10.
Triggers along the Journey
Meeting your brand’s audience at opportune moments along their individual journeys depends on understanding how triggers work. You’ll be using triggers to nudge consumers forward—employing both the natural triggers that occur within the context of their days and the targeted triggers that you as a marketer will create to motivate consumers in a contextual way.
In this chapter we’ll look at how to engage triggers to meet buyers early and often along the journey, to keep consumers moving forward through each stage, to transition them to become better customers, and to leverage the power of your advocates, who keep the cycle of context flowing.
Let’s begin with how to use triggers to jump into the customer journey as early as possible.
Meeting Buyers Early (and Often) along the Journey
One of the most common natural triggers in a consumer’s life, and one that’s good at starting individuals on their path in the ideation stage, is contact with trusted sources in a personal network. In the infinite era, social media makes it far easier for marketers to be a part of such moments; the tricky part is breaking through in close context so that people will find your brand experience authentic. To break through organically and trigger next steps, you need to leverage the cycle of context.
For example, “influencer marketing” is an easy way for a brand to become organically part of a consumer’s life. Influencers are individuals who promote or recommend a brand or product to their social audience, and they can often kick off or reengage a journey. Where most brands are aware of influencer marketing, too often they apply it in traditional marketing style, pushing out a new product with a highly paid celebrity endorsement. This onetime hit works more like a campaign—“one and done”—very limited era.
To become contextual, influencer marketing is best accomplished as a continuous drip spread across a number of smaller audiences, even nanoaudiences. Sapna Maheshwari, writing in the New York Times, sums up why nanoinfluencers (with followers as few as one thousand) are so effective: “Their lack of fame is one of the qualities that makes them approachable. When they recommend a shampoo or a lotion or a furniture brand on Instagram, their word seems as genuine as advice from a friend.”1
The watchmaker Daniel Wellington used small-sized influencers to turn its startup into a $100 million business. One of its target personas was the millennial buyer, who is heavily influenced by experiences on Instagram. From interviews, DW marketers derived three key topics to cover: fashion, travel, and lifestyle. They knew that by meeting their audience in the context of influencers posting about these topics, people might get the idea that they would like a sleek, stylish watch. The watch was never the focus of the Instagram photo, so the influencers could stay true to their own focus on fashion or travel.
Daniel Wellington is a good example of a company that follows the context framework, delving deeply into being purposeful (element #5) by fostering coaction with customers. After influencers post images to their channels, the brand reposts some of the images on its own Instagram account, and with each post the cycle of context compounds for greater effect. Such a targeted trigger is just one example of how identifying the key moments from your interviews—and working to continually be part of them—can drive growth for your brand for many years. That’s how, in 2017—six years after its launch—the watchmaker grew its audience by another 31 percent, year over year, resulting in four million active and engaged fans: an Instagram audience almost four times bigger than Tag Heuer’s and Fossil’s audiences combined.
Triggers also work well for entering the customer journey when a high-consideration, risky purchase is on the table, such as business software. HubSpot, for example, has mastered the use of natural and targeted triggers at the early stages of its customers’ journeys. To make sure potential customers find the company, it publishes content to its blog so it appears in search results, answering people’s questions in the moment. Very few of the articles talk about the company or its products. The majority focus on a wide range of other questions the company knows its audience is asking. Each piece of content answering a question and guiding them on to the next, triggering the journey to continue.
Those triggers do more than just bring people to the company blog; they drive demand. HubSpot found a very high correlation between blog readership and purchasing, which is why it put such a heavy focus on its blogs and content. The company uses its content to ensure HubSpot arises organically in those moments along the customers’ journey, but it also works to take that experience further, with the use of targeted triggers. Before deploying a targeted execution, HubSpot first seeks permission by asking you to subscribe to the blog. It then uses that subscription to trigger a deeper connection to the brand. In the words of Anum Hussain, a former HubSpot growth marketer behind that effort, “Our goal isn’t to shove content into inboxes; it is to provide something worth reading.” If the company can get you to desire its content, or at least think it’s great, then your odds of reading the blog increase, as do the odds of you then becoming a customer. The result for HubSpot? The blog is the source for one out of every five purchases of the company’s product.2
To showcase that value, HubSpot uses a very specific technique to transition new subscribers, called “onboarding.” I’ll dive deeper into the onboarding tactic later in the chapter, but for now notice how HubSpot uses a simple series of emails as targeted triggers to not only reengage consumers in the HubSpot journey but also foster desire for the products and motivation to read future posts. Usually when a brand gets a new subscriber, the consumer is treated the same as current subscribers. The consumer is added to the list of subscribers, and the next blog post published is sent directly to his or her inbox.
