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Boost Customer Experience with Marketing Orchestration

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11 B2B Content Ideas to Fuel your Marketing (with Examples)

Marketing orchestration is the process of bringing harmony between the many fronts of your marketing strategy.

Every once in a while, you should consider stepping back and looking at the magnitude of the engine you’ve created. For perspective, you can look at:

  • Dozens of tools that make up your martech stack
  • The army of ideators, content creators, and editors
  • Number of cross-functional teams all working together
  • Heaps upon heaps of customer and target audience data sets

It’s a miracle that modern marketing teams run smoothly. However, there is a method to the madness. It’s called marketing orchestration.

Then pause and picture a set of new graduates right off Fort Bragg. 

Notice the beauty of their equally paced strides and the resultant black boots in lockstep. 

Appreciate their flawless waves of motion and synchrony of thought.

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 All this happening with harmonious symphonies of the band in the background.

Isn’t it beautiful?

This is the promise of marketing orchestration, and as this blog will show, it does wonders for your customer experience.

Just How Much Have Your Customers Changed Since 2010

What could possibly change in ten years? In the case of this past decade, well, everything.

You’d be surprised. 

The tastes, preferences, and tolerance of your customers look nothing like they did a decade ago.

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What your consumers considered a positive experience back then is probably mediocre right now. And you can see these changes in how:

1. Your Current Customers Expect Personalization

Your customers nowadays don’t value personalization. If anything, they’re past that. Personalization is something they expect. 

71% of customers feel frustrated if a shopping experience isn’t personalized. 

However, the rise of silos, different marketing tools, and marketing channels make collecting data and personalization a nightmare.

2. Your Target Audience is Now On Different Platforms

In 2010, you’d be lucky to find half of your customers on Twitter. Nowadays, your customers are on Twitter and a dozen other platforms.

What makes it even harder is that your customers expect consistency as they move across these platforms.

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You can’t say one thing on Facebook and another on Instagram. It’s hard to believe, but audiences notice even the slightest variations.

3. Your Customer Expect Flawless Cross Channel Experiences

Unlike 2010, your customers now live in the most convenient times in history. 

Look around and notice the 5G internet speeds, two-day Amazon deliveries, and one-click payments.

While you were reading that, a prospect of yours somewhere ordered pizza. It’ll be delivered a few minutes after you’re done with this piece.

Only one problem. Your target audience expects the same from your marketing strategy at any point in your customer journey.

That’s why browsers abandon pages that take more than 3 seconds to load.

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With that in mind, moving from your IG page to your website should be flawless, taking as little time as possible. Subsequently, you need an efficient content creation process that delivers relevant content whenever your target audience needs it.

The Consequences, Silos Galore and What This Means

With these changes in customer expectations, marketers were forced to adapt to an ever-increasing number of complexities.

As a result, when you walk around your marketing organization, you’re likely to see:

1. A Bloated Stack of Martech Tools

It takes 78% of marketers more than 5 tools to execute, plan and run a marketing campaign. (Welcome & Sirkin Internal Study Jan 2021).

Modern marketers did what they did best to meet these customer demands, automating using the available technologies.

This has created so many incompatible tools held together by weak integrations in marketing teams it’s sad. As a result, your customers:

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  • Get inconsistent outreach from different platforms
  • Repetitive outreach, e.g., sending a client two emails
  • Slower services when moving between endpoints

2. Team and Departmental Silos

For every critical aspect of customer experience, you probably have a team dedicated to just that. Often, you will have a:

  • Content creation team
  • Search Engine Optimization Team
  • Customer acquisition team

Oblivious to many, the more teams and team members you have, the harder it is to achieve synchrony.

 Think about it, would you rather have a choir of 10 members or one of a hundred members. This eventually leads to:

  • Unproductive and inefficient teams
  • Recurrence and repetition of tasks
  • A varying tone during customer outreach

3. Difficulty Measuring Progress

With the rise of multiple teams, channels, and marketing tools, everything blurs, and measuring progress becomes a nightmare.

84% of marketers say that demonstrating meaningful results is critical. (Welcome & Sirkin internal study, Jan 2021)

You’ve probably tried metrics and key performance indicators. However, even these strategies are no match for the disorganization of a fragmented marketing platform.

As a result, you may end up with:

  • Aspects of unpleasant customer experiences that are difficult to root out
  • Keeping expensive and ineffective CX strategies still running
  • Inability to respond effectively  to customer feedback

What Is Marketing Orchestration

Forrester defines marketing orchestration as a powerful tool in ABM and marketing. This tool focuses not on standalone campaigns but on optimizing a set of related cross-channel interactions that together make up an individualized customer experience.

If jargon isn’t your cup of tea, the term comes from the literal orchestra. Picture several individuals playing different instruments that blend to create a beautiful symphony and a wonderful experience.

