Healthcare content marketing requires time, effort and strong strategy — three resources that are always in demand within healthcare organizations (HCOs). Creating high-quality content that resonates with your audiences means figuring out what those audiences want and showing why your team is the best choice to help them. A messaging matrix can play a key role in that work.

At first glance, a messaging matrix is a simple-looking table that outlines key areas your healthcare messaging should address with your consumers. But look a little deeper, and you’ll see that this unassuming document has layers upon layers of complex utility for your HCO’s marketing team .

Perficient’s healthcare experts know what it takes to create an effective, successful messaging matrix for your outreach efforts. Let’s go over the components of a strong healthcare messaging matrix together, or feel free to contact us for more information.

1. A messaging matrix is the logical next step after healthcare personas and journeys

Our healthcare personas and journey maps offer a deep dive into what consumers are looking for from HCOs like yours. But all too often, we’ve seen clients take these valuable insights and stick them on the digital shelf, rather than taking the lessons they provide and putting them to use. A messaging matrix can help your team translate your consumer personas and their unique healthcare journeys into clear, discrete content touchpoints.

By identifying scenarios that map to milestones in a persona’s journey with your HCO, a messaging matrix can help you understand:

• Key moments of influence in the persona’s journey so you’re speaking to your audiences when they’re receptive to your messages
• What the persona is looking for at that moment in their journey
• How that coincides with your business priorities
• What to say to motivate the next level of action in the consumer

Your messaging matrix is one way your team can continue to create long-term, ongoing and demonstrable value from your strategy efforts.

2. A messaging matrix can help align your marketing team members

Good content strategy depends on the consistency of your messaging. You may have a fantastic content creator on your team. But if that creator is out of line with your strategy, or if the rest of your team isn’t aligned with the messaging of your high performers, then you’ll likely have problems with your consumer touchpoints.

Your content likely comes from many sources: your own team, strategic partners like us, other marketing teams within your organization, other vendors, freelancers and so on. But — and this is key — your consumers shouldn’t be able to tell these disparate players apart. Consistent messaging means you speak in one clear, distinct, on-brand voice, no matter who’s conceptualizing the message.

In addition to resources like your voice, tone and style guide and healthcare writing training for your team members, a messaging matrix can help keep your various internal and external teams aligned as they present a consistent, high-quality message at every step, no matter where they may sit or whom they’re talking to.

3. A messaging matrix can jumpstart your content creation process

I’ve written thousands of pieces of content over my career, and I can comfortably say from experience that I still get intimidated sometimes when I’m starting from a blank document on my screen. Even when given a thoughtful creative brief, the idea of reaching healthcare consumers and helping guide them to a conversion and beyond can be a lot to contend with when I don’t have much to go on.

But with a messaging matrix, you can tailor the message to meet the needs of the audience members you’re trying to reach. You can use language that will resonate with them. You can make sure to include key points that they’re searching for. By having key message points detailed, you can help ensure that campaigns carry those messages through for a consistent voice and experience, from the first outreach campaign through long-term nurture campaigns.

Plus, if you find yourself constantly creating content for a key scenario for one or more of your personas, you can update the messaging matrix to account for that scenario. Not only can that make your individual job easier, but it can also help ensure your team members handle the need the same way down the road.

4. A messaging matrix supports messaging throughout the consumer journey

Many of our clients are laser-focused on pulling healthcare consumers down the funnel to conversion — whether that’s finding care, choosing a healthcare plan or purchasing a medical device. That’s natural. Conversion is a key metric and one that’s crucial for measuring the success of marketing efforts.

But conversion isn’t the point at which your content marketing efforts should stop. In fact, it’s only about halfway through the content marketing cycle, because it’s only about halfway through the healthcare decision-making process. The remaining parts of the process consumers use to make and support healthcare decisions require continued check-ins and support at key milestones even after conversion.

Our healthcare strategy team uses the Transtheoretical Model often to inform our recommendations. As you can imagine, many HCOs focus their efforts on efforts up to the Preparation stage — the point at which the consumer is ready to do something and the organization’s marketing efforts can influence the consumer’s decision.

As we often note, however, a complete content marketing strategy often involves nurture campaigns, targeted content and other marketing materials geared toward supporting the consumer through the Action and Maintenance stages. These often aren’t rigid, and your HCO can lose consumers if they feel like they must navigate them on their own. But your messaging matrix can and should include scenarios that help the consumer feel understood and supported as they continue their journey.

A messaging matrix that considers the healthcare consumer’s entire decision-making cycle can:

• Build awareness of your organization and its services/products
• Ensure your messages include the value propositions that are most important to your audiences
• Build trust over time (whatever time it takes the consumer to be ready to convert)
• Pull consumers down the funnel toward conversion
• Build loyalty after conversion
• Foster an ongoing positive relationship with your consumers

The messaging matrix is real – and it’s essential

Our healthcare and life sciences strategy team members understand how to reach consumers with messages that resonate at every stage. And we know how to craft a messaging matrix that will fuel your team’s content marketing efforts with real results.