But is your next blog post your best post? Odds are it isn’t, not even close. So rather than starting off the relationship with subpar content, HubSpot jump-starts it by featuring its best. Each new subscriber is taken on a personal onboarding journey via email, where he or she is introduced to the top-three-performing blog posts first, only after which is the individual placed on the regular cadence to receive the newest blog content. Those onboarding emails have created twice as much engagement as other emails that HubSpot has sent. Such triggers bring the subscribers back to the site while increasing their desire and trust in the brand’s content.
HubSpot has used this model to grow rapidly and consistently. Today it creates more than fifty good pieces of content per week to publish across various channels, ensuring HubSpot is there for consumers in those important moments during that initial ideation stage of the journey.3 By being early in the journey and building strong trust, the company helps shape the ideas and journeys of its subscribers. As Hussain said, HubSpot isn’t focused on just creating content but rather creating value, and it does. This method is so effective at driving downstream purchases that the company has given up exhibiting at trade shows to reallocate more resources to support it.4
How to Keep the Customer Moving Forward
Once you’ve met your potential customers in the ideation stage, you can use triggers to keep them moving ahead through the next four stages of the journey: awareness, consideration, purchase, and customer. Let’s look at each in turn.
Motivating Buyers in the Awareness Stage
Awareness kicks off a more active stage, distinguished by questions your buyers use to better refine their needs and determine solutions or methods for reaching their goals. Thus your need to account for the sequence of questions (batches) asked (which you should have assembled from your interviews)—in the channel where they are asking them. Answering those questions is how we trigger next steps. That’s not a new idea, yet brands often fall short in accounting for the number and batches in their buyers’ journeys. The more questions you’re prepared to answer with your content and human-to-human contact, the greater trust your brand will build and better positioned it will be as the preferred solution.
Your interviews about the awareness stage reveal a wide range of questions, far past your product or category keywords. For example, when Pardot (now a Salesforce company) was first selling marketing automation, it was a new category of technology; so many people who needed it weren’t even aware of the term for it. In fact, progressive consumers who began their journey searching for “marketing automation” were probably already in the consideration stage, having become aware of the solution. At the time, email tools were the closest thing to marketing automation, and we knew from our interviews that our core audience was searching for “email best practices” not because they wanted to buy a new tool but because their goal was to be more effective marketers. To meet them in context, we answered their questions about new email marketing best practices, with one of the best practices being how email marketing can be automated and drive much higher results. You’ll find this is still the case: 50 percent of the top answers for the search “email best practices” come from marketing automation vendors. That’s a strong natural trigger.
Other triggers found during these batches include social question-and-answer sites, such as Reddit and Quora. You can learn about opportunities there and on other social media sites by engaging in social listening, a powerful way to meet individuals when they are talking about you or related topics. The Salesforce 2016 State of Marketing report found high-performing marketing organizations to be 8.8 times more likely to use social listening programs than underperformers.5 They know where to listen, what to listen for, and how to respond.
Answers to your interview/consumer research questions about what the buyer is “doing” (see chapter 9) will point you to the channels where people are asking questions or engaging in conversations that you should be joining. Social listening happens in a few ways, many of them automated (more on this in the next chapter). Some social channels have “walled gardens,” meaning you need to join a relevant community and use notification tools to “listen.” LinkedIn is a key example for enterprise questions, as Nextdoor is for local purchases. You must be listening on those channels and respond when notified of a conversation.
