It’s apparent that there’s a missing vital component in the quest to modernize marketing. Today’s marketing organizations are aggressively modernizing, automating and adding more digitally centered marketing tactics as they focus on their mandate to discover prospects and create new customers. To meet the challenge, CMOs have turbocharged Marketing Ops teams and are building their “Marketing Clouds,” leveraging marketing automation to nurture prospects, adding CRM to manage pipeline and customer relationships, while spending millions on branded websites and social pages, coupled with billions on media to promote their offerings.  We are not connecting that media investment, the prospects generated, nor their data, with our marketing systems and processes. Integration between the two is a critical missing link.

The prospect marketing effort, which is predominantly driven by third-party media investments in content syndication, search and advertising, is still very fragmented and, worse, seldom measured or optimized. Disconnected and unable to adequately track and optimize media spend, marketing organizations struggle with lead velocity, mixed data quality and a lack of ability to attribute results back to the source or measure ROI. This is a tough hit for marketing executives as they realize how much money they’re actually spending on media to create prospects—$40 billion+ on digital advertising alone in 2013, according to the IAB.

Here are 3 areas of focus for CMOs and marketing pros who are out to modernize their approach in order to drive a higher return on media and technology investment should consider:

• Integrate third-party media investment and data with marketing systems and processes.  Today, engaging with the media community (publishers, affiliates and other sources) combined with the internal marketing processes necessary to get data into systems, requires numerous manual processes—hours of data scrubbing and lots of spreadsheets passed between media providers and marketing teams.  A more efficient approach is to automate by integrating the prospect and lead data garnered from media campaigns and partners directly with your marketing automation system and/or your CRM. Ensuring the data is delivered directly into your current systems eliminates numerous manual, resource-intensive tasks.
• Validate prospect information in order to inject quality, actionable data, and thereby increase lead velocity and lower media costs.  Once you decide to directly inject prospect data from your third party media sources, it becomes essential that the media-driven data you’ve paid for is validated, cleansed and formatted for your marketing systems (Eloqua, Marketo, Salesforce, Pardot, etc.). This not only ensures that you get what you paid for from your media investment, it also allows you to more rapidly get down to the business of nurturing and developing customers.
• “Close the Loop” to garner actionable insights that can be applied to optimize media campaigns and marketing programs. Today, we have the ability to gather data from every campaign we run but most of it we can’t and don’t act on.  Whether you leverage banners, email, content syndication, telemarketing, search or a combination and whether you utilize cost per acquisition, lead, sale, click or incoming call, you need to analyze marketing performance data by media channel, media source, creative, content, offers and campaigns all in one place.  Then you can more easily acquire insights that can be applied to optimize campaigns by focusing on higher performing tactics, redistributing media spend across the most successful media sources, and applying the resulting audience data to fine tune targeting parameters.

Taking action on the missing link is a necessity. If you are investing in media to generate prospects and acquire customers, be certain to connect those media programs with the rest of your marketing systems and process.

This post was written in collaboration with Integrate – learn more about Integrate at http://www.integrate.com

With constant access to a growing list of channels and devices, today’s connected customers are no longer satisfied with vanilla, one-size-fits-all experiences and offers. To stand out in the increasingly crowded and competitive marketplace, many C-level executives from the world’s most iconic brands are not content with just “Keeping Up With the Joneses.” Instead, they are actively seeking opportunities to better understand their high-value customers across every channel and device.

The reason for this is simple: These customers are more often than not brand loyalists and willing to persuade others to become regular brand purchasers if they’re kept happy and engaged consistently in every single place they are interactive with brands. But the task of keeping brands happy and engaged beyond one big “win” isn’t easy. It requires CMOs and the entire business, for that matter, to combine their internal resources with technology that’s both powerful and agile enough to boost customer engagement and revenue long term. And a brand’s success today, in this hyperconnected and digitally dependent environment we live in, depends heavily on leveraging digital to reward high-value customers. Rather than spout out a to-do list of tactics that show high-value customers they’re appreciated, here are some specific benefits instead that can be derived from deep and sophisticated forms of segmentation:

Don’t confuse high-value customers for high-volume customers.

In the less digitally savvy days, brands and their teams of analytics “experts” would navigate through Excel spreadsheets with massive amounts of data. In those days, there was sometimes confusion and lack of knowledge as to what constitutes a high-value customer. As a result, high-volume customers would often be mistakenly categorized, and subsequently treated, as high-value customers. But the reality was, and still is today, that people who interact with a brand frequently aren’t necessarily going to be the ones that have the most value from the perspective of consistent engagement, conversions and sales across multiple channels – from being inside a physical store to making a last-minute purchase on their mobile devices or shopping from their PCs. So it was common for those brands to see a huge surge in traffic for a short burst of time, but after the excitement faded, so did the engagement and ROI.

Marketers today need to adopt a more realistic and accurate definition of value that’s based on “the combination of opportunities to convert and increase potential order value, and maximizes both, while at the same time, yields your highest value customers.” But identifying the best customers online and serving them the content they need is easier said than done. The key to obtaining a 360-degree view of high-value customers means personalizing and differentiating every message by offering an array of online content to drive maximum conversion and revenue uplifts.