Contact us to learn more about the role a healthcare messaging matrix can play in your strategy and outreach.

In the healthcare and life sciences space, good content strategy and content creation are rooted in scientific principles. We base our work on key tenets of behavioral science and psychosociology. One of the most important of these that forms a foundation of our work on healthcare personas and journey mapping is the Transtheoretical Model, which describes key stages of healthcare decision-making and is an often-used method for modeling behavioral changes.

It’s important for healthcare organizations (HCOs) to influence those decisions among consumers in their service areas. One way to do that is to have specific types of content to appeal to consumers at each stage of the Transtheoretical Model. By appealing to where individuals are in their healthcare decision-making processes and their personal journeys, you can help position your HCO as the logical choice to help consumers address their needs.

One note of clarification here: Don’t expect all consumers to go through the entire journey with you. Some likely will. But some may come in ready to act on their decision and don’t need the earlier stages of the process from you. Some may even have already acted on their own and simply need your HCO for support after the fact. This is another point in support of having a wide variety of content to support consumers at every stage.

With that in mind, let’s go through the five key stages of the Transtheoretical Model and discuss what kinds of healthcare content you can create and surface to consumers at these critical stages.

Precontemplation

In the precontemplation stage, the consumer either doesn’t yet think they have a problem or isn’t motivated enough to act on the problem they know exists. They may underestimate the pros of deciding to act against the cons of not acting.

Healthcare consumers in the precontemplation stage need content to pull them into the top of the marketing funnel so they’re aware of your HCO and/or aware of your organization’s ability to help them. Your content for consumers in this stage should include:

• Social media posts promoting services or products, provider teams, etc.
• Digital marketing campaigns based on consumer demographics
• Email campaigns
• Health quizzes (e.g., “Find out whether you’re at risk for heart disease”)
• Symptom wizards (e.g., “Let’s find out whether you could benefit from seeing one of our cardiologists”)
• Premium wizards (e.g., “Let’s figure out how much you could save on your health plan costs”)
• Blog articles – both specific to services and products your HCO offers and information related to your offerings, such as health and wellness articles

This kind of content should help “prime the pump” for your consumers to start changing their minds. And it can help them start associating your HCO with their healthcare needs when they decide to move forward. You need the consumer to start thinking of your organization so they come back for the next phase.

Contemplation

We had a client a while back who was convinced their website should just be locations listings and calls to action, because the person who navigates to their site clearly wants to act. After all, they came there from Google, right? We had to walk them through why it’s good to have content that speaks to consumers at every stage, because some people won’t have made up their minds yet. The contemplation stage is that moment in time.

A consumer in the contemplation stage intends to act soon. However, the pros and cons of action are in relative balance for them. They need more evidence or motivation before they’ll act.

Your content for this phase of the healthcare decision-making process should focus on positioning your HCO as the best, most logical choice for the consumer. It should speak to your value proposition — why the consumer should trust you for the service or product they’re seeking. Content to gear toward the contemplation stage should include:

• Service-line content (for healthcare provider organizations)
• Health plan content (for health plan organizations)
• Product content (for life sciences and medical equipment providers)
• Patient stories, using the hero’s journey as a model
• Videos
• Blog articles

The contemplation stage is the best chance to change the consumer’s mind. They’re open to options and weighing their choices. But remember: It’s also the last chance to change their mind. Don’t be pushy, but be persuasive and authentic to give your message the best chance of resonating with your audience members.

Related: 4 Soft Skills to Take Your Healthcare Content From Good to Great

Preparation

The consumer who has reached the preparation stage is ready to act. Now they’re simply looking for the right options, partners and pathways for them to take that next step.

Going back to that example I mentioned before — the preparation stage of healthcare decision-making is all about easing the path to conversion. Every piece of your content for the consumer in this phase should help them move forward with your HCO, including:

• Calls to action (CTAs)
• Find a provider/find care
• Location pages
• Open scheduling
• Provider profiles
• Telemedicine/virtual care

Action

In the action phase, the consumer is … well … acting. They don’t need information to help them choose a provider, plan or product. They’ve made their choice and are following through on it. But they do need help and support as they move through this phase of the healthcare decision-making model.

Your content in this phase should be about supporting the relationship and helping the consumer continue their journey. Pieces to consider include:

• Regular check-ins within your customer relationship management (CRM) system
• Setting reasonable expectations and what to do if the consumer is having trouble
• Information about related services
• Content about support networks/services
• Services and products for chronic conditions
• Reminders about regular follow-ups as needed

The action phase is a delicate one. It’s common for healthcare consumers to fail in a treatment course, not succeed with a medical device or otherwise have trouble during this time. Regular, ongoing support can help them improve their chances of success and build their loyalty to your HCO.