Open social networks, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, allow for large-scale searches, so you can listen for any keywords across the entire network and apply a wide range of filters, such as geography or #hashtag, to make sure you listen to a more targeted audience.
When you answer a question in any channel, do not refer directly to your product. And it is always better if the response comes from an individual, one of your staff or a brand advocate, human-to-human. Answers from your brand’s account will seem inherently biased and won’t be trusted as much. You can set up alerts when your people need to respond (again, more about this in the next chapter). The program(s) can listen, identifying those moments so you can target a reply to the individual driving him or her forward. Again, a combination of consistency by constantly listening to the natural triggers and responding in context wins the day.
Note that when your staff or advocates respond to questions, they should focus only on the immediate question and the next step in the buyer’s journey, not the sale. This is how motivation is fostered—not by trying to sell but rather by harnessing the existing action to guide the consumer forward. That’s how you create value for the consumer, breaking through and building trust. The less people know about the product or solution they need, the more anxiety they’ll have at this stage, and the less trust they will have in the answers they encounter. Creating articles with titles like “5 Things to Know” that aim to clarify issues surrounding your product or service can go a long way toward easing the kind of anxiety consumers experience during this stage. Here, too, the writer may mention your brand or be affiliated with it, but not promote it directly. If you answer questions fully and often, in a number of channels used by your buyer personas, you will build awareness of your brand in a contextual way.
Creating Triggers in the Consideration Stage
In the consideration stage, individuals in your audience become prospects who are developing a shortlist of vendors. They are going to purchase; the question now is finding the best fit for their needs. Based on your consumer interviews, you’ll see that you have a whole new batch of questions to answer. Again, you must meet your prospects where they’re looking—and enlist the sales department only when prospects request a conversation.
Questions buyers ask at this stage are focused on products and customer experience, and your answers must be detailed enough to satisfy discerning buyers. Whether your product is high-consideration or low-consideration, there are two triggers that I recommend you employ as soon as possible: (1) reviews and (2) product or service trials. People want to hear from others who have experienced your product or service, or better yet, they want to try it for themselves.
To get reviews, you must ask for them. The main problem is that everyone is asking, and reviews require quite a commitment from your customers: they have to navigate the review channel, such as Yelp or TripAdvisor, which often requires that they set up a profile, then they must write their review. Knowing this, you must offer ways to make it easier for them—and it never hurts to add an incentive, such as a 20 percent off promo code or free glass of champagne on their next visit to your establishment.
Backcountry, the outdoor outfitter, could use its Gearhead program (described in an earlier chapter) to personally reach out to customers about posting reviews. It could provide customers with a link that takes them to the exact page on the website where they want the review posted.
A human-to-human conversation, or note, before the customer writes the review is worth the investment here, because someone within your organization can inform the customer about issues related to the product being reviewed. If people are concerned about a product shrinking after washing, for example, your staff member could direct the reviewer to address that. They can also encourage customers to simply tell their story using as many details as possible. When you are triggering your customers to write a review, such information will help guide them, as will including in your email examples of great reviews.
Once the customer has left a review, someone should reach back out and say thank you. This should be done in a very personal way, but not online or as a response to their review. A study by Cornell University in 2016 found that when brands engaged with the majority of their positive reviews on a review site (even with simple responses like “glad you had a good time”), they actually created a negative effect on total revenue.6
Product trials are another significant trigger you can use in the consideration stage. If your service is online and lends itself to a trial program, you should be allowing such trials if you don’t already. But even consumer goods can be given a try with the help of technology. Retail brands including Asics have adopted True Fit, a software allowing people to type in what size they wear in their favorite brands and then True Fit matches the fit or size of the online product based on that data. For example, if your favorite shoes are New Balance 910 in size 9.5, True Fit can tell you exactly what shoe size to buy in another brand to get the same fit. Virtual reality is also making it possible for brands such as Sephora to release a VR makeup app to help its buyers make better purchasing decisions by seeing what they would look like wearing the makeup or lip color in real time.