To get there, the modern brands of today must, and I repeat must, push beyond the basic forms of personalization – think product recommendations or ads that chase you around on the Web. Instead, these brands are likely to be best served by leveraging the power of technology, real-time data and automated segmentation to effectively profile individuals who are in actuality high-value customers. That identification is the first hurdle that brands need to overcome. From there, it’s all about extending personalization across every device and channel to delight and please consumers with the most humanly relevant, easy-to-navigate and engaging offers.

Tap into the beauty of data to boost cross-channel ROI.

The urgency to identify high-value customers online is being fueled by a number of factors. First, the online channel represents the biggest growth opportunity for most brands. According to a new Forrester Research global eCommerce report, e-commerce revenues are going to continue to grow in 2014 as customers’ online buying habits evolve. Meanwhile, a new study released by IBM in 2014 reveals that brands stand to lose $83 billion due to poor customer experiences.

When you think about it, that’s a lot of revenue that could be left on the table if brands don’t put every segment of their customers first. For example, brands are able to gather intelligence on channels shopped — including Web, tablet, mobile phone or store — and then integrate data from a CRM system, POS, DPM or other source to help augment customer profiles. By combining intelligence on shopping history, search history and Web behavior, this combined intelligence can help brands identify when to offer an in-store promotion, extend a seasonal offer or make a product recommendation. If brands are able to identify their high-value customers, then they can scale the business more efficiently and ensure that every decision and action they make is focused on delivering the right actions defined by the right data.

Discover unique attributes of unique markets.

One common challenge that today’s brands face is a tendency to make decisions based on data points as opposed to data profiles. In these instances, it’s not that uncommon for brands to use pre-existing data models to identify their buyer personas as well as the content and offers they deliver on their websites and mobile sites.

By using automated segmentation and targeting, brands should be able to detect segments unique to their brands and industries. This process turns traditional targeting on its head because buyer profiles and offers are all determined by real-time intelligence gathered against real-time customer behavior. One example of such a data profile could be a “weekend shopper” persona. Based on their digital behavior and purchase activity, these shoppers may spend significantly more money (at multiple channels) than mid-week shoppers. So it’s more than likely these shoppers would be frustrated and intolerant of being shown irrelevant and mismatched offers that would better suit mid-week shoppers. That is where many brands today realize that even with all the benefits of technology, they have made shoppers that much less tolerant and patient with poor experiences.

Move away from campaign analysis; bring it back to the customer.

One of the ways brands have traditionally gathered intelligence on customer behaviors is through basic A/B testing of different content and offers. Building on the quantifiable value of testing, many innovative brands are now shifting from campaign-driven analysis to a more holistic and accurate customer-driven analysis. By doing so, marketers can get a more robust and humanistic view of every single customer segment, as well as being able to identify which segments are performing better than others. With businesses – across all teams – being challenged to consistently demonstrate ROI, this ability to gauge the value of high-value customers and appropriately target them with the best content on the best devices at the best times and places, is especially critical to success.

Responsive design brings a variety of benefits – both for brand marketers and the consumers interacting with content across multiple devices. According to data from a December 2012 study conducted by eConsultancy, nearly 70 percent of client-side marketers described their experience level with responsive design as “average” or better, and more than half of that group described their companies as “ahead of the curve” or “state of the art” when it came to the design technique.

As advanced as some brands and in-house digital marketers may believe they are in responsive design, there are still quite a few challenges that optimization experts and digital marketers must heed. Here are some lessons CMOs can use to get strategic in their approach while driving real, impact-filled growth to the bottom line.

Rule #1: Don’t Become Complacent

Since the mobile marketplace is extremely dynamic and the mobile consumer is ever changing, don’t become complacent just because you launched a responsive-design site.  At the beginning of 2013, tablet users were already showing a higher conversion rate than desktop shoppers. Moreover, 20 percent of mobile users use it as their primary device. This means consumers are evolving more quickly than you may think, so closely monitor your analytics. In fact, companies like Gilt have seen a 100 percent increase in mobile users in a single year.

Rule #2: Always Be Refining

Continually develop and refine new design iterations that work seamlessly across multiple screen sizes and functionalities (e.g., touch, swipe). Being immersive is just as important as being intuitive. Pinch, swipe and zoom are features that smartphone and tablet users know and love. In the early days of responsive design, it was said that these were features that couldn’t be tapped into. With today’s more common blend of adaptive and responsive design, we know that this is not the case. Developers have touch-screen-specific controls at their disposal, and customization can be achieved through injection of JavaScript, for example. It’s important to strike the right balance between optimal performance (page-load time) and customization, as the two are interrelated.

Rule #3: Never Stop Testing and Learning

Always be testing and learning with your responsive-design site so that key information and functions are visible, prioritized and accessible to people regardless of what device they are using. Getting shoppers to move through the entire funnel – starting on the home page and moving to key product and landing pages all the way through the checkout process – is no easy feat. Each consumer, be it a first-time visitor or a longtime brand advocate, wants something different and unique from the checkout process. For a big-box apparel retailer, for example, free shipping can prove effective in rewarding high-value customers and cultivating loyalty among a brand’s average customers. This is where testing and learning play an integral role in pinpointing the optimal threshold for free shipping to boost online sales and grow the brand’s market share amid competitors. The data and insights delivered from a test-and-learn strategy could very well disprove brand assumptions and, in turn, generate the type of ROI brands seek such as higher average order value, as well as an increase in purchase conversions and overall revenue. 