Maintenance

Healthcare consumers in the maintenance phase have sustained their choices and continued their journeys. This phase of healthcare decision-making is about long-term validation and relationship-building. Your content should include:

• Regular check-ins (but on a longer cadence, depending on use cases/conditions)
• Ongoing support services information
• Marketing and remarketing campaigns for related services, chronic care, etc.

Your role now is to help support the consumer as they continue to make good choices about their health. And, with your HCO as their partner, they’ll have the support they need over the long haul.

Where are you with your HCO’s decision-making process?

Whether you’re just considering your options, you’re ready to act or you’re perhaps reconsidering some strategy choices that didn’t do enough for your organization, we’re here to help you. We welcome you to explore our strategic position on patient-centric find care experiences. Contact us to explore how our content strategy solutions can position yourselves as the right choice for your consumers.

Healthcare organizations play key roles in offering access to care, employing, and motivating skilled workers, and acting as social safety nets in their communities. They, along with life sciences organizations, serve on the front lines of addressing health equity.

A well-planned and executed DE&I strategy not only creates a healthier and more welcoming environment for team members, but research from McKinsey has shown that these programs can also have significant benefits to an organization’s financial performance.

Delivering on the aspirational goals of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I) requires vision and diligence. As a global digital consultancy, we are uniquely positioned to equip healthcare and life sciences leaders as they plan, activate, monitor, and expand their DE&I initiatives.

The Impact Our End-to-End Expertise Makes on DE&I Initiatives

Experts from across Perficient are working together to support healthcare organizations’ DE&I initiatives across a variety of specializations, including:

1. Strategic Planning and KPI Identification / Tracking: We partner with healthcare leaders to think through strategic approaches (e.g., developing dedicated teams and budget focused on health equity) and to establish and continuously track KPIs.
2. Change Management: Our change management professionals apply broad-based business experience and expertise to drive user engagement and adoption of major change programs. We help healthcare leaders manage the transition process to ensure their team is ready, willing, and able to perform effectively in the new environment (e.g., implementing acceptance of a DE&I program throughout an organization).
3. Personas & Journey Mapping: Including diverse populations in persona development, journey mapping, and user testing is key to understanding their specific friction points, barriers, and expectations.
4. Data Integration: Integrating a client’s current EDW or data lakes with publicly available data sources (e.g., Feeding America, Healthy People 2030, Common Core data, etc.). allows the client to identify patients likely impacted by different SDOH circumstances. With this direction, payers, organizations, or provider groups can create programs/outreach to their members to impact SDOH and health equity within their population. We work with their digital teams to integrate community resources on their patient portal to address SDOH (e.g.: food pantry, Lyft program to doctor appointments, etc.). This creates a personalized experience for the member, and targets areas they may need the most help.
5. AI & ML: We balance the need for better, quicker, and faster improvement with the real and pervasive risk that if we build these tools without thinking all the time about DE&I, we could be building inequity into the technology solutions that should minimize inequity, not exacerbate it.
6. Accessibility: We keep individual’s diverse user stories and unique challenges in mind and consider how health conditions and temporary impairments may impact an individuals’ ability to interact with digital experiences.
7. Content Strategy & Messaging: User experience, content strategy, and messaging are also key to addressing DE&I. Ensuring everyone feels a sense of belonging builds trust, brand loyalty, and adherence to clinical protocols.
8. Clinical Trials: We enable life sciences leaders to build inclusion into the clinical trials that determine if a new drug or medical device is safe and effective.

EXPLORE NOW: Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DE&I) in Healthcare

Healthcare Leaders Turn to Us

Perficient is dedicated to enabling healthcare and life sciences organizations to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion within their companies. Our healthcare practice is comprised of experts who understand the unique challenges facing the industry. The 10 largest health systems and 10 largest health insurers in the U.S. have counted on us to support their end-to-end digital success. Modern Healthcare has also recognized us as the fourth largest healthcare IT consulting firm. With more than 20 years of experience in the healthcare industry, Perficient is a trusted, end-to-end, global digital consultancy.

We bring pragmatic, strategically-grounded know-how to our clients’ initiatives. And our work gets attention – not only by industry groups that recognize and award our work but also by top technology partners that know our teams will reliably deliver complex, game-changing implementations. Most importantly, our clients demonstrate their trust in us by partnering with us again and again. We are incredibly proud of our 90% repeat business rate because it represents the trust and collaborative culture that we work so hard to build every day within our teams and with every client.

Contact us to learn how we can help you plan and implement a successful DE&I initiative for your organization.