Each of these tools also has the ability to provide data, and thus become a platform for additional targeted triggers. The Sephora app, for example, can keep track of the products used and instantly spawn offers for those products in-app, or pass off the data to use in other channels (for example, the website). So when consumers return to the app, they are offered those products they spent the most time with (assuming they didn’t already purchase), along with an incentive. Sephora can also send a triggered experience via the app, such as offering a full makeover in-store with the products and including a call to action in the form of picking a date and time. This triggers customers to move to the next step in the journey: getting the product in their hands.
Triggers in the Purchase Stage
In the purchase stage, each buyer persona will buy differently after varying levels of consideration. Knowing how and why your personas buy is very important, and your interviews will point you in the right direction. In general there is still some anxiety at this stage, which can be assuaged by a salesperson—human or not—as long as they are completely knowledgeable. That’s why it is an excellent idea to share with your company’s sales leadership the questions you discover during your interviews: your sales associates must be empowered to answer the common questions instantly, with easy access to any information they don’t know off the top of their heads.
In 2018, a report looking at 6,000 consumers and their retail habits found that 73 percent of consumers had visited a retail store within the past week,7 noting that knowledgeable sales associates were among the most helpful factors in the consumers making their final purchase decision. Brands such as Design Within Reach (DWR) provide sales associates with iPads equipped with software that allows them to answer any question consumers pose—about materials, options, availability, and even delivery date. Very soon I expect this information will be made accessible to customers online, so they can ask Alexa, “Where can I find a Mies van de Rohe chair within 50 miles?” This will give a heavy advantage to those brands that can answer these questions by making their inventory easily accessible and searchable in real time.
Where natural triggers ensure you are found, targeted triggers can bring your potential buyers back and get them to take action. Lego created a targeted trigger on Facebook, with the goal to reengage website visitors who had not bought a product. The trigger was a highly automated effort deployed only to those web visitors who hadn’t been back to the website in thirty days, and who hadn’t purchased anything in the past fourteen. The trigger was deployed via an ad on Facebook, enticing the individual to engage with Ralph the Lego Giftbot.
As I mentioned earlier in the book, ads do have a place and time, and this is a great example. The ad wasn’t used to place product back in people’s faces; rather, it was used to help them accomplish their goal: finding the perfect gift. The bot was a conversational interface and through dialogue the bot understood their needs, suggested products, and even ordered those products for them—all in Facebook Messenger. The trigger drove 25 percent of all online sales in 2017. But remember, we’re talking here about just the tail end of a journey when a brand helped consumers accomplish the final task.
Another significant part of the purchase stage is configuring the purchase and determining final details like delivery. Recall the IKEA example from earlier in the book. Its addition of TaskRabbit allowed Ikea to assist with consumer goals for easy delivery and assembly in the same moment as the purchase. The final bit of motivation to get someone to purchase usually requires a targeted trigger (such as the TaskRabbit option) to help ease the transition. The desire is there, but we can remove any obstacles to the final step taking place. Identifying those obstacles comes from your consumer interviews (see chapter 9), leaving it up to you to solve them.
For complex purchases where you need to involve the sales department, you can pinpoint the specific obstacle by the standard process of objection identification. For example, a good salesperson will simply ask, “What is keeping you from moving forward?” Once the salesperson knows those answers, he or she can work to solve for them. If you have a sales team in place, those obstacles are already being identified and overcome. However, you should ensure you’re aware of them too so you can begin to lay the groundwork earlier in the journey. By addressing obstacles to purchase earlier on, you can use your content to teach consumers an alternative option, or better yet, take them down a different path where the obstacle doesn’t exist; or even better, when they reach the end the obstacle has been flipped and becomes a feature. For example, a product competing in a marketplace where it may lack more advanced features, often requiring extensive set up, could use early stage content to set the buyers requirements and make “ease of use” a key feature they should look for in a solution.
