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3 Ways To Build A Consistent, Polished And Engaging Brand Voice

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By Rhett Power

Excuse the clichéd thinking, but a brand’s voice is the cover of its book. Any turn of phrase you’ve heard about first impressions applies to brand voice because it’s a consumer’s initial interaction with you. Voice is the hallmark of the brand-buyer relationship—as with any connection, it needs to be consistent.

The slogans used, the tone evoked, and the sentiment left with customers must be similar across the board. Consumers find it comforting to interact with their preferred brands on any channel—in stores or online—and know that the messaging won’t change. A consistent brand presentation is so valuable and appreciated by customers that it can spark a 33% uptick in revenue, according to a Lucidpress study.

A clear and focused brand message positions companies to rise above their competitors and appeal to potential investors, customers, and employees. Entrepreneurs who want to craft a cohesive and consistent brand voice from the outset can follow these three steps:

1. Look to your audience. Modern customers aren’t shy about sharing their opinions. They’ll tell you what works, they’ll certainly share what doesn’t work, and they’ll offer those insights in comments sections, on social platforms, or via product reviews.

Feedback loops are now continuous, so why not apply that to every facet of your brand identity, including voice? If you have different products or verticals, for instance, look at what messaging resonates with each segment.

It’s a tactic Tara Fusco, chief marketing officer of Kepler & Wilde, supports wholeheartedly.

“When building or adjusting brand voice, look to your audience for communication cues,” Fusco said. “It doesn’t matter if you’re in SaaS or some other kind of service; tailor your voice to what you’re offering, to the base you’re trying to engage, and to the kind of experience you’re trying to provide.”

A consistent voice is best when it aligns with current customer trends and needs. Look to your audience for cues on how to modify your tone and continue to engage your target base.

2. Keep stakeholders and employees n the know. If voice is the first interaction customers have with your brand, employees are the carriers. By that logic, it’s vital that everyone in the company—from top to bottom—buys into the brand’s messaging and conveys it correctly.

Yes, the brand’s messaging should ring true in all marketing material and every piece of product packaging. Still, it also needs to bleed into how employees and leaders speak about the company. Apply that tone to how the company reaches out internally to personnel and externally to customers or even potential employees.

For example, FedEx makes each of its employees take “The Purple Promise,” an oath that guarantees a top-flight experience for customers and frontline employees. In the words of FedEx CEO Fred Smith, the promise prepares everyone to “sell trust,” something that resonates with customers who want to see their private information protected and their precious belongings delivered safely.

Getting buy-in from stakeholders to attach this voice to their professional correspondence can further entrench the brand voice. Then, it becomes a more defined trademark of the brand’s overall presentation.

3. Humanize that voice via social. The reach of social media makes brands available to their customers at a moment’s notice. While that might seem daunting and overwhelming, it presents companies with an excellent opportunity to use social media as an approachable and relatable marketing arm.

On a Twitter or Instagram feed, brand voice can permeate every interaction, every hashtag, and every back-and-forth touchpoint with customers. Social almost serves as another kind of call center where brands can hear customer feedback and present the brand in a helpful and friendly light. Just look at Wendy’s. The fast-food eatery regularly uses its uniquely crafted social platform and voice to engage customers, playfully trade barbs with rival brands, and promote its menu.

Apply the same brand voice guidelines you use for website copy and in-person interactions to your social strategy. See these touchpoints as another way to establish customer rapport and emphasize with your audience that what they see is what they’ll get from your brand—no matter where you connect.

First impressions are hard to break. Apply this thinking to your brand voice crafting and emit a positive and consistent brand tone at every customer interaction. Get that buy-in from the start, and customers will reward your company with trust, repeat business, and continued viability.

By Rhett Power

I co-founded Wild Creations in 2007 and quickly built the startup toy company into one of the fastest-growing companies in the US. I have been a finalist for EY’s Entrepreneur of the Year twice and recognized with over 40 awards for innovative products. Recently, I was named one of the world’s top 100 business bloggers, and I am a regular contributor on entrepreneurship, management, and leadership to top business publications. I’m now the Head Coach at Power Coaching and Consulting, a rapidly growing global executive coaching and training firm in Washington, D.C. My second bestselling book, The Entrepreneurship Book of Actions, was published by McGraw-Hill and is in bookstores now.

Sourced from Forbes

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7 Tips For Team Productivity During Social Turmoil

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By John Hall

If you haven’t noticed, the United States is a nation divided. With so much tension in society today, it’s only natural that your team will experience a dip in productivity.

As a leader, you can help your team regain its mojo and focus on the positive. Taking care of your employees should be your highest priority, but keeping your business running optimally will be a welcome and needed side effect.

To help your team stay motivated, use these leadership tips to spur productivity during these days of social turmoil:

1. Organize Team Activities

Teammates can lift each other up even during the most difficult times. Americans spend more time at work than almost anywhere else, so building strong bonds can help co-workers maintain productivity even amid social discord.