With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, businesses and consumers are reminded that anything can happen. Consumers are looking to the companies and resources they trust to understand relevant, rapidly evolving information and guidance. Brands have an opportunity to grow that trust by creating website experiences with up-to-date visuals, content, features, and functionalities consumers need to quickly navigate and find the information they are seeking. As customer needs and relevant information continue to change at a fast pace, organizations are increasingly leveraging iterative design approaches to launch new digital experiences as quickly as possible.

To successfully implement an effective iterative website design in a short period of time and improve the end-user experience, follow these steps:

Align on a Plan of Action

A business’s main objective is to get the customers what they need as soon as possible. Solid upfront communication, collaboration, and commitment with your client is crucial to everything else in the design process going as planned.

Achieve Alignment with a “Week Zero”

Before design work begins in a quick-turn project, set up a “Week Zero” with your key client stakeholders and working team members. The design process will move fast, and it is important that your team is upfront to confirm, re-confirm, and then confirm again the project scope, goals, and timeline drivers. Identify and align on potential blind spots such as unknown design preferences or requirements, and establish a plan to address these throughout the project. Week Zero is also the perfect time to set expectations for the wider stakeholder audience. Given a tight turnaround, how much time commitment do you need from each stakeholder to make this a success? How many collaborative discussions do you need with them to ensure continual feedback and buy-in? Your key client stakeholders are vital at this point. As your best advocates to secure buy-in and commitment from the wider stakeholder group, they will ensure the entire design process runs much smoother.

It is also important to note that keeping the client in mind throughout the entirety of the project is essential, especially in the beginning. For example, our client had as little as four weeks to overhaul the information on its website with user-friendly design, visuals, and content to make the brand relatable and relevant during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. We prioritized the scope of the project and end-goals within that Week Zero, kept the client’s website live throughout the entire process without fail, and successfully completed the re-design on schedule.

Hold Iteration Sessions with Key Stakeholders

With upfront planning and commitment secured, it’s time to put the design plan in action. One useful approach to facilitating iterative design collaboration is establishing client and working team iteration sessions throughout the length of the project. When you and the client have a tight business-driven deadline, gaining stakeholder commitment and feedback during multiple iteration sessions aligns each party to when and how a design change will occur, as well as opens the discussion for what progress is made. This approach enables your team to produce designs with no surprises and meet deadlines accordingly.

Set Aside Time to Revisit Design Decisions

Iteration sessions foster collaboration, but not all stakeholders will agree on all design decisions. In a quick-turnaround design project, contentious or undecided sticking points do not have to become a burden during the project, and can actually help the process by encouraging the team to identify what is truly critical for the current design.

With our client, we used ongoing current scope, ”parking lot”, and roadmap lists to help maintain focus on the design task at hand while also capturing potential enhancements for later implementation. For each iteration session, we established a set amount of time to revisit these items. Parking lots contained lists of undecided features or design considerations that might impact the current design phase but were not strong enough yet to draw focus away from confirmed design requirements. Roadmaps contained a list of desired features that likely would not fit within the timeline of the current design but were recognized as value-add features to be reconsidered in future design phases. Implementing strategies like these keep stakeholders and team members aligned on decisions for the project design, relieve pressure, maintain timeliness, and enable the client to improve the end-user experience overall.

Organize Your Content Strategy

When redesigning website content, it is important to build a plan that guides the creation, publication, and management of consistent, relevant, and persuasive content. This is critical when providing content and answers to several audiences and personas. Your design team must consider what written message or imagery the client would like to convey to its consumers, define the tone for the website, and establish a content journey for each different audience. Content strategy must relate to visual design and the user experience to link the what, why, and how, and help the client understand what information its customers care about and need to know.

Bringing the Project All the Way Home

Even with a tight deadline and high expectations to meet, your client deserves an impeccable design and improves the user experience for its consumers. Following these steps will ensure you do exactly that. For more information on creating an iterative and effective design for your clients, contact our user experience and experience design experts today.

Sitecore 10 is here! And with it comes some exciting new features - from improving the content experience to new analytics tools and evolving to a stronger integration with Content Hub.  

With the release of Sitecore 10, our digital and content strategists at Perficient wanted to dig into the new features. Working with these strategists, Monique Anderson, a Perficient marketing manager, interviewed them to explore some of the new features. 

Content Hub and CMP

To start, Rick Bauer, a Sitecore Digital Strategy MVP, updated us on Content Hub. From reminiscing about Content Hub’s beginnings to where it is today, Rick covers modules including Digital Asset Management (DAM), Content Marketing Platform (CMP), and more. Rick talks about how additional integration between Sitecore and Content Hub could lead to making Content Hub’s CMP the place to build content, with Sitecore being one of the channels to distribute it through.  Additionally, Rick discusses the new field types that have been added and the new functionality to pull marketing taxonomies into Content Hub.  Listen for Rick’s take on Content Hub’s DAM replacing the media library! 