Rule #4: Leverage All Data

Even the most basic site analytics can reveal huge potential opportunities.  Incorporating analytics early in the development of a responsive-design site is important. Set your responsive breakpoints you seek to track within your analytics solution and run a report for traffic to specific pages by device type. You’ll be able to glean a wealth of information about which areas of your site are seeing the heaviest tablet traffic, compared to areas with significant upticks in smartphone-only traffic.  You’ll also be able to see which areas produce low traffic or poor conversions. This tactic can help you optimize the customer experience to drive customer engagement, loyalty, conversions and revenue consistently for the long haul.

Back in 2001, when Google AdWords was just launched, I remember the day that my first pay-per-click (PPC) campaign yielded the first batch of leads for the company I was working for. In all, this tactic generated 42 leads, and a significant portion was even qualified. Better yet, the price was just right, ranging between 15 to 25 cents per click. It seemed like a great tool to grow our website traffic, as well as an effective means for generating unique leads. There was no doubt in my mind we were going to scale this campaign.

Since then, a lot has changed in the PPC world. Now there is a great deal more available in terms of competitive products from other search engines like Bing. You don’t just have an array of search ads; now there are native ads on Google that replicate the search experience, remarketing display ads, mobile ads, Facebook-sponsored ads, sponsored tweets via Twitter and LinkedIn ads. The CMO has fallen in love with performance-based ads like these PPC ad vehicles, mainly because they work (to some extent) and it’s easy to justify a budget for it when a return can be clearly shown to the CFO.

But like any ad, the efficacy of a single ad deteriorates over time because people become numb to repeated exposure to the ad. So the typical reaction is to change the ad around and run it again. But what happens when the efficacy of the ad network declines? The usual approach from marketers is to simply run more ads and spread them out in different places — all in the hopes that they will stick somewhere. But hope and guesswork do not make an effective strategy.

It’s amazing to me that so many enterprise-level CMOs focus on increasing their digital advertising budgets as the first option to increase online engagement. That’s only going to lead to a flawed strategy and less-than-stellar results. Why would you spend a lot of money, resources and staff hours on mobile ads if the online or mobile experience itself frustrates, irks and turns away customers?

What CMOs need to do is focus on creating seamless, easy-to-use-and-navigate, relevant and meaningful experiences for customers, regardless of their device or channel. And that doesn’t mean launching a full redesign of your website with fancy UX architecture, nor does it mean you should put all your mobile eggs into the responsive design basket. It means taking the slow and steady approach to test and tweak every single experience across the entire engagement funnel and using real-time data to power more personalized experiences that meet the individual needs, habits and behaviors of customers.

But before CMOs raise their hands in the air in praise of online testing and personalization, they need to make sure that they’re measuring the right metrics (that really matter for their business). For instance, analyze bounce rates and your average number of page views. These types of insights can tell you a story about your visitors — who they are, what they’re doing, where they’re going within your website or mobile site and what types of actions they’re taking. What if you have a high double-digit bounce rate of 30%, 40% or even 50%? This is what’s commonly known as the “show up and throw up” approach in the Web business. Most likely, you have a low single-digit page view of 1.xx or 2.xx, which is not uncommon. This is where the money is literally falling out of your budget. And that’s not something CMOs can or should take lightly.

Consider taking a piece of your PPC ad budget and instead, put it to good use by testing and optimizing your online experience. I’m not talking about search engine optimization (SEO). What I’m talking about is making every single page a funnel within a website or mobile site optimized and personalized for the actual traffic you are driving to it. For example, if Facebook is driving a certain portion of traffic to your website, are you using all of the data you have about those visitors and combining it with Facebook data to create the most intuitive, relevant and engaging on-site experience to convert “lookers” into purchasers? If a mobile ad is directing smartphone users to your mobile site, have you tested the specific page they’re landing on and optimizing it to drive higher engagement, conversions and cross-channel revenue? If your answer is no, then you have a serious problem.

The reality is that in a world where the consumer reigns supreme, there is an abundance of opportunities for brands to connect, interact with, speak to, engage and convert casual browsers into loyal brand advocates. So it’s high time brands stop running themselves ragged with PPC ads and start putting their attention toward creating a unified customer experience across every single device and channel.

In a company, the term “culture” is often defined by qualities such as an organization’s business values, overarching mission statement, operational style, working languages, technology and operating systems, personality traits and in-office habits. Basically I tend to think of a company’s culture as the delicate balance among those inexplicable qualities that make your employees do the things they do. It’s those traits that cannot always be written down on paper that often make employees and their company culture stand out amidst a crowd of “so-so” performers. And it’s often what keeps customers happy and coming back year and after.

