How Destinations Can Boost
Introduction . . . 3 Part 1 . . . 6 Part 2 . . . .8 Part 3 . . . .12 Part 4 . . . .17 Part 5 . . . .21 Conclusion . . . 24 Contact Information . . . 26
Table of Contents
Early adopter destinations of content marketing report mixed results and feelings about content marketing itself.
It’s no wonder. Content marketing isn’t easy to do well in the face diverse barriers to growth.
There is the challenge of creativity. Creating content that is relevant to your customers and makes your destination stand out in new, exciting ways takes a constant supply of fresh, innovative creative ideas.
There is the challenge of dynamic change. Not only are changing technologies and different channels involved, but the DMO sales process itself is evolving. The hard sell is out. The soft sell–with
The art of creating buy in over the hard sell is making its way through the DMO sales community . . . .
Jeremy Fairly, 10 Things to Look Out for in 2014 Destination Marketing Destination Marketing International 12/31/2013
While consumers continue to tune out traditional, intrusive marketing communications, they increasingly crave the type of genuine, customer– focused information that content marketing delivers.
customer-focused, value-rich information–is in and quickly becoming the new norm.
There is the challenge of perseverance. Content marketing also isn’t easy to do well because the results can be less than
spectacular at first.
When your content marketing results are low, not only does your destination’s competitiveness suffer, but you and your marketing team can be tempted to discouragement too. This, in turn, can negatively impact performance, which your destination doesn’t need.
It’s 2014. Time to Act.
If your DMO’s content marketing is down, lower than expected or just needs a lift, what will you do in 2014?
The following are some suggested actions you can take that are essential to creating content marketing lift, closing the door on
discouragement, and positioning your destination’s digital
marketing for improved productivity in your destination’s sales life cycle process:
1. Change or modify your DMO’s customer view 2. Make customer relationships strategic
3. Craft customer personas and profiles 4. Analyze customer brand journeys
5. Study customer’s perception of “relevance”
The processes of turbo-charging your destination’s content marketing in 2014 starts, naturally, with your customers, how you view them and your attitude towards them.
Though in two different marketing contexts, the statements by Rust, Moorman, Bahalla and Garcia capture the same, vital truth for marketing success in general that applies to content marketing in specific: the need for a high customer view.
How do you, your marketing team and entire DMO view your customers? Do they view them mostly as faceless sales, a low transactional view, or as human beings and valuable long-term customer relationships–a high relational view?
Part 1
Change or Modify Your DMOs Customer View
To compete in this aggressively interactive environment, companies must shift their focus from driving transactions to maximizing customer lifetime value. That means making products and brands subservient to long-term customer relationships.
Rust, Moorman, Bhalla Harvard Business Review, 2011
Our strong suit is what we do–and our audience.
Jerry Garcia The Grateful Dead
Does your DMO tend to think of customers primarily as consumers, or as co-creators of what makes your destination and DMO great?
The answers to these questions matter because they powerfully shape or define your customer view and they reflect how you really feel and how much you really care about your customers.
Remember, how much you care comes through everything your DMO does–including your content marketing. A high customer view that sees, thinks and acts towards the customer as a valuable long-term relationship will tend to produce more relevant, customized customer content for their marketing. A low customer view tends to think that re-packaged, un-customized content is good enough.
High Customer View’s Impact
A high customer view encourages caring. Caring impacts relevance and quality, and relevance and quality impact customer’s
Want to kick-start your destination’s content marketing productivity in 2014? Start by ensuring that every member of your DMO’s marketing and creative team owns a high customer view.
Another step to boost your destination’s content marketing is organically related and flows from your DMO’s customer view. It’s called customer intimacy.
The term customer intimacy may sound new, because it is not commonly used in the DMO marketing community, but it has existed in wider marketing circles, at least since Michael Treace and Fred Wiersma introduced the phrase over 20 years ago.
Part 2
Make Customer Relationships Strategic
Companies that excel in customer intimacy combine detailed customer knowledge with operational flexibility so they respond quickly to almost any need, from customizing a product to fulfilling special requests. As a consequence, these companies engender tremendous customer loyalty.
Treace and Wiersma Harvard Business Review, 1993
In their best-selling book The Discipline of Marketing Leaders, Treace and Wiersma outlined three strategies they described as value disciplines: operational excellence, product leadership and customer intimacy.
Their essential idea regarding customer intimacy was that it was necessary to stop viewing sales transactions as stand-alone events and move to a longer-term relationship view of sales. This long-term view of sales relationships would be characterized by more particular knowledge of customers.