Segmentation Matters 

For marketers, analytics are used to determine the effectiveness of content and the need to create new, more relevant content. But how can you know what content each segment of your audience is interested in? Megan Jensen (MJ), a Perficient Digital Strategist, went over the new advanced audience segmentation feature. While she mentions that this functionality to filter by segment has been available in previous versions of Sitecore before Sitecore 10 the implementation required some MacGyver-ing and was not very flexible. In the new release, segments can be applied as a filter to Experience Analytics reports with a few clicks to get really rich insight about these segments.  

Update on SXA and SCORE

In addition to the new features in Sitecore 10, the Sitecore Experience Accelerator (SXA) also debuts new functionality and fixes. Sitecore Digital Strategy MVP, Jo Troxell, delves into the fixes for personalization within Snippets and Partial Designs as well as his favorite new feature, A/B testing a component within a Partial Design! Jo pointed out that SCORE, Perficient’s own Sitecore accelerator, already had this feature for two years and many clients have enjoyed taking advantage to test global content on their sites. So if this is a feature you’re interested in, upgrading to Sitecore 10 and/or getting Perficient SCORE might be for you! 

Horizon and Experience Editor

Lastly, we have Jim Petillo, a Sitecore Ambassador MVP, who spoke about how he is really excited about Horizon, Sitecore’s new authoring experience that improves upon the WYSIWYG Experience Editor. For seasoned content authors like Jim, specific features such as the ability to edit some Content Editor fields within Horizon, the new autosave feature, and Undo/Redo buttons will definitely improve their productivity and workflow. Jim briefs us on Horizon’s simulator mode, an improvement from the previous Experience Explorer, allowing content authors to review their pages on different devices as well as different days and times in case you might have any time-based rules. And what would all of these features be without a bit of analytics? Horizon includes Page Insights to give content authors and even marketers a quick look at the performance of a page.

And there you have it! While these features are not an all-inclusive list of what Sitecore 10 has to offer, our strategists are confident you’ll be excited for those mentioned. If you haven’t already, take a look! Don’t forget to leave a comment and we look forward to sharing more on Sitecore Sessions, Vol 2!  

In a world of sophisticated search engines and machine learning (ML), it might seem like investing in a taxonomy is overkill. After all, can’t those ML-enabled search engines find everything?

Sometimes even technology needs an assist.

Let’s look at why you might want a taxonomy.

What Taxonomies Are Good For

Taxonomies enable three main digital functions: findability, faceted search, and personalization. Let’s take a look at each.

Findability – The User First

If your website has any breadth and depth of content, many users are going to conduct a site search rather than browse for what they are looking for. Research has shown that 50% of users go directly to search on a website. And while site searches are getting increasingly powerful, they can’t find what isn’t there.

For example, consider the user searching for “physician” on a medical website. This website is untouched by any taxonomy. The user gets a bunch of search results for “physician,” and maybe what they need is in the top few results, but entries that have “doctor,” “MD,” or “DO,” but not “physician,” won’t show up. What is the user missing?

By tagging all relevant documents with “physician” and having a robust search engine map that can account for misspellings and mistyping, the user sees a complete list of all physician-related documents.

Alternatively, assuming your search engine is sophisticated enough, you can create a map of terms to surface everything with the word “doctor” in a search for “physician.”

What’s next? So, the user now has a long list of all physician-related pages and documents… but it is long. An estimated 91% of users don’t look past the first page of search results, and more than 50% don’t look past the first three results. If the specific desired results don’t float to the top, it’s potentially a huge miss. How can you make sure the most useful information floats to the top?

• Don’t over-tag the content.
• Use type-ahead suggestions to help focus the user’s search.
• Weight results to drive the most useful content up in the results.
• Create a robust “see also” experience, so users narrow their searches with predictive search.
• Provide a list of “did you mean?” suggestions in the search results to focus the user’s search.

Each of these is enabled by a good taxonomy.

This is a Google Trends chart showing the relative search interest for three terms over the course of a year. “100” is maximum interest; all other points are relative to that. In this comparison, “MD” has the highest interest; “physician” has low interest. But a good taxonomy would ensure that whether the user searches for “physician,” or “doctor,” or “MD,” they would get appropriate results.

Findability – Authors Count, Too

A secondary use for a good taxonomy is to allow users to identify content instances in the content management system (CMS) for updating and sunsetting. Topical taxonomies – the most common user-facing taxonomy – are useful here, but even more so is a content type taxonomy. A content type taxonomy includes tagging content instances with content type, date of creation, date it should be reviewed, author, and owner (among other tags).

This will help content authors to identify content in the CMS and manage it effectively and efficiently.

Faceted Search

Faceted search is the fancy term for structured search. All those places where you can search for doctors by their specialty or location – faceted search. When you can search a dataset of events by date and topic – faceted search.