Seek out opportunities for your team members to interact. Start a book club to get co-workers of all persuasions talking to—not past—each other. Dan Rather’s What Unites Us or Arthur C. Brooks’ Love Your Enemies are bridge-building choices.

If your office has some outdoor space, get a firepit and hold socially distanced cocoa breaks. Your workers will head back to their desks with rosy cheeks and a happier demeanour.

2. Offer Spontaneous Encouragement

One of a manager’s chief responsibilities is keeping their team members motivated. Always be on the lookout for employees who need a little encouragement to get through the day. At the tail end of 2020, that list of people is probably a lot longer than it was last year.

Scripted encouragement doesn’t do much good because it lacks sincerity. The encouragement you provide should be authentic, specific and spontaneous.

Beginning each morning with an office-wide “Thanks for all you do” email will sound rote. Stopping by an individual’s desk to praise the proposal they made during yesterday’s check-in will sound genuinely appreciative. Surprising employees—in a good way—will give them the boost they need to push through the rest of their day.

3. Encourage Time Off

When the world feels like it’s collapsing around them, your employees will occasionally need a break. A day or two to focus on themselves can make all the difference. Don’t just tolerate your team members taking time off; encourage it.

If you notice an employee has been nose-to-the-grindstone non-stop, ask when they plan to take some time to decompress. If you can afford it, declare a team- or companywide Refresh Day. Getting a much-needed reprieve will allow employees to clock back in re-energized and ready to hit the ground running.

4. Enable Remote Work

Many companies experimented with remote work when Covid-19 struck. Consider maintaining it as an option long after the crisis passes. Not only does working at home gives employees peace of mind, but recent research has shown that their productivity doesn’t suffer—and may even improve.

Communication is key to making remote work effective. Project management tools can ensure that all employees know which tasks they need to complete to keep work moving along. Messaging platforms can help prevent project bottlenecks by getting team members quick answers.

5. Set Small, Attainable Goals

There’s a time for BHAGS (big, hairy, audacious goals), but these days of Covid-19 stress and social unease probably aren’t it. Looking too far into the future can be stressful and cause your team’s productivity to plummet.

Instead, set smaller, short-term goals that are easier to reach. Accomplishing these goals will provide the morale boost your team needs to maintain productivity.

Perhaps your marketing team sets a goal to increase marketing-qualified leads by 50% by the end of the quarter. With all the other things on their minds, this challenge may seem overwhelming. Increasing social media exposure by X posts per day or getting X webinar sign-ups per week are more manageable objectives that can move the team toward the same end goal.

6. Promote Healthy Habits

Productive workers practice self-care. During times of social turmoil, though, your employees may find it harder to take care of themselves. Sitting in front of the TV with a plate of nachos may seem more comforting than going for that post-work run.

Do your part to promote your employees’ well-being in the workplace and after hours. Provide healthy drinks and snacks in the break room, and bring in some soul-soothing greenery. Offer discounts on home exercise equipment or online yoga courses to encourage fitness at home. When your employees are healthy and well-rested, their productivity will naturally rise.

Finally, trying to stay productive at work while simultaneously managing a mental health crisis is a recipe for disaster. If a team member is experiencing mental health issues—not uncommon during these fraught times—offer counseling. Achieving a healthier headspace will help employees better focus when they’re on the clock.

7. Celebrate the Victories

Whether it’s a small work goal or a personal achievement, take the time to acknowledge every victory. Few things are as motivating—and uniting—as celebrating a win with the entire team. Feed off each other’s energy and use the motivation to move on to your next task.

In such uncertain and fractious times, it’s important to shine a spotlight on the positive things. Use an employee engagement tool like 15Five to encourage team members to recognize their co-workers’ contributions. Hold Friday afternoon shout-out sessions to highlight the week’s wins. Get everyone involved, and they’ll support each other toward that next milestone.

Leading a team through social turmoil will never be easy. However, taking these steps can keep your team motivated to continue working through the uncertainty that surrounds them.

Feature Image Credit: Young business professionals working on business project in office. Getty

By John Hall

Follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn. Check out my website.

John Hall is the co-founder and president of Calendar, a scheduling and time management app. He’s also the strategic adviser for Relevance, a company that helps brands differentiate themselves and lead their industry online. You can book him as a keynote speaker here and you can check out his best-selling book “Top of Mind.” Sign up for Calendar here.

Sourced from Forbes

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Five Things Marketers Can Learn From Biden’s Victory

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By Dr. Augustine Fou

Early Saturday morning, November 7, 2020 – “Biden Wins!” After days of agony waiting for final ballots to be counted, the race for the President of the United States is called, by one network, then another, then another, then all of them. Cheering and people rejoicing in New York City could be heard through open windows, as people breathed a sigh of collective relief. The thunderstorm is over; a ray of sunlight broke through. And a rainbow marks the beginning of better days ahead, as we rebuild kindness and decency towards every fellow human.