Take, for example, a global footwear brand. This brand’s primary foothold may have been from brick-and-mortar stores around the U.S. But as consumers quickly ditch in-store shopping in favor of the speed, ease of use, convenience and massive array of product options made possible by online and mobile devices, a brand’s digital marketing culture matters, a lot. It can make all the difference in customer engagement and loyalty on one level. But most important, it can also very drastically impact actual sales figures and revenue across multiple channels. So let’s look at some of the prevailing digital “values” that could either help or hurt a brand’s bottom line.

The “other” dominates our attention. We spend our marketing dollars and resources in search of ways to “one-up” our competitors.

We see this a lot among brands. The marketplace is highly competitive these days. Consumer budgets are drastically lower, since the 2008 financial collapse. Attention spans and free time are often very limited. Consumers, in turn, demand much more from their experiences with brands, regardless of where these experiences occur and what devices they are using.

Because of these challenges, we often see brands looking to digital marketing to move the engagement and revenue needles in the right direction. But then they get stuck because their digital focus becomes all about showmanship and facing off in a tit-for-tat competition with others in their same space. What good will that approach do? Not much. It will only make your customers feel more frustrated, less appreciated and more unlikely to interact with your brand. If you can’t make every single interaction and experience customers have with your brand a positive, engaging and intuitive one—whether it’s in-store, online, mobile, social or email—you should expect to say goodbye to them relatively quickly.

We can no longer envision “big ideas” and creative marketing without the support of big data.

There once was a time when the “creative” process of branding and marketing was left solely to agencies and their teams of art directors, creative designers, copywriters and everyone else who spent a good portion of their days drawing and sketching out brand concepts and stories. On the other side of the proverbial “brand” table sat the numbers and analytics “geeks,” as they were often called. These teams would crunch numbers, run hundreds of equations, and compile long and arduous Excel^® sheets.

Well, that divisive line between creative and data is no longer existent. To be a brand that’s challenging the status quo, inspiring consumers to smile, laugh, cry and even debate what’s acceptable, as well as getting consumers to spend more time and more money with them, we have to use data to support those “big ideas.”

No two consumers will ever want an identical experience, so we continually test and learn.

A recent poll by Korn/Ferry among senior executives indicates that 53 percent of them believe their companies should allocate budget to explore new marketing channels through a “test-and-learn” approach, in order to remain competitive; but half of the respondents feel that their marketing departments do not receive enough budget to do so.

Can chief marketing officers transform the way they market by simply employing a test-and-learn philosophy? Well, yes and no. Let me explain. If a brand is simply going to try a bunch of random “tactics” without any real reason or purpose behind them, there won’t be much value in it. Just look at how many brands these days are jumping headfirst into the responsive-design game. They’re doing it because they are being told by either the C-level executive team or the board of directors that mobile is where they need to be. So they go after a quick fix and rush into responsive design without any real thought, strategy or testing behind it. That’s a big mistake.

On the other hand, the real value of a test-and-learn digital culture lies in being patient, spending the time to analyze all of the data available (CRM, online, mobile and social), and identify what’s working and what’s falling through the cracks. That allows you to formulate a very calculated and strategic hypothesis and then test against that, until you can create an experience—be it online or mobile or social—that’s as relevant, seamless, easy to use and engaging as possible.

As mobile devices continue their gains in popularity and usage worldwide, more consumers are interacting with brands at various stages of the buying life cycle—from browsing, researching and comparing products to reading reviews, sharing their experiences and making actual purchases. The digital affinity of consumers, who once were bound by a very tactile customer experience of seeing and touching products in-store, has put a lot of pressure on CMOs to become the boss of their online customer experience.

While being a CMO connotes leadership and authority, it doesn’t inherently mean brands need to be forceful or intimidating in how they speak with their online customers. What does work is a smarter and more nuanced approach to listening to their customers’ explicit actions and using those actions to become more relevant to each individual customer. Brands that get this approach see it pay off with greater respect, trust, loyalty and, of course, revenue.

So to help CMOs master their online customer experience, I have outlined five surefire rules they should follow to get customers to respect, trust and spend more dollars more often with them across multiple channels.

Rule #1: Don’t shout and bulldoze your customers into clicking and buying.

In the traditional model of sales, salespeople often acted and operated under the premise that being louder, pushier and more forceful was the way to win over, or bulldoze, consumers to get them to say “yes.” There was a notion that salespeople could wear down consumers into succumbing to their will and, as a result, get them to make a purchase.

While that approach may have resulted in a one-time sell, we would all agree that it isn’t the most effective way to generate repeat, long-term loyalty and purchases from customers. Today’s customers have almost limitless choices and options at their disposal. If they can’t find a product in-store, they can easily and quickly type, click, tap and purchase away on a number of competing online sites. If they’re strapped for time, they don’t have to wait (for hours) to get in front of their desktop/laptop computer at home. Instead, they can browse, compare and shop from thousands of product options on a brand’s mobile-optimized site directly from their iPhone, Samsung Galaxy, Apple iPad or Google Nexus tablet.

Even more than convenience, consumers aren’t as easily swayed by hyperbole, outlandish claims or dubious offers. Brute force and fear are no longer profitable strategies. It’s the brands that are authentic, humble and real that get consumers to keep their eyes (and hands) on their online and mobile sites longer and ultimately clicking through multiple areas of the site to the checkout or to request a quote.