If you don’t have specific tags to support structured search, the results will be unreliable. For example, “boxing class” won’t show up under a “fitness class” filter.

Faceted search categories and terms are usually set up as part of the searching/filtering tool. The content type (such as “events”) have specific categories (such as “date,” “location,” and “topic”) from which the author has to choose terms (such as “fitness class”). You might not view this as part of your taxonomy, but it is.

Product Search: Faceted Search to Drive Sales

Product search is a special type of faceted search. Customers trying to identify the right product for them often need to filter based on multiple criteria. What size cups do I want? How many rolls of toilet paper can I store? How big is the bookshelf I like? Supporting rich tagging of products, tied to user needs and the customer journey, is key to creating a strong experience that can drive sales.

High-end carpet manufacturer Karastan allows filtering by multiple facets, including style preferences, such as “Animal Prints,” because sometimes specifying “green” doesn’t get the user close enough to their dream carpet.

As with most taxonomies, the trick is to support tagging that both groups and separates products. The products should be grouped into meaningful categories that are specific enough so they also adequately separate and differentiate the products.

Personalization

A good taxonomy also enables personalization. If you are trying to message your users differently based on user attributes or behavior (for example, the type of user, past experience with your organization, or recent behavior on the site), different messages need to be identified in some way.

For example, you lead marketing for an association. The entry point to membership and fee-based continuing education courses is an initial certification course. When a user first visits the website, you may surface messaging that encourages purchasing the certification course. Once that is completed, you may want subsequent messaging to encourage membership and its professional networking and growth benefits. Once they become a member, you might want to encourage purchase of advanced continuing education courses, conference attendance, or premier networking events. As the user’s engagement grows, the messaging changes.

Organizational Role Personalization

Another common type of personalization is based on organizational roles, which is commonly seen in intranets. Based on job titles, organizational levels, locations, or departments, internal users of intranets may see a slightly different “view” of the corporate intranet. They’ll see events specific to their location, training appropriate for their role, or announcements appropriate only for their level of management. This makes their intranet experience more relevant and effective for each employee.

Each of these types of personalization require that content instances be dynamically surfaced to users. To do so, content instances (a promotion, an event, an announcement) need to be tagged with terms that correspond to the attributes driving the personalization. That’s a taxonomy, too.

Can Machine Learning Help?

Machine learning can make a huge difference in making a taxonomy part of your user experience. Some of the ways ML can help include:

• Identification of clusters of terms to inform the development of the taxonomy
• Automatic assignment of taxonomical terms based on an analysis of the content
• Application of learnings over time to identify and refine customer paths through the content

Other important inputs into taxonomy development are search term analysis, domain modeling, and user language research.

First Steps

Before you think about a taxonomy, think about what you want your user experience to be. If you have only one or two products, you probably don’t need a faceted search. If your website is only five pages encouraging users to call the organization, you probably don’t have to consider too much about search.

But if you have a site of any depth, robust content, or users with different goals, ask yourself these questions:

• Will my users feel better about the organization, the products and services, and their experience if they find exactly the right information easily? 75% of consumers admit to making judgments on a company’s credibility based on the company’s website design.
• How will that impact engagement and ROI? McKinsey found that companies placing data-driven personalization at the core of marketing and sales decisions improve marketing ROI by 15-20%.

A strong taxonomy can help.

Synonyms: Pivot, Different, Unique

From a definition standpoint, when we talk about a ZigZag strategy we are talking about when organizations take a marketing approach that differs from the crowd and competitors and helps you stand out. When everyone is zigging, you are zaggnig.

Why do we care about ZigZag strategy?

We care about zigzag strategy because it often helps you find unique, winning strategies. All marketing tactics or content strategies will eventually lose effectiveness over time so a zigging when others are zagging is a way for you to find the next best thing and keep your marketing fresh. Also, doing something that differs from what is being done or what people expect is a surefire way to catch attention.

How do start zagging when others are zigging?

The key to finding a way to pivot and differentiate from your competitors is to keep an eye on what they are doing. Always keep a pulse on what your competitors are doing, saying, creating, etc. This will allow you to see trends that are

If you want to chat more about zigzag strategies and how to stand out from your competitor, fill out the contact form or you can always message me on LinkedIn or Twitter @sitecorejo! 

Stay thirsty, friends!

Synonyms: boost, raise, surge

From a definition standpoint, when we talk about optimization we are referring to actions and strategies that are used to enhance an experience or make it the most effective and drive business goals.

When it comes to optimization, specific tactics we refer to include personalization and testing which both fall under the optimization umbrella.

Why do we care about optimization?

That sounds like a silly question, doesn’t it? Why would you want to leave something as adequate, when you could optimize it and make it better? The practice of optimizing a site is one of the best ways to collect actionable data not only about what is working and what’s not, but more detailed data around what is driving different audience groups towards their conversions.

