A Content Success Story: How FedEx Operations Now Delivers a Better Customer Experience. Editor’s note: Drew Bailey is a finalist for 2017 Content Marketer of the Year. Clever problem-solving, a clear strategic road map, and a few counterintuitive steps have helped Drew’s team start to meet this goal, and earned him a nomination for the 2017 Content Marketer of the Year. By carefully evaluating people, process, measurement, inputs, and technology, they found small changes that could deliver immediate improvement. FedEx measures content by engagement and revenue produced by the targeted customer segment. After a few iterations and several major new technology rollouts, FedEx has measured savings in the thousands of dollars annually per each full-time content team member thanks to less redundancy and a more systematic approach to content marketing. Prior to the new approach, FedEx had five agencies creating 80% new content for each monthly newsletter. Not only has the reboot reduced the cost associated with the newsletters, it’s also delivering double-digit revenue increases from subscribers in the months since the pivot. process is a go-to-market strategy that centralizes content operations for U.S. marketing teams (and soon several international marketing regions). Channel meetings, they shared their findings quickly with their colleagues who could duplicate their results in their own work.
Editor’s note: Drew Bailey is a finalist for 2017 Content Marketer of the Year. We will be sharing insight from all CMY finalists in the blog before the winner is announced at Content Marketing World this September.
Redundancies, overlaps, and a general lack of communication kept good content marketers from delivering a better content experience for FedEx customers.
Drew Bailey wanted to change that when he took the reins of content operations at the company. “My team’s job is enablement,” says FedEx’s manager of content strategy and curation.
Clever problem-solving, a clear strategic road map, and a few counterintuitive steps have helped Drew’s team start to meet this goal, and earned him a nomination for the 2017 Content Marketer of the Year.
He’ll be the first to tell you that it’s still early, but initial results have the entire content team at FedEx excited for what’s coming.
Solving content strategy problems with ABLE
Drew, an IT and project management transplant, found no shortage of areas for improvement as he explored his new environment in the world of content strategy. To shift the process and technology responsibilities from the content creators to the strategy and curation team, Drew spent a lot of time listening to wants and needs.
“It was never about creating more great content,” he says. “It’s about connecting the dots for the customers and letting the content teams do more for them.”
To focus his efforts, Drew used the ABLE problem-solving method to break down each issue one by one.
Assess
This phase includes a root-cause analysis to discover what really contributes to a disjointed customer experience. For example, one customer received 13 unrelated emails each month from FedEx. The team wanted to know why. By carefully evaluating people, process, measurement, inputs, and technology, they found small changes that could deliver immediate improvement.
Build
Like most content teams, requests for their support come from multiple sources. In this phase, the content team needed to determine what should be accepted into the content development pipeline, how it would be reviewed, and which audience segments would be prioritized.
Groups now complete content request forms, which include:
- Goal of the project
- Target customers
- Customer-centric value proposition
- Customer experience impact
- Strategic fit
Notice how central the customer is in all the fields? Drew says that is one of the biggest – and best – changes at FedEx. In the past, the go-to-market team would get requests for content centered on a new product or service being launched, and they’ve now flipped the paradigm.
“We have people saying, ‘Here’s the story we want to talk to our customers about based off their buying journey or their learning journey,’” he says. “It’s based off the customer. It’s much more customer-centric.”
Launch
In FedEx’s analysis, the launch phase standardized the process for planning and…
COMMENTS