The third wave of the sharing economy was kick-started in 2008 by some young lads, who couldn’t afford the rent increase on their pad in San Francisco. They came up with scheme to put up a couple of design conference participants on air mattresses in their living room, as the same design conference had reserved every hotel room in the city.

Supply and demand always create business opportunities, as long as the parties are able to find one another. It takes it’s app, certainly, but the sheer genius of AirBnB – what has made your, mine and everybody’s home part of the world’s largest hotel chain – is the social factor in both concept and experience: A second to none, unique, authentic and community oriented experience. So completely different to the tourist traps most hotels can muster.

This is customer engagement in full bloom. That, which makes us return for more, put up our own home, and spread the good news in social circles and via good rankings.

AirBnB doesn’t threaten the establishment directly, like the black sheep, Uber. To the contrary, many argue that this initiative actually expands the cake, increasing tourism by attracting new segments.

With full transparency, flexibility and easy smartphone access, the sharing economy keeps the traditional companies on their toes. And it takes quite a lot to keep up with the bliss of sharing, which is not only economically sound, but often also environmentally, practically and socially superior.

Legislation might upset the apple-cart in favour of the establishment. But not for long, like the 12 km/h speed limit the horse carriage industry manged to get enforced at the emergence of the automobile.

The post Sharing Economy: Why Own? appeared first on Nzinck.

Smartphones have overtaken desktop as 1st screen, and we are far more intimate with it than with our closest friends. 87% of us sleep with it every night, and 68% check it as the first thing after waking up. And this is just the first of 150 daily checks.

Google clearly favours mobile users, and so should we. There’s no time to waste, as people who are checking us out on mobile are:

• 57% more likely to visit our shop
• 40% more likely to call us, and
• 51% more likely to buy our products and services

These facts and much more can be found in Google’s report about micro moments and the shift to mobile.

Micro-moments happen everywhere

Micro-moments happen everywhere, all the time, and mobile users are impatient creatures. The days are gone, when we solemnly sat special time aside and our butts down at the desktop to research on a new car or the next vacation destination.

We want our answer here and now, and we are gone if it takes more than 3 seconds. In fact, 82% consult their phone on their way to the check-out counter in physical shops, and poor you, if all you’ve got is slow loading desktop content.

Ultimately, a customer journey is the sum of all micro moments with differing intent in each phase and across all channels and devices. It’s crucial to realise that only a small fraction of people who encounter your brand or content are ready to buy now and will get turned off if pushed too soon or aggressively.

To drive incremental revenue, lead generation and brand sentiment, we should focus on offering short, clear interactions that add value or help the customers on their terms – instead of our own.

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Gartner’s top 10 predictions for 2017 and on is an interesting read about a not-so-distant future full of science fiction. The boundary between the real and the digital world becomes increasingly blurry, and in 2020 more than 100 million consumers are expected to shop in an augmented reality with image, text, video and sound digitally layered directly onto your physical world. And here, you shouldn’t expect to hang around the supermarket frost section for long before a pokémon jumps out like a killer clown jack in a box and slams you in the head with an irresistible poultry offer.

The report also predicts that 30% of all internet surfing will be screen-less in 2020. And you won’t need your eyes or hands in the future, as future platforms are voice activated. Smart for when you are driving a car, but soon the car will drive itself, and what will we do then?

Yes, the future is an exciting place with lots of time to study …our navels.

Read much more here:

• http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/3482117
• http://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/gartners-top-10-technology-trends-2017/

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Analytics is an important tool to help us understand the outcome of our efforts and communication. But that doesn’t necessarily make it the best driver for innovation. Yet every day, I encounter decision makers, who want proof that proposed initiatives will work; “Sounds like a grand idea, but please show me the results before we launch”.

Have we lost our faith and courage?

An obvious thought is, that the faith in the viability of our ideas has decreased with the increased focus on measurability, because: “We can’t very well base our future on gut feelings”. No, but… on the contrary our world perspective may get a little too simplistic if we rely solely on analytics. And what happens to our creative ability, when we all act according to the same narrow data set?

How to balance math and music?

I believe in the customer, and I am 100% dedicated to understanding their needs and behaviour. With this persuasion, I must develop and preach the faith needed to restore the courage and balance of power between mathematics and music. With insight, empathy and an open mind, it calls for a reset with focus on factors that can’t readily be quantified and measured.

The post Has Analytics Replaced your Common Sense? appeared first on Nzinck.

Although Big Data don’t tell the whole story, it’s tempting to limit KPIs to the easily accessible quantitative and historic data.

The trouble is:

• If we don’t integrate qualitative (small) data into our business analysis, we’ll never understand the motives behind our customers behaviour and choices. This may lead to the wrong conclusions. A trivial example of this is interpreting long visits on our site to be a sign of interest, when in fact, it may be because visitors can’t find what they are looking for.

• We reproduce ourselves based on historic data; looking back instead of ahead. Of course, we should learn from experience; what worked and what didn’t. But the danger of cycling around in retrospective data and making small adjustments is that it prohibits us from thing out of the constrictive box that big data creates. It prevents innovation.

Qualitative data are necessary, if you want to steer according to accurate KPIs. But they are costly to collect and process, and  so far, I haven’t encountered systems to automate the process and eliminate the cumbersome and time consuming process of qualitative research. How to make small data more accessible and operational? Until we find out, it may be wise to have some faith in your gut feeling instead of relying solely on big data.

The post Are we Blinded by Big Data? appeared first on Nzinck.