Perhaps more important, it is almost impossible to guess at what ideas and appeals will resonate most with your buyers and entice them to buy. Lower costs? Free shipping? Sustainable materials? Thirty-day guarantees? Bigger images? Different CTA? Guess if you want. But the only way to truly know for sure what attracts your customers is to test and learn what they really want. More important, it is to use the big data from your tests to tailor what you’re saying, doing and offering across all devices. The most successful online marketers aren’t browbeating; they’re influencing by showing value. They are experimenting and exploring all the time.

Rule #2: Listen to your customers and make their lives simpler and more productive.

The reality is that customers will be more accepting and responsive to messages and offers that have real value. If there is no perceived value, they’ll click away without batting an eye. At the end of the day, consumers want the same thing from the online customer experience as they do from the products they’re buying. Simply put, it needs to solve a problem. If your customer experience isn’t solving a problem for your customers, you’ve got a big problem on your hands, and all the fancy design work you can imagine (and spend money on) won’t make any difference.

The key to rule #2 is not to guess at what problem drove the customers to your site. Instead, it is to serve up only what your customers truly want based on what you know about them as well as what they have previously asked or searched for. Recommend products that make sense for them, not for you as a brand. By listening to your customers’ needs and digital footprints, you can tell a lot about them and what types of messaging and offers are likely to resonate with them and make them more willing to spend money repeatedly across all devices with your brand.

Rule #3: Be in more than one place at a time.

Consumers don’t just look for and buy products in one place. They’re using multiple devices simultaneously throughout their day and juggling dozens of activities at once. In this “Age of the Customer,” the adage of “I can’t be in two places at one time” no longer rings true. For brands that want to get customers to experience and interact with them and their products/services consistently and repeatedly, it’s important to be in more than one place at a time and deliver a consistently great experience in all of these channels.

Rule #4: Never pistol-whip new visitors.

For your website’s home page, the easy way out is to display three, four or even five offers, rotating in sequence. On the surface, it makes sense: The more “stuff” you show, the better your chances are of finding something that a given customer may like. Better yet, it also satisfies all those internal groups that are clamoring for exposure on the website.

However, this approach is problematic because the data shows that few visitors (other than your internal teams) ever get to the end of your rotating banners on your home page. This is because there is an average of a 50 percent drop-off after each banner. Experience also shows consumers do not have the time or the patience to wait for the right offer to appear. It’s much more effective to test home page offers (to quiet those internal groups) and use that data to personalize the offer based on who is visiting your website.

Rule #5: Cement boots do not create loyalty.

In all cases, you will make more money across multiple channels from customers who return again and again. The long-term revenue opportunity lies in building trust and loyalty with visitors who keep coming back and recommend your site to their network of friends and family.

What is the best way to get customers to sign up for newsletters or emails? What should you say in your follow-up communication to customers? Should you offer exclusive products or discounts? How should you greet repeat visitors and what should you offer them? Have you tested and experimented with this content? These are all great questions brands should be asking themselves when optimizing their online presence.

There’s a reason why Amazon garners such incredible repeat business. The online giant understands which groups of consumers they are actively selling their products to and integrates those consumers’ digital history, preferences, behaviors and actions into their customer experience across all devices. If brands want to learn anything from Amazon, it should be that engagement across multiple channels is less about muscle and more about smarter marketing.

No matter where you look, brands are all trying to crack the code of having a two-way conversation with their customers wherever they are – be it in-store, online, on a smartphone, on a tablet or on social media. It’s a constant struggle for brands to make themselves be seen and heard above all the noise that’s out there, especially when their “prime” consumers have minimal attention spans and are far less forgiving of faulty, uninspired experiences with brands.

However, brand loyalty online can be much more fleeting than it is offline. Stop and think about some of the online brands that have your devoted loyalty (no matter what sins they may occasionally commit). What Google, Amazon and Facebook all have in common is that they’ve built their entire customer experience across all devices and all channels around customers’ trust and respect. For many of us (myself included), it would take a lot to sway my trust, respect and loyalty away from these three online giants.

When brands commit customer experience sins such as excessively slow page loads, page flickers, and irrelevant messages and offers, the cost can be more than just how consumers feel about and speak of your brand. It can actually decrease their likeliness to click through a brand’s website or mobile site, and lead to a willingness to go to a competitor’s site. That is what we saw in the “Mobilizing the Retail Shopping Experience” research study. One of the most important findings of the study revealed that 39 percent of consumers would leave and visit a competitor’s mobile site if their customer experience expectations were not met. Meanwhile, another 23 percent would return less often if the mobile experience were deemed poor. If that’s just the scenario on mobile retail sites, just think about all of the e-commerce sites and brands that rely on the Internet to drive traffic, click throughs, newsletter sign-ups and purchases. Here are three secrets to help brands have a two-way conversation with their customers online.

Don’t treat every customer the same.

Smart marketers realize that painting their entire web and mobile audience with the same brush is no longer a valid strategy. With so much data available about a visitor’s digital behavior and preferences, it’s unfortunate that there are still brands out there with one-size-fits-all customer experiences. Say a visitor is sitting in front of their laptop on a Sunday night and while searching Google for Prada heels, this visitor is served up an ad with multiple fashion sites with a variety of shoe options that will make this visitor swoon. When this same visitor returns to one of the fashion sites, wouldn’t it be more effective to personalize and differentiate the messages and offers she sees? That’s the power of personalization: It not only gets a first-time visitor to click on a home page and navigate through product pages to the final “buy now” purchase moment, but it also gets returning visitors to come back repeatedly for multiple purchases.