Tom Denford jokingly suggested in a tweet “Super excited to learn “5 things marketers can take from Biden’s victory” on Monday morning. I could not wait till Monday, so I wrote it today. Indeed marketers could learn some things from Biden’s victory, perhaps 5, perhaps more. Here are the five that come to my mind, having been in and observed marketing for 25 years. What follows is not political commentary, but commentary on marketing.

Slow, wins.

Everyone knows Aesop’s fable of the tortoise and the hare. And “slow and steady wins the race” is a phrase repeated regularly. This is particularly true for marketing, but sadly it has been particularly forgotten in the headlong rush into digital. Too many marketers try to buy success by showing more ads to more people more often. They push their agencies to buy ever more vast quantities of digital ads, at ever lower unit prices. This has led to a prolonged deterioration of actual business outcomes and marketing efficacy, a veritable “lost decade” of digital marketing.

The headlong plunge into digital and the unchecked spending in programmatic channels led to dramatic increases in the number of ads purchased, and a concomitant increase in ad fraud. The number of humans on earth didn’t suddenly multiply many times over; and their time spent online, on social, and on mobile didn’t multiply many times over either. But the number of digital ads did multiply, reaching into unfathomable territory – half a quadrillion ads per year. The vast majority of these ads were created out of thin air by bots, not by humans visiting sites, using social media, or using mobile apps. So while marketers are spending $350 billion every year on digital ads, their business outcomes don’t reflect the spending. And the marketing efficacy is lower and lower due to more and more fraudulent activity.

You can’t buy your way to “wins” quickly. Slow and steady does indeed win out, long term.

Right, wins.

When marketers are spending so many billions of dollars in digital, someone’s going to ask if it’s worth it. So the marketers that are doing the most spending (ahem, CPG companies with too much money to spend) look for ways to justify it. The metrics they and their media agencies conveniently chose were quantity metrics like number of ad impressions purchased, the average unit price, and the number of clicks, traffic to their sites, and click through rates. But just because these metrics were easy to measure doesn’t mean they were the right metrics to use to prove marketing value.

In fact, these vanity metrics, oops “quantity metrics,” were easy to think about, because more meant better. But if the marketer didn’t know about bots and fraud, they wouldn’t know that these are also the easiest metrics for bots to fake. Bots can generate more ad impressions, and drive higher click through rates, and create more traffic to advertisers’ websites all to make the campaigns appear to be performing better than they really are. Despite drastic increases in these quantity metrics, business outcomes remained flat to down. Some business outcomes may have gone up, but the rise was entirely unrelated to digital marketing activities (more people wanted to buy toilet paper for some reason, not because of advertising). And remember when P&G cut $200 million from digital ad spending and saw no change in business outcomes?

Having the right metrics in place, and using them, means you know when you are driving real outcomes, rather than just getting “more of” various vanity metrics.

Detailed, wins.

With the right metrics and analytics in place, it “pays” to be detailed oriented and actually check the details yourself. Too often, these duties are passed off to agency partners. While some agency partners have the right-skilled analytics folks to look at the data for you, most don’t have the desire to do more work than they are paid for. Sadly, if the client (the advertiser) appears to be happy with campaign performance and doesn’t ask for more details, why make the effort and show them analytics? So advertisers must look more closely at analytics for their own campaigns.

With detailed data, they can see if campaigns are actually performing — not the clicks and traffic stuff — but actually driving incremental business outcomes. If the campaigns are not, and if there is ad fraud observed, marketers can make tweaks themselves to optimize the campaigns while they are still running. It’s much like making small course corrections with tiny movements of the steering wheel when driving down the highway. You don’t make large turns. Having detailed analytics enables you to see whether there is any fraud impacting your campaigns — common send and your gut will tell you something needs to be further investigated. And it will tell you what is working or not working so you can make the small course corrections as you go.

Detail-oriented wins out over handing off your analytics and duties to someone else.

Good, wins.

While fraudsters “clean up well” and are the slickest of the slick salesmen, ad tech companies can only dupe clients into paying for their snake oil for so long. Sooner or later, when advertisers start looking at the right data in more detail, like we said above, they will realize the snake oil didn’t “cure the cancer” as it claimed. In fact, it WAS the cancer that was draining ad budgets — directly into the fraudsters’ pockets (as opposed to showing ads or doing better digital marketing). The fraudsters make a quick buck, sometimes gobs and gobs of it, “by hook or by crook.” They can fool enough advertisers enough of the time to take money off of them. And even when the are outed, they just change the name of the company or start another company and go back to doing what they do best. Yes, this has happened, A LOT, in ad tech. And we’re not even talking about the cases where fraud detection companies shake down clients and prospects — if you don’t pay us, we’ll lower your score, mark you as fraudulent, or remove you from lists.