Using Targeted Triggers to Transition Buyers into Customers
Once you have a new buyer, triggers can help your brand create better experiences for the individual in many ways, thus increasing purchases and extending the lifetime value of that purchaser. As buyers transition to becoming customers, you will have a new goal: helping them get the full value of your product, tool, or service. Your interviews will have pointed you to the specific goals of your buyer personas. For example, the customer may be seeking self-esteem, better business outcomes, or better ways to perform a task. You can craft triggers to help customers accomplish almost any chosen goal(s).
Recall that HubSpot used the powerful trigger technique of onboarding to transition readers into subscribers by sending emails focused directly at the individual customer. So now we face another transition period: to move the buyer to becoming a customer, the onboarding trigger might come in the form of a chatbot greeting them on their next log-in, or perhaps a series of emails spanning their first tender weeks as a customer.
The goal of the onboarding at this point is to trigger individuals to take the steps that your best customers take, such as asking for help, getting it, and taking first steps. Essentially, you’ll want to remove barriers between customers and the value they seek. Onboarding campaigns work because they drive revenue across the customer life cycle. In a discussion of onboarding with Nicholas Holmes, former industry manager at Google and current marketing director at Nickelled (onboarding specialist), he shared the following example, which mathematically shows how effective such triggers are at driving motivation and much higher profits.
Starting with the assumption that your business has 1,000 users, let’s say that every year 5 percent of your existing customers churn, or quit using your service or product. In addition to your existing customers, there is a 50 percent new customer churn rate, meaning, of the customers who sign up today, only half will stay for more than a month. And for easy math, let’s say you’re adding 100 new users monthly. You are losing half of those 100 users every month because of problems with their onboarding, meaning they’re not finding the value from your brand that they feel they should be. To recap: in terms of our total churn, 5 percent of it is happening among existing users (1,000 × .05 = 50), and 50 percent is happening among new users (100 × .5 = 50), so overall churn is 100 users per month, 10 percent of the total customer base. The number of users lost over one year (by month) would look something like figure 10-1.
Holmes points out if you do the math in this scenario, you will find that the business is stagnant; 1,200 users have signed up, but you’ve lost exactly that amount due to churn. This is a very common situation for many businesses, as month-one churn rates are often surprisingly high for software-as-a-service businesses but are often masked as “trials” or “pre-sales accounts” and excluded from calculations. They shouldn’t be.
Customer churn over one year
Source: Nicholas Holmes, “How to Quantify the Impact of User Onboarding on Churn and LTV,” Nickelled, September 9, 2016, https://www.nickelled.com/blog/how-to-quantify-the-impact-of-user-onboarding-on-churn-and-customer-ltv/. Used with permission of Nicholas Holmes.
Now, assume your company deploys an onboarding tactic to improve the user experience and increase retention, changing these numbers. If we can bring 70 percent of users back in the first month rather than 50 percent, we’ll assume that brings down the new customer churn from 50 percent to 30 percent. And the growth now looks very different.
In total, the business has grown revenues by 18 percent rather than stagnating (see figure 10-2). Now with a decreased churn rate of 7 percent, customers will stay for an average of fourteen months instead of ten months before they churn. So the lifetime customer value has instantly increased, and the bottom line of the business is dramatically affected via marketing’s involvement with adoption of the product, not just connecting people to it. In a Harvard Business Review article published in the early 2000s, Frederick F. Reichheld and Phil Schefter agreed with that type of growth strategy: they found that increasing customer retention rates by 5 percent increases profits by 25 to 95 percent. The reason high performers are using this trigger is clear.8
Reduced churn drives business growth
Source: Nicholas Holmes, “How to Quantify the Impact of User Onboarding on Churn and LTV,” Nickelled, September 9, 2016, https://www.nickelled.com/blog/how-to-quantify-the-impact-of-user-onboarding-on-churn-and-customer-ltv/. Used with permission of Nicholas Holmes.
In the 2016 State of Marketing study, we found high-performing marketing organizations to be ten times more likely to use onboarding programs than their underperforming counterparts.9 Helping people know what to do, when to do it, and how to do it greatly increases the use of the brand and creates a personalized experience for the user. Such triggers are highly effective at increasing adoption and growing revenue in a new way.