How do we get started with optimization?

Always start with data. Whenever you are looking to optimize, it is important to have a pulse on baseline performance so you can understand which parts of your site (pages/content pieces/CTAs/etc.) are performing well or where there might be an opportunity to improve the experience through optimization efforts.

If you want to chat more about optimization strategies, fill out the contact form or HMU on twitter @jgrozalsky.

Stay thirsty, friends!

Auto manufacturers need to rethink their entire approach to their websites. The typical content that every OEM displays on their website is getting stale and boring. Yes, you should still have a vehicle details page, and all the shopping tools that go with it, but why not start including different types of content outside of the normal stuff you find on every auto manufacturer’s website.

For example, include images and historical info about each model. Let consumers see the evolution of the vehicle and all the various body styles it has gone through, the good and even the not so good. Don’t be afraid to express your brand in new ways. Consumers appreciate when brands are open and honest. That’s actually a key essential if you want consumers to connect with your brand in a real way. Again, showing some historical information about each body style that is interesting and adds to the appeal of owning and driving that model is a great way of doing that. This idea leads me to my next point.

Change Your Lifestyle

Why are auto companies creating lifestyle sections to show what it’s like to own their brand? Shouldn’t the entire brand site be tailored around the brand experience/lifestyle? Instead of a lifestyle section, make a lifestyle website. If your brand truly does have a lifestyle appeal this should be easy to do and consumers should be able to easily identify it and connect with it. If a brand has a difficult time making their entire site represent their brand lifestyle, they don’t truly have a brand lifestyle and consumers know it.

Some of these brands have a lifestyle section on their site that includes truly compelling content and does portray what it’s like to own one of its models. The problem is, these sections receive very little traffic. I know from firsthand experience working with auto brands, measuring their websites and reporting the volume of sales matched to visitors across every page on the site. Visitors aren’t making their way to these sections, so obviously buyers aren’t either. Many brands aren’t advertising and driving traffic to their lifestyle website sections, but the biggest reason for the lack of traffic is that consumers don’t go to a car website and ask themselves “what’s it like to own this brand?”.

Like I said, when consumers are presented with this lifestyle content it can be persuasive and compelling, but they aren’t actively seeking it out. That’s exactly why you need to create your entire website in a way that represents the lifestyle qualities of your brand, not just a section on the site. You can’t fake a brand lifestyle….well, I guess you can, but consumers see right through it.

Build & Price Could be Twice as Nice

One significant improvement auto manufacturers can make to their websites can actually be done by combining two of their most essential shopping tools. Combine Build & Price with Inventory Search. As consumers build their vehicle, adding and changing options, the inventory in their selected geographic area should be displayed on the same page. Don’t allow consumers to spend time building a vehicle they won’t actually be able to shop for or ultimately purchase. That’s a terrible consumer experience, and wastes time a consumer could be spending on something positive that entices them to buy your brand.

I know this seems like a simple and easy idea to implement, but it actually isn’t. Not only does it take some technology and data improvements, but it also requires coordination across your dealer base to stay on top of their inventory listings. However, I firmly believe that it would be more than worth it in the end.

An organization’s thought leadership – blog posts, whitepapers, case studies, and other informative content demonstrating industry and subject matter expertise – typically spreads across several website categories separate from product and services pages. Culling that thought leadership content for infographics, comparison charts, checklists, and other visually expressive assets, and identifying and tagging insightful snippets, provides an opportunity to enhance the user journey on product and services pages with contextually relevant content.
Imagine each product and service page having a small but conspicuous space where content authors are challenged to place a contextually relevant illustration or video, captioned for perspective, or a call-out snippet that grabs attention and moves a user to scroll or link for more content. If creative and relevant, the additional content will further engage site visitors and inspire their confidence that you are providing information and solutions to guide their research and decision-making.
In a previous post, “Organize the Organization for Thought Leadership,” I summarized four steps for shaping a site-wide content strategy to maximize thought leadership content. The four steps span content assessment, content guidelines, CMS optimization, and content governance and prepare an organization to multipurpose its thought leadership assets. For starters, it is quite likely that your organization already has plenty of assets to draw from for contextually relevant content to insert at points or pages in the user journey. You can begin there to evolve a content-authoring process where each piece of content is structured for multiple uses.
Strategic thought leadership for page-level, contextually relevant content is encompassed within four interrelated activities:

Content Modeling

A content model describes formats for the types of contextually relevant, structured content, so that components can be developed and applied to a page layout. The content model can apply to existing or new pages, including pages dynamically assembled based on the user’s profile and behaviors. Ideally, the content model should have few and repeatable components for ease of use and management.