In the long run, extortion, crime, and even petty theft, are not sustainable ways to do business. Doing good, and doing good business, are good for the long run, not to mention you sleep better at nights, not having to worry when you will be found out. Good, doing the right thing, is often harder and definitely takes more time and effort than stealing a quick buck. But good wins.

Trust, wins.

One you get good at doing good business for your clients, you also do good business for your business. You earn trust over time; you build real bridges with your clients, so they stick with you through good times and bad. They trust you to be stewards of their ad budgets, and to invest it wisely in marketing activities that drive real business outcomes for them, not vanity metrics reported on monthly spreadsheets.

Trust wins in the long term; and this brings us full circle to the first point – slow, wins. Trust is slow to build, but can be lost in an instant. If you invest in trust with your clients and partners, the pay off is over time; it’s not a lump sum pay-out, like one of the choices on a lottery ticket. Trust wins, and slow wins more. Earn it over time by building real relationships, even if short term metrics, and profits, are not as high.

Together, Everyone wins.

And finally, today, Democracy wins and decency wins. Hope and faith have hope again. Onward and upward for the United States of America, and for all citizens of humankind.

Feature Image Credit: STRF/STAR MAX/IPx

By Dr. Augustine Fou

Follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn. Check out my website.

I am a digital marketer of 25 years. Now I help marketers audit their digital campaigns for ad fraud that isn’t caught by widely used ad verification services.

I have witnessed the entire arc of the evolution of digital marketing, since the mid-90’s. I taught classes in digital strategy at NYU’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies and Rutgers University’s Center for Management Development.

I have worked on the “client side” for American Express, and on the “agency side” as Group Chief Digital Officer of Omnicom’s Healthcare Consultancy Group and SVP Digital Strategy Lead at McCann Worldgroup/MRM Worldwide. I started my career in New York City with McKinsey & Company.

Sourced from Forbes

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Marketing Is Expensive. Is It Really Worth It?

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By Timothy Carter.

Sooner or later, most entrepreneurs have to face the reality that marketing is expensive. In the course of planning a new marketing campaign or trying to grow the business organically, you discover that to execute a strategy could cost thousands, or even tens of thousands of dollars, and to keep it going will cut into your bottom line.

Why is marketing so expensive? And is it really worth the cost?

What you’re paying for

Let’s start by explaining why marketing is so expensive. Generally, marketing costs account for things like:

  • Salaries and human labour. According to Glassdoor, the average marketing manager’s salary is $65,834 per year. Most marketing strategies require extensive planning and execution, requiring many people coordinating together. Many of these people are highly skilled and highly paid.
  • Limited resources. Some marketing campaigns depend on the use of finite resources, and at least some of these resources will be in high demand. For example, there are only so many billboards on the side of the highway; if a bidding war starts, it could drive up the price of advertising considerably.
  • Risk, failure, troubleshooting and support. Some marketers build in the cost of risk and failure; if their original efforts fail, they’ll need to double down and try again. We also need to consider costs for ongoing troubleshooting and support in addition to core marketing campaign costs.

Differences in price

It should also be obvious that different types of strategies will differ in price. Depending on your approach, marketing could end up being very cheap or ridiculously expensive, often based on variables that include:

  • Strategy choice. Some strategies are more expensive than others. TV ads are often expensive because of finite supply and high demand. By contrast, search engine optimization (SEO) is often less expensive because there are unlimited opportunities for development; that said, even SEO can be pricey under the right conditions.
  • Scale. Most marketing campaigns vary in scale; a small mom-and-pop business and a large corporation aren’t going to use the same tactics or the same number of resources. The larger your campaign is and the more people you’re trying to influence, the more you’re going to pay.
  • Freelance, in-house or agency. To execute a marketing campaign, you can do the work yourself, hire a freelancer, hire someone in-house or work with a professional agency. Each of these options has different costs, as well as different strengths and weaknesses. For example, working with a freelancer can help you save money, but it might be hard to find individuals who fit your needs, and they might not be reliable. An agency is more expensive, but it’s often worth the money because of its reliability.
  • Quality and experience. In marketing, you get what you pay for (at least most of the time). Individuals and agencies who have more experience and skill tend to charge more because of their abilities. Accordingly, in many cases, an expensive campaign is a good sign; it means you’re getting the quality work you need. Of course, there are exceptions, and it’s possible for high costs to be excessive.

The nature of ROI

One of the most important factors you’ll need to consider when budgeting for and planning your marketing campaign is your return on investment (ROI). In other words, how much value are you getting out of your campaign compared to what you’re putting into it?

In many cases, you won’t be able to concretely measure your ROI until you actually launch the campaign. However, you might be able to come up with a reasonable estimate that’s based on your past experience and the knowledge and experience of the professionals you’re working with.