Particular knowledge is information about the customer that goes beyond her name, email, segment data or demographic points and includes things like knowledge and attitude towards your brand, personal thoughts, interests, desires, needs, purchase history, purchase recency, readiness to purchase, willingness to refer and other personal inputs. The possibilities are many.
This refined, particular customer knowledge could then be leveraged to better understand, anticipate, respond and fulfill
customer desires and needs, like content they deem relevant and valuable.
It is one thing to have an anonymous sales transaction and quite another to have an intimate customer relationship. DMO content marketers that see and take this difference seriously, and apply it to their DMO’s creative production process, can have a competitive advantage and will have increased ability to boost their
destination’s content marketing results.
Why? To summarize:
1. Because their content is founded on knowledge that goes beyond segment and demographic data to deeper, individual interests, desires and needs.
2. This translates into content that has more power to attract attention and cut through the marketing clutter and noise, and
3. The content has more power to sustain consumer’s attention and motivate to action because its value is more relevant.
Priority and Goal
To add lift to your content marketing results in 2014, make customer relationships high priority and customer intimacy your goal.
If you haven’t already, start thinking of your different marketing communication channels as different customer intimacy channels for you to capture and continuously expand knowledge of your customers. There are plenty of online and digital tools to help you do this as well.
In addition to maintaining a high customer view, creating and
applying customer intimacy insights to your DMO’s content creation process, developing and applying customer personas and profiles
can help increase your content marketing productivity as well. Let’s take a closer look at this.
A destination’s content marketing can lag with disappointing results for a lot of different reasons.
Sometimes, the problem doesn’t lie with a low customer view or not having particularized customer information. Sometimes the problem is too much customer information or unhelpful data organization.
As the director or leader of your DMO’s marketing team, you may be trying to “listen” to your customer data, but because your
Part 3
Craft Customer Personas and Profiles
When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.
customer data isn’t organized in more meaningful ways, you’re not able to “listen completely” or very much at all.
Because of this, you may sense opportunities are missed for your DMO to create more interesting and relevant customer content. As a result, you suspect your destination might be less competitive.
Customer personas and profiles of your ideal customers can be a solution to this problem in 2014.
A customer persona is a grouping of customers based on certain shared attributes. “Summer Campers,” “Fall Lovers,” “Winter Skiers” and “Spring Walkers” might be an alpine destination’s typical customer persona set, for example.
A customer profile breaks a persona down into more particular details. There is no “right” or “wrong” way to analyze a persona. There are as many ways to organize customer’s profiles as there are marketers.
However you choose to do it, the essential thing is you, your marketing team and content production team find it useful and use it to unite, shape, drive and manage the content production
process.
Organize your ideal customer data into an ideal customer persona and profile chart to make it easy to access and use. Your chart’s format might look something like the following example:
Translate Insights Into Relevant Content
Naturally, as customer information and intimacy grows, your ideal customer personas and profiles chart can change too. Be sure the chart is kept up to date and frequently before the eyes and minds of you in-house or outsourced content creation team (copywriters, content writers, designers, videographers, editors, etc.).
The more content that is produced around your ideal customer’s problems and interests listed in your chart, which is grounded in objective customer data, the more power your content will have to break through the marketing noise, get heard and motivate your ideal customers to profitably act in your destination’s favor.
Content that customers or visitors consider highly relevant and valuable doesn’t all spring from objective or scientific knowledge. The customer knowledge that may determine the impact and effectiveness of your destinations content marketing most may arise from empathy.
A destination’s content marketing should do far more than serve up objective information, facts and figures to its customers.
Content that mostly objectifies your destination is boring. While it may be interesting to city hall, hospitality, entertainment and shopping venues it tends to make your destination invisible to potential visitors and customers. It makes competing destinations seem better.
The reason why is because content that over-emphasizes your destination’s objective information is more about you than about the customer. It’s destination-centric rather than customer-centric. It can feel more like a hard sell rather than gentle persuasion– something especially younger customer segments quickly sense and avoid.
Analyze Customer Brand Journeys
Movies that encourage empathy are more effective than those that objectify problems.
This is not to say that objective information isn’t needed in your DMO’s content marketing. It is necessary. It just needs to be put into its place in the content development process. Content that is more about your destination’s ideal customers–their problems, interests, aspirations or dreams–is far more interesting to your customers and effective at increasing your destination’s content marketing productivity.
So, how can your content marketing and creative team develop more customer empathy and effective marketing content in 2014? A solution is to create a framework that provides perspective and meaningful insights into your different customer’s experiences with your brand.
