Mura 10: Introduction

Introduction

Overview

The Mura Digital Experience Platform is a web-based platform that allows delivery of content-driven experiences to your most valuable audiences across the web and mobile. It integrates with Marketing Automation, CRM, Data Management Platforms and more to leverage behavior, 1st & 3rd-party customer data to continually increase relevance over time.

In order to implement MXP and take full advantage of all it has to offer, there are a few things that need to be completed and ready to implement.

This document will walk you through the following:

Understanding the Customer Journey
Defining Personas
Defining Experiences
Mapping Content to Experiences
Defining Integrations
Project Roles and Responsibilities

Understanding the Customer Journey

“The buying process is a measured, deliberate journey, not a sweaty sprint. You must build your buyers’ confidence slowly. Each time they visit your site or read your content, you should be engaging in a mutual exchange of value, balancing your desire for more information with your buyers’ reluctance to share.”

- Bob Johnson, IDG Connect, Content Marketing Institute

The Customer Journey is a simplified, but important framework for content marketing strategy — but what does it look like? How are buyers getting from “Do I have a need?” to “I’m ready to buy?”

Because up to 70% of the Customer Journey can be complete before a buyer even reaches out to sales (SiriusDecisions), marketers and sales reps alike are having to adjust their strategies to cope with these changing consumer practices. But what can they do about the 70% of the Customer Journey that they’re missing out on?

“Deliver the right value, to the right audience, in their time.”

- Robert Rose (Connecting Content Marketing Experiences)

The Content Marketing Sales Funnel

Below is a description of each stage of the Customer Journey in the context of a content strategy, including buyer intent and suggested content types.

New Visitors / Generate Awareness

Demand Generation; Inferred audience (inbound) or known contact who has never visited your site (via outbound programs)

Focused on generating traffic and increasing awareness
No barrier to consumption
Social media, blog posts, press releases, web pages

Top of Funnel / Generate Leads

Lead Generation; Early Stage (Known Contact)

Focused on generating leads
Low barrier to consumption (email opt in, download forms)
Cheat sheets, white papers, guides, how-to’s, short videos

Middle of Funnel / Generate Prospects

Lead Nurturing; Mid Stage

Focused on generating prospects
Moderate barrier to consumption (Longer forms with qualifying information, webinar registrations, subscriptions)
Longer videos, eBooks, webinars, subscriptions, case studies, assessments

Bottom of Funnel / Generate Customers

Sales Enablement; Late Stage

Focused on generating customers
High barrier to consumption (demo request, free trials, sales kits)
Demos, free trials, price quotes, brochures

Customer Loyalty / Generate Engagement

Customer Experience; Satisfaction to Advocacy

Focused on supporting or rewarding existing customers
Requires knowing the customer
Product offers, discounts, specials, loyalty incentives, capture feedback Defining Audiences & Personas

Personas are composite sketches of a member of your audience, designed to help inform your content strategy. Defining personas will allow you to answer basic questions that you can use to to attract new and better qualified customers, shorten buying cycles, and increase the value of each engagement. But to do so, you’ll need to ask questions such as:

Who is my customer?
What motivates them?
What does success with my product mean to them?
What kind of decision maker is my customer? Fast, slow, impatient?
What questions are they asking at each phase of their buyer journey?

Content Audit & Scoring

Auditing and scoring content for relevant content experiences

After audiences have been defined and needs assessed, you'll need to perform a content audit to determine:

How much content exists to support each audience and buying stage?
What holes do you have in you existing content and what do you need to create based on audience needs?
How will you use this content to create a content continuum that leads the customers to the next logical stage of the buyer journey?

Once you’ve audited your existing content, you’ll need to take it one step further and decide:

How "uniquely relevant" is your content to specific audiences on a scale of 1-100? i.e. How much content do you have that is simply not relevant to any other audience, but is valuable for one audience specifically and by what relative measure?
How much of this uniquely relevant content would someone need to consume for you to feel confident an anonymous visitor is a member of one of your audiences?
Do you need to create content to help “smoke out” members of a specific audience?

An example of a content scoring model for a specific audience might look like the following. (Keep in mind, that scoring has to do only with the content itself and it’s unique relevance to the audience it is scored for, not the content type.)

Blog post - 10 Points
Whitepaper - 25 Points
Infographic - 15 Points
Webinar - 25 Points
Case study - 15 Points
Ebook - 25 Points
Link to audience-specific portal - 75 Points

Using this model, an anonymous visitor could meet the threshold of 100 points and be delivered an audience-specific content experience by consuming the following content:

Whitepaper (25 Points) + 6 blog posts (60 Points) + Case study (15 Points) + Webinar (25 Points) = 125 Points

Defining Experiences

Once we know which content exists, or needs to be created to support our strategy we’ll define the Experiences.

Experiences are the culmination of content, navigation, user interface features, visual design or specific functionality delivered to an audience and triggered by specific behavior, known data points or a combination thereof.

MXP will allow you to create experiences for each persona and stage in your Customer Journey. This phase is usually handled by the implementation and content strategy teams. When planning experiences, it is important to consider the following:

Who is the experience for?
What will it consist of?
- Specific content, including narrative shifts or content tilts
- Visual changes
- New offers or incentives
- Functionality changes
When should we deliver it?
What needs to happen in order to trigger this experience?
- Lead score change
- Specific behavior such as download, opt-in, information request, email response, PPC event, change of status in CRM, site visit from specific locale
- …and More

Mapping Content to Experiences

Once you define the experiences you’ll be delivering, you can begin mapping content to them. This process includes the following steps:

Identify which content will support each experience
Mapping existing content to the appropriate experience and identifying holes that need to filled
Define what triggers will move customers to the next stage in the Customer Journey and create a content continuum

Defining Triggers

Once all content and features of an experience have been mapped, we’ll need to determine what events will ultimately trigger the delivery of each experience to each audience.

Inferred (Anonymous or known, if via outbound)

In this stage, we’ll use targeted and uniquely valuable content to infer that someone is a member of an audience by assigning “Persona Points” to content within MXP (see “Current Content Strategy Audit” above). When a visitor has consumed enough content to meet the 100 point threshold, we can trigger an experience.

Early (Known)

Transitioning leads from “Inferred” to “Early” is one of the easiest because it usually involves a form submission and official contact creation within the marketing database. In addition, existing early stage leads can be “smoked out” with email if they are known, but not yet known to MXP.

Mid

Mid stage leads are more difficult because we have to measure engagement via behavior across at least a couple of channels (web, email). Lead scoring (usually within marketing automation platforms) play a big role in the transition to and out of this stage.

Late

Like the Mid Stage, transitioning a lead into the Late Stage will need to use lead scoring to measure interest and engagement. When possible, the sales team should update lead data to further inform our understanding of prospects at this stage.

Customer

Just like the Early Stage, knowing someone is a customer can be easy with integration to your CRM. Since they’re our customer and have a customer record in our CRM, we should have access to which products and services they’ve purchased, among other information. We can use this data to continue to deliver value, create opportunities to upset and cross-sell, while nurturing advocacy.

Integrations

MXP can leverage 3rd party data about customers in order to trigger an experience on the web site. During the discovery phase, we will want to understand and define which 3rd party data sources will we integrate with. Once they’ve been defined, we’ll need to determine integration points.

While not all of these are currently supported, if there’s a requirement and the platform provides the data needed via an API, we can look into adding it for your project.

Marketing Automation

Marketo
Mautic
Eloqua
Pardot
Silverpop
Act-On
Hubspot
Engagio (ABM)