Onboarding is a tactical way to help people find value faster, and clearly it has a major impact on the growth of a brand. Beyond onboarding, the customer journey continues along many other points—moments when your customers are going to get stuck, need support, and ask more questions. We’ve covered the organic need to answer questions to drive demand, and the same holds true for driving a better customer experience throughout the journey. Brands must include the user/product experience as a part of their purview, triggering experiences along the way that help customers achieve their goal in the moment. Providing a better customer experience not only increases lifetime value; it also moves customers one step closer to advocacy.
Starting Small and Growing with Confidence
Because the important work of meeting consumers at the right place and time during their journeys can be complex, smaller businesses might shy away from such tactics (like using triggers) in favor of more traditional strategies. But there are ways businesses of any size can join the context marketing revolution that don’t require massive changes.
First identify some simple moments. If you don’t have the time or resources to conduct full-scale customer interviews and map out a customer journey, you still likely know some basic places you should be. For local businesses, geographical searches are obvious. Consumers searching “food near me” or “car repair near me” are likely to be significant natural triggers for any local businesses, and they are only growing stronger by the day. Work to make sure your brand is there, able to guide next steps. You can easily do this by optimizing your existing website, keywords, and content for that moment so you can leverage it to its fullest.
For many brands this will simply mean owning your social business profiles. This will allow you to manage the basic information about your business, including days and times you are open and your reviews, and augment it with images and coupons. All channels—Yelp, Google, Bing—allow business owners to create a business listing where they can manage the basic information and upload coupons, post news events, and even announce calls to action for booking, buying, ordering, and creating a reservation. By combining these calls to action, you’re creating a natural trigger, making it is easy for people to take the next step in their journey.
Beyond being found, you also need to be an active part of your community. This is easily done with social media. If you are a local business, make sure you join the local community groups and that you’re consistently engaging in relevant topics. These hyperlocal groups, such as neighborhood groups, often have a significant influence over their population.
For brands that aren’t local, you still need to create and foster community and even work with their audiences to build your products. The small, independent clothing line Seamly.co works with its audience to design its clothes. The company does this across multiple channels, including its website and social media channels, mostly Instagram.
For brands just starting up, you must become a member of the community you plan to sell to, long before you start the business. Engage the community, find out what it wants in a neighbor and in a product, and build relationships with its members. Become a vibrant part of the community, and it will want to buy from you.
Extending the value of each customer along his or her journey is also easily done for small businesses, and where local businesses can have an advantage. A personal relationship is a massive driver for repeat purchases, and local businesses can easily build those deep personal relationships. The owners of small businesses tend to be passionate and purpose driven. You don’t open a skate shop unless you are passionate about skating, and the same holds true for flowers, hair, and food. Make sure you get to know each person, adding personal touches along the person’s journey and sharing your joy with him or her. Handwritten notes telling the person about the product and how it was made or just saying thank you go a long way. These notes can be written in advance and simply added to any order.
After the purchase, a note can be sent as well, even digitally—just a simple and personal check-in to see how things are going. Have they had a chance to use the product? Do they need to make a return? These are simple things you can ask. The goal of the follow-up isn’t to sell them more, but rather to show you care and are focused on their needs. Such total experiences can also be automated very inexpensively, because most modern marketing software allows you to send triggered and timed communication.
Finally, use advocates to ensure a continuation of the experience. For small businesses, reviews are a powerful driver, and you should ask customers who have great experiences to leave a review. When and how you do that is up to you, but you must ask. Additionally, being a member of your community and creating advocates can be easily done via social media too. My local bike shop takes a picture of each new bike and owner and posts to its social media account. Again, this is such a powerful action because the person buying the product wants to become that thing. You buy a bike because you want to be a cyclist. The validation from a bike shop showcasing you is then validation for this desire, creating a deeper brand relationship through context.
Context-based marketing may seem complex and large, and it can be for those brands that have large and complex scenarios. It can also be made very simple for brands with simple scenarios, such as a local business, by doing three simple things. First, focus on the main aspects of identifying key points along your customers’ journey, making sure you are in them and leveraging them. Second, work with your audience either by being an active part of your community or by finding ways to cocreate your products with them, or better yet, both. Finally, focus on creating a great customer experience at every step and turning customers into advocates, keeping the cycle turning. The more of these elements a business can incorporate, the more reliable and sustainable the business will become.