For example, Chris Ribaudo has developed a customer empathy framework for content marketing and communication applications by mapping out ideal customer’s brand relationships using the diagram below:
Each of the five phases above reflect the progressive journey of a customer from brand “stranger” to brand “best friend.” The benefit of such a framework is that it can impart empathetic clarity on the experiences of different customers at different points of their brand journeys. These empathetic customer perspectives and insights can then be integrated into the concepting phase of your DMO’s content creation process.
Stranger • Expectations • Problems • Issues • Thoughts • Feelings Acquaintance • Expectations • Problems • Issues • Thoughts • Feelings Friend • Expectations • Problems • Issues • Thoughts • Feelings Good Friend • Expectations • Problems • Issues • Thoughts • Feelings Best Friend • Expectations • Problems • Issues • Thoughts • Feelings
The result of this is content that “speaks” more to your customers. It makes them feel like you personally know them and their interests. It builds customer’s confidence that your DMO is able to guide them to what they need in order to have a great time at your destination.
Some visitor segments are highly sensitive to miss-spending their dollars, especially with the economy today. So this perception of confidence and trust in your DMO is key to building pre-purchase motivation.
Customer empathy is a powerful tool in your content marketing toolbox. A final suggestion to create more content marketing lift in 2014 is to consider what relevant means to your customers. Capturing insights from customer perceptions, and then applying them to your content marketing production process, will help drive customer responses and conversions higher.
A final key matter to consider when your content marketing isn’t producing the results you hope for is whether or not your thinking about what your customers find “relevant” is broad enough.
An overly narrow perspective of customer’s perception of relevance can lead to missed opportunities of creating higher quality content that can potentially generate higher content marketing lift.
The important distinctions for DMO executives to remember are, 1) Not all content value is of equal worth to the customer, and 2) Content value is calculated in the eyes of the customer, not the DMO.
Chris Ribaudo has developed a customer hierarchy of content relevance that identifies four basic types or meanings of perceived “value” in a content marketing context:
Study Customer’s Perceptions of “Relevance”
Curiosity Relevance
Marketing content aimed at customer curiosity is typically rooted in a customer’s innate inquisitiveness or general questions about something. It is the perception of relevance with the weakest intrinsic motivational force.
Interest Relevance
Marketing content that moves up the motivational-relevance hierarchy to the next rung appeals to customer’s interests. These appeals can be rooted in things like a person’s passions, hobbies or concerns.
Need
Desire
Interest
Curiosity
Desire Relevance
Moving up the motivational hierarchy further still, is marketing content that appeals to customer’s wants or aspirations. Marketing content that customer’s perceive as helping them get what they desire has stronger motivational force for driving response and conversion rates than content that appeals to curiosity or interest.
Need Relevance
Finally, at the apex of the customer motivation-perception hierarchy is marketing content that focuses on a felt need and solves a
specific problem. Their problem may be internal, external or both. The motivating force lies in the content’s promise to deliver some or total relief from their burden. Content that solves a very real
problem for customers typically has the strongest appeal and power to drive responses and conversions.
What is “relevant” to your customers is mostly a subjective thing. You will not truly know what your customers perceive as relevant– cannot know–unless your DMO content marketing team adopts a
humble, mental attitude and posture towards customers, regularly asks questions and grows in the discipline of listening.
This hierarchy of customer motivations and perceptions of “relevance” can be used to guide your destination’s customer inquires and conversations. Applied, it can help you increase responses, conversions and overall content marketing productivity in 2014.
Understanding that times have changed and so has the role and strategic focus of successful DMOs is critical. Content
development, curating and marketing are strategic priorities of successful DMOs today.
The new role for the DMOs is that of content developer and curator, reaching into the destination to find and share interesting and authentic content that inspires. Those destinations that understand this shift and take advantage of it will be winners.
Carl Ribaudo, SMG
Conclusion
However, just understanding this shift and new reality isn’t enough.
Destination leaders must know how to lead the DMOs content creation process tasked with creating attractive, rich content that visitors find highly relevant and valuable. Driving content marketing results and destination competitiveness depend on it.
This paper’s focus has been to highlight 5 action steps DMO leaders can take to positively impact their content marketing:
1. Change or modify the DMO’s customer view 2. Make customer relationships strategic 3. Craft customer personas and profiles 4. Analyze customer brand journeys
5. Study customer’s perception of “relevance”
Doing these 5 steps can help your DMO execute and achieve the content marketing lift your looking for and help shut the door on disappointing and discouraging content marketing results. You can make it happen in 2014.
Contact Us
For more information on the strategies and tactics discussed here, contact Carl Ribaudo, President of SMG.
Strategic Marketing Group P.O. Box 10109
2048 Dunlap Drive Suite 11 South Lake Tahoe, CA 96150 Phone: (530) 541-2462
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