Your ROI matters more than the absolute dollar amount you’re spending. For example, let’s say in campaign A, you spend $500 and generate $1,000 in revenue. But in campaign B, you spend $1,500 and generate $5,000 in revenue. Campaign B is objectively more expensive, but it also yields a much higher ROI, both proportionally and in total amount.

Because of this, you should never rule out the possibility of a campaign just because it’s expensive.

Operating with no marketing

We also need to consider the prospect of running a business without a marketing campaign. There are examples of businesses that have gotten successful without traditional marketing or advertising (including famous examples like AriZona Iced Tea). However, without marketing, you’ll be exclusively growing your business through word of mouth and reputation, which can take a long time and can be extremely unreliable. For most businesses, marketing and advertising are practically necessary for steady growth.

Is it worth it?

Is an expensive marketing campaign worth the seemingly excessive costs? The issue is far too complicated to reduce to a simple answer. However, in many cases, there are plenty of justifications for the high cost of marketing, and if you execute a reasonable campaign, you should be able to get a high ROI and more than make all your money back. Although some types of businesses can get away with little to no marketing, most companies will strongly benefit from a marketing investment — even if it looks costly on paper.

Feature Image Credit: Reggie Casagrande | Getty Images

By Timothy Carter.

CRO of SEO.co

Sourced from Entrepreneur Europe

 

 

 

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A new AI program can listen to you cough and discern whether you have the coronavirus. Researchers hope to turn it into an app.

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By Aylin Woodward

  • A recent study found that an artificial-intelligence model could tell the difference between a regular cough and a COVID-19 cough — even forced coughs from asymptomatic carriers.
  • The AI identified 98.5% of the coughs from people with coronavirus infections, asymptomatic or otherwise.
  • The researchers hope to incorporate the model into an app, as well as smart speakers and cell phones, as a real-time screening tool. 

At least one out of every five people who get the coronavirus doesn’t show symptoms and can unknowingly spread the virus to others. Those who don’t feel sick and aren’t notified of exposure can’t know that they should get tested.

But researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology may have found a way to identify these silent coronavirus carriers without a test.

A study published in September describes an artificial-intelligence model that can distinguish between the coughs of people with the coronavirus and those who are healthy. It can even tell from voluntary, forced coughs whether people were healthy or were asymptomatic carriers, based on sound variations too subtle for the human ear to discern.

The MIT model accurately detected 98.5% of people in the study who had coronavirus based on their coughs, including asymptomatic carriers. In fact, the program didn’t misdiagnose a single cough from an asymptomatic carrier.

“We think this shows that the way you produce sound changes when you have COVID, even if you’re asymptomatic,” Brian Subirana, a research scientist and coauthor of the study, said in an MIT news release.

Subirana and his colleagues suggested that their AI could be incorporated into smart speakers and cell phones.

“Pandemics could be a thing of the past if pre-screening tools are always on in the background and constantly improved,” they wrote.

‘Sentiment embedded in how you cough’

Man coughing_By Jojo Photos:Shutterstock
A man coughs into his elbow. Jojo Photos/Shutterstock

Before the pandemic, the researchers had been training AI models to detect other diseases like Alzheimer’s and pneumonia based on people’s coughs. This is possible because the way we talk and cough can reflect the strength of our vocal cords and the organs surrounding them, according to Subirana. Patients with Alzheimer’s, for example, tend to have weaker vocal cords due to neuromuscular degradation.

“Things we easily derive from fluent speech, AI can pick up simply from coughs, including things like the person’s gender, mother tongue, or even emotional state. There’s in fact sentiment embedded in how you cough,” he said.

vocal training speech therapy
A speech therapist guides a young patient through vocal training. FatCamera/Getty Images

 

So Subirana’s team applied those earlier models to COVID-19 patients.

They collected 70,000 audio samples of coughs from both healthy and infected people, and asked the latter group to report any coronavirus symptoms or lack thereof. More than 2,600 of the recordings were submitted by people who’d tested positive for COVID-19.

Then the researchers had their artificial-intelligence model listen to about 4,250 recordings, including the audio from infected people. The AI was able to build a picture of what sick and healthy coughs sound like. It identified specific patterns in coughers’ vocal cord strength, lung performance, emotions, and muscular degradation that were unique to COVID-19 patients.

Once the model was ready, Subirana’s team then had it listen to more than 1,000 coughs. It identified 100% of the coughs belonging to asymptomatic coronavirus carriers.

A tool to be used ‘before going to a classroom, a factory, or a restaurant’

school reopen coronavirus Texas
Children enter school for classes in Godley, Texas, on August 5, 2020. LM Otero/AP

Subirana’s team is working on incorporating the AI model into a free app, and also hoping to get authorization from the Food and Drug Administration for its use as a COVID-19 pre-screening tool.