Show and tell customers why you’re better and right for them.

While consumers may have been to your site before, they are not experts in every single product that your brand makes and what differentiates those products/prices from competitors. How is it that Amazon can offer millions of products, yet it makes customers feel like it knows the certain products that they may want either by showing products to others like myself who have already purchased, or similar products typically sold alongside the items I just added to my shopping cart? It’s all about being smart and attentive to the customers’ needs and preferences.

Stop talking and listen to your customers.

In this “Age of the Digital Customer,” everything consumers like and don’t like is being tracked socially on places such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest. But for brands, the real opportunity lies in the data obtained from consumer interactions on these social media sites. By incorporating Facebook data into the entire digital experience, brands can develop richer, more relevant customer profiles and, in turn, be more personal and targeted in the messaging and offers shown to these consumers. That means the experience becomes more than just a social experience. It becomes authentic, meaningful and sustainable.

As more and more marketers are discovering, it’s impossible to think about any digital or e-commerce strategy without acknowledging the critical importance of the overall Hispanic population on today’s electronic marketplace. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, nearly 17 percent of the U.S. population identify themselves as Hispanic or Latino, comprising more than 53.4 million, or nearly one in six Americans. What’s more, the Hispanic sector is the fastest-growing ethnic segment in the U.S., accounting for more than half the growth in U.S. population between 2000 and 2010, rising from 35.3 million in 2000 to 50.5 million in 2010. By some estimates, Hispanics will outnumber all other cultural groups in the U.S. by 2050. In fact, there are more Hispanics in the U.S. than in any other country in the world, save for Mexico.

Just as brick-and-mortar retailers have recognized the growing purchasing power, shopping preferences and influence of this vigorous and fast-growing demographic, online marketers too are beginning to see the value of personalizing and customizing every customer experience to better serve their individual needs. So then I ask myself a simple but very important question: Are CMOS acting like mobile and social “agents” for Hispanic shoppers and giving them exactly what they want (i.e., online content, messaging, images, offers) in the right way on the right channels at the right times and places? It comes down to a CMO’s willingness and ability to listen to and observe what customers are doing online, what types of sites they are visiting, what types of keywords they are searching for online, their purchasing behaviors and the like. The failure to listen can have the most negative consequences on brand engagement, loyalty and most important, online and mobile sales.

Think in experiences, not channels.

According to the Terra Third Hispanic Digital Consumer Study by comScore, Hispanics have actually outpaced non-Hispanics in the adoption of smartphones, increasing from 43 percent in 2010 to 57 percent in 2012. According to the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), 46 percent of online Hispanics over the age of 18 regularly shop online, compared to just 43 percent of general market online users.

Even more interesting is that Hispanics tend to use their smartphones to research and make purchases more than non-Hispanic consumers in every category. In fact, Hispanics are highly likely to leverage social, mobile and other online resources in their buying decisions, and in fact, are even bypassing the traditional PC-online route in exchange for the convenience of “always on, always connected” smartphones and tablets. As Walgreens CMO Graham Atkinson stated so profoundly at the Forrester Customer Experience Forum East in New York City last month: “Omni-channel is an experience strategy, not a fulfillment strategy.” To put that in simple terms, customers don’t think in channels; they think about the experience as a whole. Does the mobile site look like a duplicate, yet shrunken, version of a brand’s online site? Do the images and pages on a brand’s mobile site take more than 7 seconds to load? Is the brand’s Checkout button large and easy to find? Does the home page feel cluttered and make it difficult to find and use the search bar? All of these questions need to be asked when a brand is looking to optimize their site to be as informative, relevant and easy to use on mobile devices. If it isn’t, you can bet consumers won’t think twice about visiting a competitor’s site or even clicking away forever from all of your digital channels.

To be sure, Hispanics are not a monolithic and homogenous market. The group actually embraces dozens of different nationalities, cultures and identities, including about three out of every five Hispanics who were actually born in the U.S. As a result, buying habits and patterns may vary significantly depending on their country of origin and local community.

Oddly enough, relatively few mainstream e-commerce marketers make specialized efforts to personalize and tailor their presence across multiple channels to better serve the needs of this hyper-connected and demanding market. Some major sites, such as insurer Progressive, are setting the bar high in terms of creating customer experiences that are authentic, engaging, relevant and useful for mobile buyers.

While your site may be well designed for full-screen viewing on a PC, it may be difficult and impractical to view on a smartphone or tablet. Is the navigation practical? Are the products and options presented meaningfully on a small screen? Should you parse and meter the content differently?

Depending on the nature of your site, it may pay to invest in a so-called “responsive design” that automatically adjusts to the viewing device, allowing for a coherent experience on anything from a 4-inch smartphone to tablet, to PC—or deploy a separate, specially built layout designed strictly for mobile devices.