Google favours mobile users

Smartphones have overtaken desktop as 1st screen, and we are closer with it than with our closest friends. 87% of us sleep with it every night, and 68% check it as the first thing after waking up. This is the first of (brace yourself!) 150 daily checks adding up to almost 3 hours of daily mobile surfing before the sandman cuts the power.

With their SEO update last year, Google clearly favours mobile users. So should we, and there’s no time to waste, as people who are checking us out on mobile are:

• 57% more likely to visit our shop

• 40% more likely to call us, and

• 51% more likely to buy our products and services

These facts and much more can be found in Googles report about micro moments and the shift to mobile.

Micro-moments happens all the time and all over, and mobile users are impatient creatures. They want their answer here and now, and leave if it takes more than 3 seconds. All of 82% consults their phone on their way to the check-out counter in physical shops, and poor you, if all you’ve got is slow loading desktop content.

Please contact Mette Stenstrup on +45 40 88 13 60 or mette@nzinck.com for further information or to set up an appointment to discuss your opportunities.

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With solid industry understanding, experience and a proven methodical process, we can help you develop and implement a strategy where sales and marketing efforts are working effectively together across all customer interfaces and touch points.

Ask yourself this:

• Do you know your growth potential and do you have a plan for reaching it?

• Does your strategy effectively accommodate being found and considered by the right customers?

• Do you know your customers’ decision-making processes and what part your website plays in it?

• Do you know what makes your customers tick and does that match the customer experiences you create?

• Do you regard yourself an IT supplier, a systems provider or maybe rather a business consultant?

• Have you considered adopting og selling systems for marketing automation?

Moving Toward Marketing Automation

Most IT companies offer complex services complicating the customer’s decision-making process. This calls for a differentiated communication approach depending on where the customer is in the sales funnel.

Marketing automation starts with identifying decision-making processes for various target groups. The automatically collected knowledge about customer motives and behaviour enables you to target your customers more closely and mature and qualify leads better. All this is supported and automated by relevant systems and processes.

We can help you identify customer needs and decision-making processes, define customer profiles and determine what strategic content is relevant in what situations.

Strategic content is not about product sheets and system specifications. It’s about customer needs and behaviour, and we can show how and when to influence leads on their way through the sales funnel to optimise qualification.

Let Us Help You

Many years of close cooperation with Danish and international IT vendors and consultants have given us a deep understanding of the IT industry’s specific challenges.

We know your customers, their needs and behavioural patterns, and with their often complex technical, economic and strategic considerations a website with focused content and strong identity is imperative to lead generation.

Supplier or Business Partner

If you help customers implement marketing automation or other rule-based communication, we can assist in mapping decision-making processes, defining customer profiles, designing communication flows and developing strategic content.

What type of IT Company are you?

Where is Your Focus?

Client Statement

A unique and sustainable competitive advantage

We partnered with NZINCK for a global rebranding project. It was a very thorough strategy initiative that entailed primary research, positioning, corporate identity, vertical brands, messaging and websites.

A full year post implementation of the brand in 16 countries, I could not be more pleased with the results! It has provided Columbus a unique and sustainable competitive advantage, in a very competitive and crowded market, and is now resulting in increased sales and improved financial results.

I have personally been responsible for four rebranding efforts with large US-based companies and this is the only one, that I would not make some alterations to with the perfect clarity of hindsight.

Besides the great work, NZINCK is a pleasure to work with; they are smart, pragmatic and creative problem-solvers that I highly recommend.

Cody R. Aufricht, Vice President – Marketing Shared Service Center, Columbus

The post Solutions for IT Companies appeared first on Nzinck.

However, to most companies it is still a huge challenge to make valuable use of all this data. One thing is to understand the data at all and to get an overview of the most important key take outs. Another thing is to transform this knowledge into concrete actions that will attract customers, build relations and support sales.

The roadmap from knowledge to relevant content creation

From our work with medium as well as large sized companies, we have learned how to see the wood for the trees and to make the plan happen by using the following process:

Step 1: Define what kind of data should trigger what kind of action

The data can be customer behavior (eg download of brochure, post on FaceBook, sign up for news, chat, reading newsletter story, clicking on banner ad), expressed interests, purchase history (and age of previous purchases), personal data (demographic/socio-/economic). And the actions can be either automated communication or personal follow up.

Step 2: Design the various logics and communication programmes along the customer journey

The key thing here is to keep it simple. As stated in the introduction, most companies have access to ENORMOUS amounts of data, and it is very intriguing to end up with far too complex communication programmes.

They seem tempting on paper, byt the more complexity the more demand for content production and maintenance, which only a minority of companies can manage – at least to start with. But it is a fact that by using various automated communication tools such as intelligent triggermails (NOT spamming), netmining and retargeting, we can ensure progress in the decision making process (the customer journey) and make the move with the right offer, when the customer is ready.

Step 3: Implement the systems

Marketing automation software is now within reach of economical means using software as a service (SAAS) and cloud solutions where you don’t need 30 IT consultants working on the system for a year, before you are good to go!

Step 4: Produce the content bits and pieces for all the actions in the communication flow

This is designed in step 2. Some of it may be short messages as a simple “We’ve noticed you have shown interest in our new XX product. If you want to keep updated on XX, please sign up for news here” or it might be a small video guide on “how to maintain your brand new XX”, etc. The point is to be relevant at the right time. And this is exactly what big data is so splendid for.

The post BIG Data – Now What? appeared first on Nzinck.