That’s the closest you’ll ever get to a perfect explanation of the relationship between marketing orchestration and customer experience. 

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This strategy aims to enable your team to deliver content, through the right channels, at the right time, and to the right person.

The Importance of Customer Experience, in Numbers

On the other side of marketing, customer experience is rising in essence like never before. Marketing was once about what you told people.

It then changed to what you showed people.

Nowadays, marketing is about how you make your clients feel, and that is customer experience at its finest.

A few CX statistics to put its importance in context include:

  • There is an 80% increase in revenue for businesses that decide to focus on customer experience
  • 73% of customers point to customer experience as an important factor in their purchasing decision.
  • 86% of customers are willing to pay more if it means getting a better customer experience
  • 89% of customers started doing business with a consumer after a poor customer experience.

Marketing Orchestration and Customer Experience: Where their Destinies Cross Paths

You’re probably wondering what your CX strategy has to do with your marketing orchestration strategy: short answer, everything.

Marketing orchestration and a positive customer experience are intertwined. Right now, it’s impossible to have one without the other.

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The long answer involves the power of marketing orchestration to:

  • Coordinate the timing, message, and segmentation of your omnichannel marketing
  • Scalability and introduction of new channels into your CX strategy
  • Eliminating bottlenecks in the curation of personalized content
  • Leveraging AI for predictive decision-making.

Marketing Orchestration in Action: What To Expect Post Adopting Marketing Orchestration 

Marketing orchestration will make your customer experience strategies effective, efficient, and measurable. It will help break down your marketing from this gigantic mountain of complexity to a straightforward process even an intern can understand.

Some of the benefits of marketing orchestration that will eventually result in a better customer experience are:

1. Leveraging Data to Demonstrate Impact of Different Channels

Marketing orchestration will bring your trial and error days to an end and welcome you to an era of informed decision-making.

By ensuring symphony over different channels, you can now track the performance of different channels and even perform AB testing as far as CX is concerned.

Do your inbound SEO strategies bring in more leads than your PPC ads?

With marketing orchestration, you’ll have answers. This will enable you to make informed decisions on funding and improvement.

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2. An Improved Customer Messaging Fit

Determining the relevance of a message to the circumstance of your target audience is one of the leading causes of sleepless nights in marketing.

However, marketing orchestration may have cracked the code.

Marketing orchestration enables you to collect and execute data on the preferences of your customers. It would help you answer:

  • What medium do my customers prefer?
  • What medium do my customers prefer at certain times?
  • What message will appeal to my customers at a future date?

 Through predictive analysis, your system is now better poised to determine the subject line, channel, time, and even tone of your personalized message leading to a better CX.

3. Segmentation of Your Multiple Marketing Channels

Marketing will help map out your entire customer experience from the perspective of marketing channels.

With a step-by-step understanding of how your customers interact with your channels, segmenting connected channels becomes easier.

You can apply this knowledge in sending:

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  • Long-form content such as newsletters through email
  • Brief notifications through social media and direct messaging
  • Discounts and notifications in-app or through websites

This makes the repurposing of content and automation efficient since channels with a similar customer effect are grouped. 

4. Reducing Low-Level Stress and Anxiety Customers May Have In Their Journey

Your customers are constantly faced with a certain level of anxiety at each level of their customer journey. Some of the questions that fuel this anxiety include:

  • Is this product legitimate
  • Will I lose my money purchasing this product
  • Can I take this seller or website  at their word

Marketing orchestration allows you to lay these uncertainties to rest with the appropriate marketing channel.

Take buying something on Amazon, for example. Their orchestration may send you a text message to let you know that your order is confirmed.

They’ll then send you an email and an in-app message to tell you that you can track your product.

Don’t Know Where To Start: How About You Bring Everything Under A Single Dashboard.

Running different marketing tools can be a hassle. However, it doesn’t have to be this way.

Welcome offers a solution. 

Why not replace the dozens of tools with a single unified platform, and improve your customer experience while at it.

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Welcome will bring all cross-functional aspects of your marketing strategy under a single dashboard.

From this dashboard, you can track progress, automate workflows, and communicate with your teams. Ready to give it a try? Get started with a free Welcome account today

 


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How To Combine PR and Content Marketing Superpowers To Achieve Business Goals

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A figure pulls open a dress shirt to reveal the term PR on a Superman-like costume, reflecting the superpower resulting from combining content and PR.

A transformative shift is happening, and it’s not AI.

The aisle between public relations and content marketing is rapidly narrowing. If you’re smart about the convergence, you can forever enhance your brand’s storytelling.