While thus far we’ve focused mostly on how to scale up strategies such as using triggers, note that all these ideas can also be scaled down to businesses of any size. See the sidebar “Starting Small and Growing with Confidence.”
Leveraging the Power of Your Advocates
Word of mouth is perhaps the most trusted form of marketing. In the infinite era, advocacy marketing unleashes opinions and shared experiences that might otherwise sit silent. It also marks the new ultimate goal for context marketers, because the customer journey no longer ends with the purchase.
Brand advocates come in two forms: customers and fans. Both are valuable, and both are needed. The key to creating both is to discover places where people have a passion for what your brand is doing, and leverage those individuals to keep the contextual cycle turning. That passion might result from how your brand has expressed its purpose, the specific features of your product, or the transformation your experience helps them achieve. (See chapter 8, which covers the context framework element purposeful.) Note that advocacy can happen before or after purchase. I’ve put it last in the new customer journey, but by no means is it limited to postpurchase. Any member of your audience can join your contextual marketing river in the advocacy stage.
Once again, the watchmaker Daniel Wellington offers a great example. Already killing it in the awareness stage with its outstanding and consistent approach, DW also represents best-of-breed in advocacy. To turn its ever-growing audience into advocates, DW awards one person each day with the #DWPickoftheDay (see figure 10-3).
With such an enthusiastic, active audience, it wasn’t difficult to trigger followers of DW to become advocates. The company just needed to ask. It asked their fans to begin posting their own images in hopes of being chosen. Entering the daily contest is easy: anyone with a DW watch can take an artistic picture of it (not unlike the influencers do) and tag it with #DanielWellington. Thus DW’s ability to foster and leverage advocacy has been off-the-charts successful: over the past six years, fans and influencers combined have posted more than 1.9 million posts featuring the hashtag. Given that the brand posts slightly fewer than two posts per day, on average, that means 99.9 percent of all hashtags featuring the DW brand have come from its paid and unpaid advocates. That’s how advocacy contributes to a constantly flowing effort.
Brands can use many kinds of targeted triggers to create new advocates, and then engage them to keep the cycle flowing. To create new advocates, use a trigger to ask your best customers, in real time, to take an action on your behalf—such as leaving a review—or prompt them to join your community. If you have a digital product, the trigger might pop up as a chatbot, notification, or different offer. If your solution is offline you might trigger people via email, personal outreach, or text.
Source: Danielle Wellington Instagram feed.
The key to using targeted triggers is timing. But how do you determine that timing? It depends on the value the customer-advocate seeks, and since the individual is already a customer, this should be pretty obvious. If you’re a roofer and your customer is gushing about how happy he is with your work and how well you cleaned up after the job, pull out your tablet and open it directly to the place you want the person to leave a review. Ask if he’d like to make his excitement public for others to find. If your solution is more complex, you might take a different approach.
If your brand has a tool or solution where you can track individual performance, learn to use this as the data to trigger an action. Reporting features can help. For example, you see that some of your customers are getting amazing results with your product, so you reach out and ask them to write a blog post on how they’re achieving those results. In the same vein, the next time that customers who are heavy users of your tool log in, congratulate them on their use and invite them to join the community or leave a review.
In every stage of the customer journey, context marketing demands that we rethink execution. We no longer fill a funnel with leads. Our job is to engender a deep understanding of our audience and use triggers to meet them along their journey and break through in context to usher individuals from one moment to the next. This is how we motivate the modern buyer and build modern brands—guiding them from step to step along their journey—regardless of the size or market. Along with rethinking what marketing looks like along the journey, we must rethink how we scale a continuous flow of experiences.
As we’ll see in the next chapter, contextual marketers must learn to leverage complex systems of data, technology, and automated programs to move beyond executing campaigns to engineering flowing rivers of demand.