Michael Schinelli Guides Us Through the New Digital Customer Journey

The only thing evolving faster than technology today is consumer behavior. Michael Schinelli, Chief Marketing Officer at UNC’s Kenan-Flager Business School, presented Curating the Digital Customer Journey at Converge 2015. His session was focused on how we need to shift the way we communicate with digital natives.

What is a digital native?

The term ‘digital native’ applies to children born after 1980 – those raised in a digital and media-saturated world. Digital natives are constantly connected to technology. They watch TV with their smartphones in hand to constantly check social media. They are constantly watching videos, reading and learning on their tablets and computers. To communicate with them, we must tell a really good, true story that resonates with their needs and wants – not ours.

A comma between experiences, not a period.

Customers are in the market for the whole, the outcome, and the experience. Look for opportunities to shift to emotional/experiential communication and engagement. As Michael put it, the customer journey should have “a comma between experiences, not a period.” Your interactions with customers should progress like a conversation and get deeper along the way – and further along in the journey, the more personalized your content should be.

Shift away from campaigns and taglines to personas.

Personas are portraits of our stereotypical customers that represent a slice of our audience – and they are relatable. The more you can create a unique, personal experience for the digital native, the more they will engage.

Leverage great content to engage with your target audience.

Data insights about your target audience should shift your strategy. How do we deliver content to go beyond stagnant campaigns to targeted campaigns?

• Look-a-like marketing: Tracking the online behavior of existing customers and converting behavior so you can identify and target similar audiences on the Internet.
• Search and type marketing: Leveraging a visitors’ keywords and search behavior.
• Contextual marketing: Serving an ad adjacent to relevant content.

The Kenan-Flager marketing team uses these best practices when curating their prospective student journey:

1. Create custom images for every post created.
2. Provide content utility through posts.
3. Leverage the strongest content in sponsored/promoted content. If a post was popular on social channels, invest in a paid campaign on LinkedIn or Twitter and layer in the targeting.
4. Don’t link from social to gated content too frequently – it breaks customer trust.

Michael shared these unique videos on the digital customer journey:

Remember, it’s a comma, not a period.

Digital natives crave more – more knowledge, more technology and more truth. Think of their journey in your marketing funnel as a conversation that gets deeper the more they interact with you and you with them.

Couldn’t attend Converge 2015?

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