Theoretically, a person could cough into their phone then immediately find out whether they may be an asymptomatic coronavirus carrier. They’d still need a test to confirm a diagnosis, though.

This kind of a pre-screening tool “could diminish the spread of the pandemic if everyone uses it before going to a classroom, a factory, or a restaurant,” Subirana said.

However, the AI can’t determine whether your cough is due to a different illness in particular, like the flu or a cold. It’s only calibrated to detect COVID-19. It also can’t say whether the fever or sore throat you have is due to COVID-19.

covid test us
People stand in line at a clinic in Long Beach, California, that offers rapid coronavirus testing for a fee, June 29, 2020. Brittany Murray/MediaNews Group/Long Beach Press-Telegram via Getty Images

 

According to Anthony Lubinsky, director of respiratory care at New York University Langone Tisch Hospital, the study results are encouraging.

But he told Live Science that “whether or not this performs well enough in a real-world setting to recommend its use as a screening tool would need further study.”

The study authors said they’ve already partnered with hospitals in the US, Mexico, and Italy to collect more cough recordings to further improve and test their model.

By Aylin Woodward

Sourced from BUSINESS INSIDER

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Question Everything You Know about Your Business Processes

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By Bruce Orcutt 

There may have been a time when an organization’s automation strategy was defined primarily by siloed, ad hoc, and task-based workflows. Now, however, the most effective and impactful initiatives require business leaders to ask bigger, more challenging questions beyond simply what tasks can be automated and the ROI on cost reduction. Here is how to question everything you know about your business processes.

Successful digital transformation in today’s landscape necessitates leaders having a better picture of how things are working interconnectedly and how users are truly operating within the process boundaries to be enhanced and improved universally to improve customer outcomes.

True digital transformation does not simply digitize analogue processes. It’s about integrating intelligence into business-critical processes across every facet of your business and engagement. As more companies realize they need to become digitally intelligent in a new era of digital-first consumers, accelerated automation adoption, and advancements in technology, organizations will benefit from adopting a more holistic approach to transforming their business.

Question the Status Quo

Questioning how things have always been done enables business leaders to find more effective ways to drive results.

Every business process within your organization contains an opportunity to improve outcomes, revitalize customer experiences, fix inefficiencies, or find new service opportunities for revenue generation. Here are three questions that business leaders need to ask to unlock opportunity and advance digital transformation initiatives that have the greatest impact.

  1. Do you really know your process workflows?

By their very nature, highly manual processes, such as inputting invoice data or new customer information, are prone to human error and oversight. In highly regulated industries, such as financial services and insurance, this can be problematic and can contribute to increased risk and decreased compliance. Likewise, in healthcare, inefficient processes can lead to negative patient outcomes.

Understand processes.

Understanding your processes and pinpointing potential vulnerabilities is a good first step to take before deploying automation initiatives. Then, leveraging the right solutions to automate important processes intelligently.

Negotiations

These processes include all such negotiations as mortgage and credit card applications, account opening, and business loan applications helps organizations minimize inefficiencies and inaccuracies, therefore helping facilitate improved internal and regulatory compliance.

Machine Learning

With advances in machine learning and predictive analytics technology, you can understand exactly which processes are ripe for transformation, not just automated, to drive real change. Process Intelligence is a form of process mining and discovery that provides granular insight into an organization’s ecosystem of processes and behaviours, enabling you to pinpoint opportunities for operational improvement.

Understanding how your processes are truly performing — down to knowing each worker’s performance – is indispensable to successfully deploy automation initiatives that deliver business results and accelerate tangible improvements.

  1. Are you accessing business-critical information?

You’d be surprised if you look close enough to how much paper (and fax) still exists in some processes. Those that are heavily paper-based can slow mission-critical workflows and negatively impact customer experience.

Likewise, valuable information is locked away in siloed systems. Various digital formats such as email correspondence, PDF, fax, and EDI can prevent you from having the right information make informed business decisions quickly.

Supercharge Growth

To supercharge growth and enhance profitability, organizations need to digitize and streamline content-heavy processes.

Digital

Digitizing, transforming, and automating customer forms, invoices, receipts, onboarding documents, application forms, claim submissions, and account documents can help lower administrative costs, reduce time to invoice and provide customers quicker service.

Data

When it comes to transformation projects, leveraging the right data and then sharing that data with key systems and stakeholders can be the difference between failure or success for meeting KPIs, service-level agreements, and other business outcomes.

  1. Are you getting the most out of your automation investment?

Optimizing and automating the right processes can significantly reduce costs and strengthen competitive advantage.

However, by themselves, automation platforms can only do so much, and in fact, many projects stall or fail. That’s because most automation platforms now employ software robots, which have a hard time understanding unstructured data and will repeat poorly designed workflows.

Intelligence Leveraging

Leveraging intelligence capabilities driven by OCR, natural language processing, and machine learning technologies can turn hard to process unstructured data into actionable information.