In addition, it would be smart to thoroughly test and experiment with your mobile presentation to discover possible obstacles, sticking points and other issues that may affect the mobile users’ experience. In the constrained space of a mobile device, you may need different tactics and approaches to ensure a seamless and frictionless experience. What works on the PC may fail on a smartphone.

People don’t engage with brands; they engage with a purpose.

Earlier this year, Gustavo Razzetti, EVP and managing director of Lapiz, the Latino unit of digital agency Leo Burnett, wrote in Clickz: “Social media has become so big that sometimes we forget to approach it as part of the overall marketing strategy. Successful brands have a holistic approach rather than approaching social media as a stand-alone tactic. We know that Latinos show a higher engagement with brand pages versus non-Hispanics. But that doesn’t mean that they will follow any brand. People don’t engage with brands. People engage with a purpose. And the most successful case studies are precisely those that embrace this approach.”

Now consider the fact that the Pew Hispanic Center found that 68 percent of Latino Internet users say they regularly use Facebook, Twitter and other social media, compared to just 58 percent of all U.S. Internet users. Perhaps even more relevant for online marketers is that Hispanics are actually more likely to seek advice and opinion before making a purchase, including both face-to-face and mobile and social channels. This means brands need to take ownership of what social channels they are embracing, how they are communicating and interacting with these tech-savvy consumers, and what purpose they fulfill. Otherwise, counting the millions of likes a brand gets on Facebook is just an empty metric if brands don’t, in one way or another, drive consumers to click more, read more and essentially spend more across multiple channels—be it in-store, online or mobile.

With more advanced personalization and optimization strategies, it’s now possible for brands to modify and customize the customer experience across multiple channels—in terms of messaging, tone and content—based on where the visitor is coming from, be it Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or another referring site. The result can make for a smoother transition between social and commerce, a low-friction journey toward purchase.

Never stop testing and learning.

Depending on a brand’s particular offer and target market, including a Spanish-language path for customers, may be worth testing and refining. However, you might discover that a simple language translation of your site may not be optimal; messages and elements that perform well in English may not work as well when simply recast in Spanish. It may indeed call for separate optimization and refinement. Should your buttons, calls to action and checkout processes be tweaked and adjusted for different language or cultural sensibilities? Only real-world testing can provide definitive answers.

UPDATE:  here is a page that provides citizens with guidance on getting the most of the Census website. Enjoy!

I had a chance to sit down with Luke Hohmann, founder of Conteneo, Inc. and creator of Innovation Games® and Knowsy® to discuss how serious games are changing Sales and Marketing teams at major brands. The following is a transcript of our conversation.

PD:     Talk a little bit about what is a “serious” game.  How does that differ from just a game?

LH:      A serious game is a game that we play to solve a business problem as opposed to any other kind of game typically played for entertainment purposes.  When I’m playing Scrabble with my wife on a Saturday night, we’re just enjoying the company and the time together, and there’s nothing really serious about it. When I play a serious game, I’m trying to solve some kind of a business problem like managing a complex sale or developing a product-marketing plan.

PD:     Why are they becoming so popular?  What’s driving the popularity of some of these games?

LH:      The reason serious games are becoming so popular is because we’re learning that when people are playing games, their brain is literally in a different state. When you’re playing a game like Angry Birds, tiny amounts of dopamine are released every time you achieve the next level in the game or create a new high score. This dopamine, in turn, makes you happy and motivates you to play more – achieve the next level, reach a new high score.

We’re finding we can take some of those feelings of positivity that occur when people accomplish a goal and put them into a work context.  For example, let’s say you need to make choices on where you’re going to invest your marketing dollars across various social media challenges. This is a classic portfolio management question.

Unfortunately, traditional ROI approaches to portfolio management often leaves you feeling beat up and hollow when you’re done, because you’re trying to argue about uncertain futures using only half of your brain.

Our collaborative games-based approach to making these choices leaves you and your entire team feeling energized because in the game you can explore both ROI and non-ROI factors to selecting your social media investments. When you achieve the goal, you’re going to feel great about the result, because along the way the game will induce your brain to release some dopamine while you’re playing.

That’s similar with Knowsy in the sales context.  A traditional way that strategic sales managers determine the priorities of a buyer or get a group of stakeholders that influences the buying decision aligned is usually a sequence of painful meetings in which salespeople interrogate their prospects. Knowsy shortens the buyer alignment process by engaging buyers in a meaningful, collaborative and fun activity that results in people feeling good about the alignments that they’ve created and the paths they agreed to take. And yup, the dopamine released during the game, and the behavioral economics theory that underpins the choices in the game, all help your sales team close complex deals faster.

PD:     Let’s go into some examples of how sales teams have solved potential business problems.

LH:      One of our clients, Serena Software, makes a software application that help large companies manage the flow and upgrade of other software applications on mainframe systems.  So if you’re a bank or insurance company and you have an old mainframe system you want to update, Serena makes software that makes the upgrading process easier. Typically, Serena’s sales involve a number of influencers: the CIO, the head of application development, the head of data security, the head of operations, all of whom need to be comfortable that Serena is the right solution to not only meet their corporate IT needs but also their individual departmental  priorities. The traditional approach of a salesperson trying to make that sale is like herding cats and chasing after one-on-one meetings. The salesperson spends inordinate amount of time setting up interviews  to understand individual stakeholder’s priorities, one at a time. Of course, when the salesperson brings the group together,  he must  present a slide deck that magically shows how his solution is going to meet everyone’s number-one priority.