The goals and roles of content marketing and PR overlap more and more. The job descriptions look awfully similar. Shrinking budgets and a shrewd eye for efficiency mean you and your PR pals could face the chopping block if you don’t streamline operations and deliver on the company’s goals (because marketing communications is always first to be axed, right?).

Yikes. Let’s take a big, deep breath. This is not a threat. It’s an opportunity.

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Reach across the aisle to PR and streamline content creation, improve distribution strategies, and get back to the heart of what you both are meant to do: Build strong relationships and tell impactful stories.

So, before you panic-post that open-to-work banner on LinkedIn, consider these tips from content marketing, PR, and journalism pros who’ve figured out how to thrive in an increasingly narrowing content ecosystem.

1. See journalists as your audience

Savvy pros know the ability to tell an impactful story — and support it with publish-ready collateral — grounds successful media relationships. And as a content marketer, your skills in storytelling and connecting with audiences, including journalists, naturally support your PR pals’ media outreach.

Strategic storytelling creates content focused on what the audience needs and wants. Sharing content on your blog or social media builds relationships with journalists who source those channels for story ideas, event updates, and subject matter experts.

“Embedding PR strategies in your content marketing pieces informs your audience and can easily be picked up by media,” says Alex Sanchez, chief experience officer at BeWell, New Mexico’s Health Insurance Marketplace. “We have seen reporters do this many times, pulling stories from our blogs and putting them in the nightly news — most of the time without even reaching out to us.”

Acacia James, weekend producer/morning associate producer at WTOP radio in Washington, D.C., says blogs and social media posts are helpful to her work. “If I see a story idea, and I see that they’re willing to share information, it’s easier to contact them — and we can also backlink their content. It’s huge for us to be able to use every avenue.” 

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Kirby Winn, manager of PR at ImpactLife, says reporters and assignment editors are key consumers of their content. “And I don’t mean a news release that just hit their inbox. They’re going to our blog and consuming our stories, just like any other audience member,” he says. “Our organization has put more focus into content marketing in the past few years — it supports a media pitch so well and highlights the stories we have to tell.”

Storytelling attracts earned media that might not pick up the generic news topic. “It’s one thing to pitch a general story about how we help consumers sign up for low-cost health insurance,” Alex says. “Now, imagine a single mom who just got a plan after years of thinking it was too expensive. She had a terrible car accident, and the $60,000 ER bill that would have ruined her financially was covered. Now that’s a story journalists will want to cover, and that will be relatable to their audience and ours.” 

2. Learn the media outlet’s audience

Seventy-three percent of reporters say one-fourth or less of the stories pitched are relevant to their audiences, according to Cision’s 2023 State of the Media Report (registration required).

PR pros are known for building relationships with journalists, while content marketers thrive in building communities around content. Merge these best practices to build desirable content that works for your target audience and the media’s audiences simultaneously.

WTOP’s Acacia James says sources who show they’re ready to share helpful, relevant content often win pitches for coverage. “In radio, we do a lot of research on who is listening to us, and we’re focused on a prototype called ‘Mike and Jen’ — normal, everyday people in Generation X … So when we get press releases and pitches, we ask, ‘How interested will Mike and Jen be in this story?’” 

3. Deliver the full content package (and make journalists’ jobs easier)

Cranking out content to their media outlet’s standards has never been tougher for journalists. Newsrooms are significantly understaffed, and anything you can do to make their lives easier will be appreciated and potentially rewarded with coverage. Content marketers are built to think about all the elements to tell the story through multiple mediums and channels.

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“Today’s content marketing pretty much provides a package to the media outlet,” says So Young Pak, director of media relations at MedStar Washington Hospital Center. “PR is doing a lot of storytelling work in advance of media publication. We (and content marketing) work together to provide the elements to go with each story — photos, subject matter experts, patients, videos, and data points, if needed.”   

At WTOP, the successful content package includes audio. “As a radio station, we are focused on high-quality sound,” Acacia James says. “Savvy sources know to record and send us voice memos, and then we pull cuts from the audio … You will naturally want to do someone a favor if they did you one — like providing helpful soundbites, audio, and newsworthy stories.”  

While production value matters to some media, you shouldn’t stress about it. “In the past decade, how we work with reporters has changed. Back in the day, if they couldn’t be there in person, they weren’t going to interview your expert,” says Jason Carlton, an accredited PR professional and manager of marketing and communications at Intermountain Health. “During COVID, we had to switch to virtual interviewing. Now, many journalists are OK with running a Teams or Zoom interview they’ve done with an expert on the news.”

BeWell’s Alex Sanchez agrees. “I’ve heard old school PR folks cringe at the idea of putting up a Zoom video instead of getting traditional video interviews. It doesn’t really matter to consumers. Focus on the story, on the timeliness, and the relevance. Consumers want authenticity, not super stylized, stiff content.”