The knowledge gained is then ready for automation platforms such as robotic process automation (RPA), business process management (BPM), customer relationship management (CRM), and electronic resource planning (ERP).

Process intelligence capabilities can identify process bottlenecks or variances and recommend the best workflows for optimal efficiency.

Raising Your Organization’s Digital Intelligence

When organizations re-think the way they have traditionally approached digital transformation projects, they unlock opportunities to strengthen and revitalize their business.

Asking the right questions and leveraging the right technology enables organizations to transform critical operations and turn the vast amount of data into a wealth of meaningful, actionable information.

Automation isn’t the end goal but rather a vehicle for achieving better business outcomes.

By Bruce Orcutt

Bruce Orcutt is VP of Product Marketing at ABBYY, a Digital Intelligence company. He helps organizations to gain complete understanding of their business and raise their Digital IQ.

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Smart Leaders Like Elon Musk Embrace the Rule of Low Expectations. Here’s Why It Works, and When to Use It

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By Bill Murphy Jr.

When ‘Better Than Nothing’ turns out to really be something.

Feature Image Credit: Tesla CEO Elon Musk. Photo: Getty Images. Illustration: Inc. Magazine

By Bill Murphy Jr.

www.billmurphyjr.com   

@BillMurphyJr

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Levi’s Rejiggers Leadership Team for a Digital Future

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Levi Strauss & Co. (LS&Co.) is recalibrating its leadership team to better serve the heritage company’s digital and direct-to-consumer (DTC) channels. The company announced Tuesday a series of leadership and role changes, effective Nov. 1, designed to strengthen the emerging channels and enable the company to respond more quickly and effectively in the marketplace.

The two business segments are helping to offset declines in Levi’s in-store and wholesale sales. Levi’s global digital business, which includes its e-commerce sites, as well as the online business of its pure-play and traditional wholesale customers, comprised nearly a quarter of total Q3 revenues, doubling the company’s digital footprint from the prior year.

“By doubling down on the company’s key growth drivers—the continued strengthening of our greatest asset, the Levi’s brand; leading with DTC and diversifying our business; and fully embracing digital to transform our operations and processes—we are capitalizing on the opportunities created by the global pandemic, which has accelerated changes in consumer behaviour and the competitive landscape,” said Chip Bergh, LS&Co. president and CEO.

To build on the existing strength of the Levi’s brand, the company is promoting its chief marketing officer, Jen Sey, to brand president. The Levi’s brand organization will bring together marketing, design, merchandising and brand experience to drive a “centre-led vision and execute with a consumer-centric focus globally.”

Liz O’Neill will become chief operations officer and leverage LS&Co.’s global supply chain by driving digitization, sustainability and agility, including the ongoing rollout of the company’s F.L.X. technology.

Seth Ellison, previously executive vice president and president, Europe, is being promoted to chief commercial officer (CCO), leading the company’s global commercial operations. As CCO, Ellison will adapt the company’s DTC-first mindset for Europe to amplify commercial growth across all channels and markets.

Marc Rosen, executive vice president and president, Americas, is taking on an additional role leading a new Digital Enterprise Office. In this capacity, Rosen will work with technology, business, data and artificial intelligence experts across the company to set the company’s “enterprise-wide” digital plan.

The business leaders will report to Bergh. “With an industry-leading management team, LS&Co. is fortunate to have a group of leaders who have been driving long-term value and are well-positioned to drive this focus for the next chapter of our growth,” he said.

Feature Image Credit: Levi’s: Courtesy

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Online Shopping Presents a Physical Marketing Opportunity: The Package

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By Heather Fletcher

A few, focused ideas for performance marketers

Millions of marketers have the same thought their customers do about packaging: It’s a means to an end. Put the product in the package. Get the package to the customer. Mission accomplished.

But experienced performance marketers know there are so many more packaging possibilities. They can literally market outside of the box. And even in it.

Performance marketing on a package

Whether it’s a box or a bag, marketers can add URLs, QR codes, barcodes, branding and so much more. Marketers can even add brand mission URLs about subjects like recycling.

For example, on a Prime box, one of the customers bringing in the 37% year-over-year increase to $96.1 billion in net sales that Amazon saw in Q3 received a box with several barcodes used for tracking the shipment; recycling information about a non-profit with which Amazon and other brands partner, at how2recycle.info; and packaging tape with Prime branding.

The tape on this first box included calls to action to Prime’s services, including video, music and free delivery. A different package’s tape highlighted “Shop at smile.amazon.com and we’ll donate to your favourite charity” and “$183 million donated to charities so far.”

It’s in the bag

One way the UPS works with ecommerce marketers is to reveal to them that there’s more to packaging than boxes. That means there are many ecommerce marketers fulfilling orders with bags, too. And while bags tend to be plain, labels sometimes carry marketing–depending on what the mail carrier allows.