But if you look at the discussion in that room that ensues, it is slow and painful, because suddenly the buyers realize that while they might know their own individual priorities, they probably do not know the priorities of their peers. And they think: “We’d better talk about our shared priorities, because if we are going to purchase Serena’s solution, it will affect everyone, but individually and as a team. So we’d better figure out what our priorities are and how we want to go forward.” The most effective salespeople know that they need to skillfully facilitate that meeting so the sales process doesn’t stall or slow down due to lack of internal customers’ alignment.

What Knowsy does is it tackles that situation head on. When you’re in a complex sale, the salesperson calls his prospects and says I want to have this meeting. I want to bring in the key players into the room. And I’m going to lead you through a guided activity that will reveal your priorities and help you reach alignment as a team. When that’s done, if the priorities of the group are such that my solution can be useful, we’ll figure it out and we’ll move forward.  If it’s not, we’ll discover this soon enough as a team.. Either way, we all win because the priorities of the individual stakeholders will be revealed, and we’ll be able to see if there’s internal alignment to progress down the buying process.

PD:     Let’s go to marketing team.  Can you give us some examples of how either a corporate team or maybe even a product team might use Knowsy?

LH:      Even though Knowsy is a tool for salespeople, we’re finding that the people who are bringing our tool into their organizations are, in fact, marketing departments. The marketing team tells us two things. One, they’re never in the room with the salespeople when the salespeople are reviewing prospects’ needs and, therefore, they’re never really sure what messages are resonating, what are the important trends and what are the important priorities. The idea behind Knowsy is that by playing this game in a fun and engaging way, you’re actually feeding a real-time database that the marketing team can use.

On the flipside, the other thing that the marketing departments that we’ve been working with have told us repeatedly is that they have expertise and a point of view about their industry that they want to communicate. Many marketing departments want to establish their employees as thought leaders. So what we do in Knowsy is we take those thought leaders and we put their opinions into the platform about what a prospect might do in a certain situation.  Prospects can compare their opinions individually and/or as a team with recognized thought leaders from the company or the industry.

What that does is it lets the marketing department promote thought leadership in the most direct manner possible, which is when the buyers are most interested in hearing the opinion of an expert.

PD:     Let’s switch to big brands. Can you give us some examples of how big brands are deploying serious games?

LH:      A recent advergame that actually is doing very well is Plantville from Siemens. An advergame is a game that is an advertisement disguised as a game. In this case, Plantville is a thinly-veiled version of Farmville.  In Plantville, you’re a facilities manager inside a manufacturing plant, building your plant and operating it using the same kind of principles of building and operating your farm in FarmVille.  And by playing this simulation game, you learn about Siemens technologies that solve certain problems in plant management, and you can test your knowledge of how to be a good plant manager.

You might assume that the last thing someone who works in a plant all day would want to do is play a game where they operate and manage a plant – and you’d be wrong. What we’re finding is that some of the most-devoted users of Plantville are in fact plant managers of significant facilities who want to demonstrate through various game mechanics that they are really good at their job. Of course, in the process Siemens is getting tremendous brand goodwill and educating the players on new products and features. For example, a plant manager who has an existing set of equipment might not have an ability to explore the operating characteristics of new equipment. But in Plantville, they can try that new equipment and get a sense of what it would do or not do in a simulated environment. It’s a tremendous value to Siemens’ marketing department, of course, to deploy Plantville as a brand engagement tool that effectively reaches its target audience and communicates the features and benefits of Sieman’s products and services.

The Red Bull Wake Open in Tampa, Florida is the world’s largest Wake Boarding contest and they wanted to do something new and engaging from a guest experience perspective this year. So, after reviewing various mobile technologies they decided to partner Smartsy to incorporate Visual Recognition and User Generate Content into their branding and collateral to help make them more interactive and actionable.

The custom app was easy to use and built around Red Bull’s main priorities for the event: driving guest engagement, generating new content and building athlete awareness. To do this various functionality was incorporated that allowed users to unlock secret content from posters and wake board rider cards (think baseball cards for wake boarders!) that offered insider perspectives on the competing athletes and the event itself.

During the event the fans could also capture their own experiences and see themselves on the Jumbotron, which created a lot of good user generated content and buzz. They were also asked to vote for their favorite rider (electing who would be the official “Fan Favorite”).

In addition to that they could see content from previous Wake Opens, as well as share content over their social networks and follow their favorite riders on FB or Twitter.

Despite inclement weather at the event, held over two days in Tampa on July 5^th and 6^th, the app ended up with a lot of adoption and users provided very positive responses to the app. While Smartsy can’t disclose specific stats on the results, they can say that they experienced very strong voting numbers, sharing across social networks, content ‘liking’ and user generated content exceeded expectations, and received extremely high numbers of visual recognitions, especially on a per download basis. The feedback from both Red Bull and guests were that they loved the new experience and thought it was a really fun way for Red Bull interact with their fans.