4. Unite great minds to maximize efficiency

Everyone needs to set aside the debate about which team — PR or content marketing — gets credit for the resulting media coverage.

At MedStar Washington Hospital Center, So Young and colleagues adopt a collaborative mindset on multichannel stories. “We can get the interview and gather information for all the different pieces — blog, audio, video, press release, internal newsletter, or magazine. That way, we’re not trying to figure things out individually, and the subject matter experts only have to have that conversation once,” she says.

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Regular, cross-team meetings are essential to understand the best channels for reaching key audiences, including the media. A story that began life as a press release might reap SEO and earned media gold if it’s strategized as a blog, video, and media pitch.

“At Intermountain Health, we have individual teams for media relations, marketing, social media, and hospital communications. That setup works well because it allows us to bring in the people who are the given experts in those areas,” says Intermountain’s Jason Carlton. “Together, we decide if a story is best for the blog, a media pitch, or a mix of channels — that way, we avoid duplicating work and the risk of diluting the story’s impact.”

5. Measure what matters

Cutting through the noise to earn media mentions requires keen attention to metrics. Since content marketing and PR metrics overlap, synthesizing the data in your team meetings can save time while streamlining your storytelling efforts.

“For content marketers, using analytical tools such as GA4 can help measure the effectiveness of their content campaigns and landing pages to determine meaningful KPIs such as organic traffic, keyword rankings, lead generation, and conversion rates,” says John Martino, director of digital marketing for Visiting Angels. “PR teams can use media coverage and social interactions to assess user engagement and brand awareness. A unified and omnichannel approach can help both teams demonstrate their value in enhancing brand visibility, engagement, and overall business success.”

To track your shared goals, launch a shared dashboard that helps tell the combined “story of your stories” to internal and executive teams. Among the metrics to monitor:

  • Page views: Obviously, this queen of metrics continues to be important across PR and content marketing. Take your analysis to the next level by evaluating which niche audiences are contributing to these views to further hone your storytelling targets, including media outlets.
  • Earned media mentions: Through a media tracker service or good old Google Alerts, you can tally the echo of your content marketing and PR. Look at your site’s referral traffic report to identify media outlets that send traffic to your blog or other web pages.
  • Organic search queries: Dive into your analytics platform to surface organic search queries that lead to visitors. Build from those questions to develop stories that further resonate with your audience and your targeted media.
  • On-page actions: When visitors show up on your content, what are they doing? What do they click? Where do they go next? Building next-step pathways is your bread and butter in content marketing — and PR can use them as a natural pipeline for media to pick up more stories, angles, and quotes.

But perhaps the biggest metric to track is team satisfaction. Who on the collaborative team had the most fun writing blogs, producing videos, or calling the news stations? Lean into the natural skills and passions of your team members to distribute work properly, maximize the team output, and improve relationships with the media, your audience, and internal teams.

“It’s really trying to understand the problem to solve — the needle to move — and determining a plan that will help them achieve their goal,” Jason says. “If you don’t have those measurable objectives, you’re not going to know whether you made a difference.”

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Don’t fear the merger

Whether you deliberately work together or not, content marketing and public relations are tied together. ImpactLife’s Kirby Winn explains, “As soon as we begin to talk about (ourselves) to a reporter who doesn’t know us, they are certainly going to check out our stories.”

But consciously uniting PR and content marketing will ease the challenges you both face. Working together allows you to save time, eliminate duplicate work, and gain free time to tell more stories and drive them into impactful media placements.

Register to attend Content Marketing World in San Diego. Use the code BLOG100 to save $100. Can’t attend in person this year? Check out the Digital Pass for access to on-demand session recordings from the live event through the end of the year.

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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

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Trends in Content Localization – Moz

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Trends in Content Localization - Moz

Multinational fast food chains are one of the best-known examples of recognizing that product menus may sometimes have to change significantly to serve distinct audiences. The above video is just a short run-through of the same business selling smokehouse burgers, kofta, paneer, and rice bowls in an effort to appeal to people in a variety of places. I can’t personally judge the validity of these representations, but what I can see is that, in such cases, you don’t merely localize your content but the products on which your content is founded.

Sometimes, even the branding of businesses is different around the world; what we call Burger King in America is Hungry Jack’s in Australia, Lays potato chips here are Sabritas in Mexico, and DiGiorno frozen pizza is familiar in the US, but Canada knows it as Delissio.

Tales of product tailoring failures often become famous, likely because some of them may seem humorous from a distance, but cultural sensitivity should always be taken seriously. If a brand you are marketing is on its way to becoming a large global seller, the best insurance against reputation damage and revenue loss as a result of cultural insensitivity is to employ regional and cultural experts whose first-hand and lived experiences can steward the organization in acting with awareness and respect.

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

AI and startups? It just makes sense.

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