Conduit’s final deliverable featured a three-part process with elements structured in progressive stages to encourage adoption.
As each stage progresses, the framework will allow for a cohesive narrative to take shape. As the narrative became clearer, the Belden Transformation Team and each internal Marketing Team within the various Belden Brands could realize increased momentum. This increased momentum and better clarity would then serve as a basis to further tighten Belden’s internal alignment.
Step One: Overarching Business Context & Climate
Conduit’s materials provided an opportunity to index each brand’s legacy marketing efforts and associated strategies. By better understanding the environments each business unit operated within, the Team at Belden would be better informed on how to position the content for the target customers.
- Marketplace Considerations: Overall maturity level of markets that the Business Unit plays within. Identifying preliminary assumptions which should be considered when framing the content strategy itself.
- Competitive Forces: Overview of relevant competitors with a snapshot of brand positioning, messaging & other differentiating insights.
- Company Business Goals (SDP): Stated business priorities & time horizons. Exploring how the businesses’ strategic priorities impact the digital/content strategy.
- Pre-Existing & Future Unique Value Proposition(s): The Business Unit’s current UVP to their target markets? How their UVP communicated on their website and through their content.
- Sales Goals, Processes & Associated KPIs: How each business unit goes to market, prospect & customer lifecycles including new customer acquisition dynamics (sales cycle, win rate, etc.), customer retention dynamics (% churn, wallet share over time)
- Customer Acquisition & Retention Impact on Staffing: Resource allocation methods to support customer acquisition & retention efforts across business units
- Marketing Goals & Associated KPI’s: Marketing KPIs & TTIs across Belden marketing organizations
Step Two: Customer Analysis & Priority
Taking the product and use case centric approach that each Belden business unit/operating company/brand deployed and backing into a real-world profile of that customer’s motivations.
When possible, taking that profile a step further and linking buying behaviors (recency, frequency of products purchased and LTV of customers). This linkage would work to establish a system to prioritize the impact of content marketing efforts to customer acquisition or increases in current customer wallet share.
- Potential Customer Types & Impact to the Sales Process: Given the markets Belden businesses compete in; how do variations of customer types impact the buying journey (if at all)?
- Customer Segmentation & Valuation: Logically grouping existing customers and relating impact of these groups to success at the business unit level and/or across brands/business units.
- Customer Behavioral Attribute Development: Developing a tagging system to link Loyalty/Value/Customer Behavior aligned to Belden brand or KPI’s
- Target Customer Prioritization: Leverage segments to group priorities.
- Brand Awareness vs Brand Awareness to Target Customers: Ensuring the brands are sufficiently clear and impactful to the right type of customers on a use case by use case basis.
- Target Customer Buying Process: What are the “personas” within Target Customer segments and how do they leverage content to make decisions.
Step Three: Strategy Document and Website Guide:
Once steps one and two had been completed, the final step was a comprehensive Strategy Document and Website Guide intended to align the business context, climate and customer priorities with strategic goals and critical website elements for each Belden brand/business unit.
High Level features of this document were to include:
- Key strategic priorities for the site
- Documented brand requirements
- Specific roles the site will play in connecting with customers
- Synthesize the various “lenses” of key visitors/users
- User journeys required to make the website a useful utility
- Overview of required business intent across main areas of the website
- Image/video/asset strategy & the role of each relative to the customer journey
- Tone & positioning of page content when considering prospect vs existing customer use-cases
- Interconnectivity required between the website and sales processes