Multipurpose Content Authoring

Consider the purpose of each new piece of content, where it will reside on the site, and what information it provides that is especially valuable to support a product or service. Develop a modular approach in which key snippets can be repurposed with engaging headlines or annotations that brief the user and that may entice them to scroll or link to the larger article.

Taxonomy and Tagging

Tag and index modules of content for easy association with a product or service for any webpage. Snippets can be delivered to the page to reside in the component defined in the content model.

Content Delivery

Your CMS or an API is crucial for turning strategy into action, using the taxonomy and tagging to deliver contextually relevant content into the component defined by the content model and onto the page where the user will find it and be delighted with the depth of relevant information your organization provides.
Once you begin delivering page-level, contextually relevant content, analytics will indicate the types of assets and presentations you employ that users find most appealing. That valuable data will help you determine the content best suited for your product and services pages. In turn, you will gain insights about assets that might make your whitepapers, blog posts, and other thought leadership content more engaging and better servicing your users.

Synonyms: Commitment, Obligation

From a definition standpoint, when we talk about engagement we are specifically talking about user engagement. Previously in this series we addressed user behavior, conversions and data, and when you put those together, you get a robust picture of user engagement. User engagement is similar to behavior in the sense that it encompasses digital movement, but where it differs is that engagement shows more commitment than general browsing behavior.

Why do we care about engagement?

A lot of times when we talk about engagement, we are referring to a user’s engagement with the content, functionality and calls-to-action aka all the things that help move users through the sales process.

Knowing about a users engagement helps us understand their “readiness.” Now the path and time to readiness may vary across B2B/B2C industries, but knowing a user’s readiness based on their engagement will help you deliver the right message at the right time.  Whether that message is delivered through personalization, email or via a sales rep – understanding engagement will help you present relevant information to support a user in their journey with your company.

If you want to chat about the best ways to understand user engagement or how to use engagement data to inform optimization strategies, fill out the contact form or HMU on twitter @jgrozalsky.

Stay thirsty, friends!

What is conversational commerce?

In January of 2015, Chris Messina, a former technologist of companies like Uber and Google, coined the term in his Medium post – Conversational Commerce: Messaging apps bring the point of sale to you. He saw an emerging trend, as others may have at the time as well. Andrew Bilak of RoyalWood says in his article about conversational commerce strategy that, “Conversational commerce allows businesses and brands to interact and nurture customers during their buying journey by offering them personalized assistance and recommendations while establishing long-term relationships.”
There is a growing concept of helping customers through purposeful digital experiences. The experience can be transactional, task-based, or meant to be more for discovery of information. They all have something in common – a human isn’t required on the other end of the screen.
Conversational commerce experiences are now coming into their own. Pankaj Malviya summarized his observations on the trend in 5 Predictions About the Future of Conversational Commerce from MarTech: “Once the territory of a few niche companies, ‘conversational commerce’ is trending with some of the biggest brands in the world — and it’s working better than anyone could have hoped.”
Malviya explains how brands like Walmart, Amazon, and 1-800-Flowers are enabling more personal conversations to happen for customers in the shopping moment. Ultimately, customers are having conversations with systems that are fed information about them, so it responds purposefully for these customers.

Prep and Plan to Ensure Engagement

Let’s take a step back. We see that customers are receiving a more personalized way to explore and shop for products. What we don’t see is the prep and planning that digital product and experience teams conduct to make sure that customers engage with a highly useful experience.
Content strategy helps to identify and account for all the key information that needs to align to achieve the conversational commerce experience goals and objectives. But as various sources of information are pulled in to support your experience, getting your content in order may take time. A content strategy output that helps with this is a roadmap to get content in a good place to intentionally serve customers in their shopping moment.
Imagine how content facilitates responses for customers going down their conversational rabbit hole.

• When does content come into play?
• How does it support cohesive responses?
• What assets, information, and next steps need to be accounted for in order to make this a reality?

Keep questions like these in mind and imagine the following scenario:

An auto shopper is looking for a new vehicle. They’re considering a new sedan offered by their choice brand. They’re open to a small or mid-size sedan. They’re familiar with the trim levels available, though not an expert on standard versus optional features. But they’re most interested in getting a few key options.

In this case, how would content enable a purposeful conversational commerce experience? Let’s break it down.

This list helps us begin to gather the content necessary to facilitate a purposeful response. So, when a customer asks, “Which [small and/or mid-size sedans] does the panoramic sunroof come standard on?” they can receive a response such as, “A panoramic sunroof comes standard on these [small and/or mid-size sedans] [trims]. Take a look!”
As there will be many ways content can facilitate an answer, it should also help facilitate next steps. So, consider the intentions that content can help facilitate when things are indirectly related. These responses help the user understand that their question is accepted, but is apart from this specific experience. It’s the difference between having a 404-page-not-found and an explore-one-of-these-things response.