And UPS is among the carriers onboarding mail clients–especially SMB, which represented 18.7% in volume growth in Q3 vs. 10.5% in Q2. (Even as B2B business is down, not just for UPS at 7.8% year-over-year, but for many businesses, its average daily volume in the U.S. is up 13.8% year over year to 20.4 million packages a day. That’s because B2C shipments increased 33.4% year-over-year to 61% of total volume.)

While many SMBs are using UPS delivery options, others are taking a different route.

Local goes online

Maya Komerov is founder and CEO of Cinch Market, a local online marketplace for retailers in Brooklyn. As of last month, she had 50 stores on board and 50 more wanting to join. Because the National Retail Federation reports consumers want to shop local, despite increasingly going online to patronize marketplaces, entities like Cinch are in demand for Brooklyn’s speciality food, gift, toy, essential and pet food retailers.

“We keep the bags of the stores when we deliver the package to the customers,” Komerov said. “Most of the businesses have branded bags.”

This reflects a trend Adweek reported on of retailers using stores as online fulfilment centres to offset in-store losses.

Thank you cards and inserts

Among those brands going for the personal touch in package marketing are those with marketers who add thank you cards or other personal notes within the packages. Those can onboard consumers to e-newsletters for content marketing purposes or provide some other cross-channel capability to create brand loyalty during a pandemic.

Performance marketers can also add fliers, whether they’re using third-party marketplaces or their own packaging. For instance, Tervis added a warranty activation insert in its product within an Amazon package.

Transpromo

Performance marketers who want to create new sales within the packages can add predictive analytics to the invoices. Similar to Netflix and Amazon, performance marketers can tell customers what they have to offer that’s similar to what the customer already bought, or might interest them based on what they bought.

Marketing thought leaders say not to do what Shopify suggested about unloading less-desirable inventory on customers as a gift within packages. It’s not moving for a reason: customers don’t want it.

Package shipping will continue during the pandemic

The USPS is moving 708 million more shipping and package pieces vs. the same time last year. That’s a 49.9% increase.

“In the near term, the postal service anticipates that these trends will continue given the surge in e-commerce as many Americans stay home due to the Covid-19 pandemic,” according to Q3 results. Package marketing may bring a whole new bag of tricks to performance marketers looking for an edge with pandemic purchasers.

Feature Image Credit: Getty Images

By Heather Fletcher

Heather Fletcher is a freelance reporter for Adweek. She covers performance and direct marketing.

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No Coding Experience Necessary: Microsoft Offers DIY Tool To Build AI Models

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By Patrick Kulp.

The tool allows anyone to easily build an image recognition system

Microsoft wants to make it easier for anyone to build machine learning systems through the release of a newly revamped app that caters to people with little or no coding experience.

Microsoft Lobe, which is available in public preview this week, allows users to build AI-powered visual recognition systems by simply uploading sets of labelled images for training. Its current customers range from marketers looking to identify optimal images for social media ad performance to non-profits attempting to map marine resources by scanning social posts of people whale watching.

Microsoft is one of many companies rolling out tools to simplify and automate the process of coding basic machine learning systems. A lack of technical talent and daunting complexity has hampered AI adoption among some businesses. Google, IBM and Amazon have all released offerings that similarly make AI development more accessible with varying degrees of technical understanding needed.

Lobe boasts a much less technical interface than even many of these tools, however. The program can train on as few as five images (though more are better for accuracy), then automatically selects the right architecture for the data. Users can also tweak results as the model trains to improve accuracy.

“Lobe is taking what is a sophisticated and complex piece of technology and making it actively fun,” Bill Barnes, manager for Lobe, said in a blog post announcing the release. “It fills [people] with confidence that they can actually use machine learning. And when you have confidence you become more creative and start looking around and asking ‘What other stuff can I do with this?’”

In a test of the app, we were able to train a model to fairly accurately distinguish between packs of Starburst and Skittles in around 5 minutes with 15 photos of each.

But while more wide-ranging platforms like Amazon Rekognition and Microsoft’s computer vision API can identify images with more dexterity, Lobe is best for use cases specific to the needs of a particular project.

For instance, Ansira-owned automotive marketing agency Sincro uses the tool to distinguish photos of vehicles as they appear in a sales lot from generic stock images, which don’t perform as well in social ads, for local car dealerships, according to Microsoft’s announcement.

The company is planning to eventually add more options for other simple types of machine learning functions, including object detection and data classification. Microsoft acquired Lobe in 2018 and has been incubating it into its current version since then. It’s now available for download on Windows and Mac.

Feature Image Credit: Microsoft’s tool allows for anyone to build ML systems. iStock

By Patrick Kulp.

TWITTER:@patrickkulp

Email:[email protected]

Patrick Kulp is an emerging tech reporter at Adweek.

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