How to Create an Integrated Customer Experience with Lyndi Thompson @lyndit #vcbuzz

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How to Create an Integrated Customer Experience with Lyndi Thompson @lyndit #vcbuzz

The customer journey used to be much more linear and easy to understand. These days it can start on one device and continue elsewhere on a different day.

Without adopting a new marketing strategy, it is becoming next to impossible to acquire new customers.

The solution is integrating customer experience into every facet of the company’s marketing strategy.

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About Lyndi Thompson @lyndit

Lyndi Thompson @lyndit is VP of marketing at @mParticle. She is the champion of tech startups and empathic human-centered marketer.

Connect to Lyndi on LinkedIn

Questions we discussed

Q1 How did you become a digital marketer? Please share your career story!

My career journey has had many twists and turns, yet following the theme of demand gen. My first digital marketing role curiously enough started in SEO and digital advertising.

I’m a long-time PNW native, and if you didn’t know, Seattle is flourishing with an entrepreneurial spirit. I was fortunate to stumble on that community and began doing demand gen for startups in 2008.

Q2 What is integrated marketing and why is it the future of marketing?

Integrated marketing is getting a lot of attention, I remember my days at @Tableau where we first introduced the idea of a highly coordinated and thoughtful demand gen strategy. The approach changed our marketing culture by thinking audience first.

Integrated marketing as a framework helps anchor marketers to think strategically, delivering persona-specific messaging for the ideal customer profile, the right stage of their buying journey.

Why is it the future? For those of us in marketing, sales, customer success, we know that customers are overwhelmed with messages and offerings. Our job is to be their sherpa across their buying journey and their advocate.

Q3 How to (and why) integrate customer journey into your whole marketing strategy?

Start with your audience. Who are you serving? Where are they? Where do they work, play, and pray? What are their questions? Their pain? What concerns do they have about adopting your solution?

I’ve always believed that being a marketer means I’m responsible for scaling the experience someone would have with you in person, the tone, the thoughtfulness, the customer service. Even at the rapid pace of today’s eCom world, we need to make time to be thoughtful.

After everyone internally is aligned on the audience, it’s time to understand what the current journey is; mapping out the experience can be as complex or simple as where you currently are; I’m personally a fan of @MiroHQ for mapping and collaboration.

Mapping out the buyer’s journey as it stands today from one specific persona’s experience can be overwhelming, however, I’m going to bet you are going to find a lot of areas of opportunity for tagging, improved landing pages, and clearer messaging.

Once you have a foundational buyer’s journey then create a learning agenda – what do you ultimately want to learn from this experience? The answers to these questions vary, however are extremely important in better understanding relevant metrics to that audience.

Now, that we understand who, and where these folks are going, it’s time to dig into the messaging. I appreciate this framework: How can I communicate I understand the need, can meet that need, and that we’re qualified to meet those needs?

From my experience at startups @tableau@stripe and @mparticle – having an anchor asset that everyone can rally around helps determine messaging across all programs and channels.

There is no perfect world, however, once you’ve aligned on your anchor doc, core messages across the journey it’s then time to develop the media strategy.

Media planning is dependent on relevance, targeting, messaging, and experience of the team. Don’t rush the media planning to just get stuff out the door; this is where dollars are burned, and wonky metrics set the reputation of that channel.

I don’t recommend agencies for media strategy work – know where your audiences are, embed yourself in that community’s language and culture.

Now that the media plan has been crafted, it’s time to launch initial tests – learn through small tests. I recommend remarketing audiences, I really like @clearbit to help with matching audiences.

A/B test go well? Learn something? Great. Now it’s time for the true launch. Don’t be shy. This is the time to do marketing for marketing internally. Enabling everyone who is customer-facing.

Now that you’ve launched your integrated campaign, it’s time to take a look at all the DATA! Who said data? I LOVE DATA. Remember, data is to inform, not drive your next iteriation.

Iterate! Now that you’ve learned a few things, it’s time to go back and adjust the dials on your messaging, creative, channel mix and report back on the results.

Q4 How can integrated marketing be organized? There would be many teams involved, how to keep everyone working together?

Integrated marketing organization has been done in many ways; I’d recommend starting simple – a shared Google doc will work for the marketing, product marketing, sales, and customer success folks. I’ve seen spreadsheets, @trello and @Jira all work OK.

While regular meetings sound like a bore, it’s those informal convos where great ideas come up. Today, the @mparticle team dug into remarketing journeys we want to create next, we had fun talking through how not to be annoying and actually deliver value to engineers.

Do you want to hear another organizational secret? Celebrate the wins, and learnings even if they are “mistakes”. Getting the team talking, being transparent & motivated to learn more about the audience is critical to internal customer advocacy and marketing mastery.

If you have a large team, lucky you, a campaign manager as the ring leader is awesome, a dedicated subject matter expert within the company, and an exec sponsor outside the marketing org is helpful to unblock issues.

Q5 What are your favorite customer journey mapping and integrated marketing tools?

For journey mapping, I like @mirohq. For integrated marketing planning; my favorite is actually @jira (be nice to me; I’m a nerd). I love @Trello yet it’s been tough to onboard folks quickly. Easy global access options are Google docs and sheets.

Our previous digital marketing chats:

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