a part of SharePoint works well and doesn’t need to be customized. For example, Alerts that notify a small group of people when part of a workflow is completed is standard within SharePoint. It’s not necessary to overdevelop or over-design this functionality unless user needs dictate something different.

To make the best use of SharePoint and ensure it’s adopted across all groups in an enterprise, it’s best to have a good understanding of how it’ll be used and which parts of SharePoint should be modified, as well as which parts work well out-of-the-box. Determining the mix of standard functionality with unique, branded elements will help you get the most out of your SharePoint investment and ensure maximum user adoption.  

Identifying customer personas, and cataloguing the insights associated with them, is essential for targeting marketing and sales efforts in the most efficient and productive way possible. It prepares the business to most appropriately appeal to its prospective customers.

Here are the six essentials to successfully developing buyer personas for any business.

1.The audience basics.

It’s important to begin with basic audience demographics — age, gender, job title, and geographic information, as well as a clear understanding of the problem the audience is looking to solve.

2. How they buy.

What single factor influences potential customers the most as they decide whether to buy? Online research? Word-of-mouth from colleagues or friends? And how long will they take to make a decision? Or, is the audience prone to impulse decisions?

3. Why they buy.

What tips the audience into making a decision? Do they buy based upon price, or are they less price sensitive? What is the deciding factor for them? Is it utility? Is it design?

4. Their values.

Is the audience environmentally conscious? Do they place importance on social responsibility? When a company understands the prospective customers’ values, it can better align its offering with what the audience is trying to accomplish.

5. Differentiators.

It’s essential to understand the differences between prospects who take action and those who don’t. Making this distinction will prevent a business from spending too much time and energy chasing down potential customers or clients who were probably never serious in the first place.

6. Their personalities.

Finally, a business must evaluate the psychographics of the target audience. This has to do with the audience’s likes, attitudes, and opinions. Information like this will help create an understanding of the personality types and decision-making styles included in the audience.

Keep in mind that customer personas might change as a business evolves. It’s important to stay in touch with the needs of the audience over time.

If you’d like to learn more about customer personas, their development, and how they can help you better target communications to be more relevant to your customers and prospects, let us know.