Marketers face many challenges today: high growth expectations, hyper competition in crowded market places, and the digital and social-media revolution. What’s more, growing pressure from the C-suite to implement marketing return on investment measures as a way to track and evaluate marketing success is increasing the marketer’s workload. To add to the challenges, the way people engage with brands has changed. Customers, empowered by modern technology and information, engage much differently with brands today. Their behaviour is sporadic, fragmented and spans across channels and devices in an unpredictable fashion. Customers are more informed than ever and in most cases have made their mind long before the first contact with a sales rep. In short, marketing and sales teams are losing control at a time when expectations for their performance is rising. Sounds scary? It is!
The first step to tracking return on investment in marketing is building objectives based upon clear insight into the customer decision journey. This informs everything within the marketing plan including: building customer personas, engagement tactics, metrics, brand messaging, marketing mix, and spend for future growth. Yet marketers are faced with managing a multitude of moving parts; shifting digital landscapes, changing marketing channels, growing volumes of data and siloed systems. Consequently, building an accurate image of the customer journey becomes difficult. To further complicate the matter, cloud technologies have turned the once loyal and known customer virtually anonymous – harder to track, profile and ultimately measure brand engagement against.
As a result, online marketing efforts are becoming fragmented ideas of how to plan and approach the online customer. To gain a better insight into the customer journey – and do so quickly – marketers need to invest in new technologies that compile data from all marketing systems, and combine it with data from real-time customer interactions both from the known and unknown user. Only in doing so can marketers truly understand the customer journey and make informed and timely decisions on how to optimise it as well as identify areas for strategic changes in customer engagement.
The Digital Dilemma
Learning how to adapt marketing plans to the digital consumer-driven buying journey isn’t an easy feat. According to Forrester Research, “Customers take many paths as they solve problems, activating business capabilities in unpredictable ways.”
Yet online and offline engagement data sets – click through rates (CTRs), data from CRMs, and social analytics – are siloed and stored in different formats meaning that a 360 degree view of the journey is almost impossible. These data sets are multiplying too, due to the ability to gather more information from technologies including sophisticated sensors, connected devices and social channels. In fact, according to a report by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, 90 per cent of all data has been created in the past two years.
While marketers complete the time intensive task of unifying siloed data, often across multiple spread sheets, the static data becomes old, quickly. And, as the components in the marketing plan shift in value (such as ad space and customer interaction) they add to this problem.
Many marketers use marketing automation tools to pinpoint and engage with the customer quickly. But these rarely even provide suggested execution tactics and not a 360 degree view into the customer journey. Marketing automation tools rely on authenticated contacts – those assigned a name and profile because they have provided their details through marketing sources such as downloading whitepapers or attending events. However, in most organisations the authenticated contacts are 2%-3% of all contacts. With so much data in the cloud, most potential customers remain anonymous, and marketers are unable to identify, track and use their information to build their persona profiles meaning that an inaccurate view of the customer informs the objectives, engagement techniques and metrics.
The key to the customer: Real time learning across systems
Marketers need a solution that will help them to compile and analyse all of the customer touch points across multiple channels – CRM, direct marketing or engagement on social media – in real time from initial contact to end point. Clever digital marketing command centre (DMCC) technologies, such as the Telerik Sitefinity Digital Experience Cloud, can do this by providing a central repository of individual customer interactions. These often integrate with third-party data sources to draw information from key systems such as Salesforce.com, Marketo, Microsoft SharePoint and Dynamics. Certain DMCC’s can also collate anonymous user profile information, assigning them an identity and tracking behaviour.
These technologies will also use machine learning to relate how groups of customers and prospects interact through all channels. From the learnings, they can recommend next steps for engaging with customers, and give potential lead a score on how ‘warm’ they are to the brand via a centrally managed framework, shared across sales and marketing teams for both anonymous and known users.
Data driven decisions based on sophisticated technology
To some marketers understanding the nuances in technology and its customer identification features may be a secondary priority. Yet in a digital world, where the picture of the customer is continually fragmented and where customers aren’t always known by name to a company, the right technology plays a crucial role in helping give marketers a truthful insight into who they are marketing to. This is essential. Marketers can only turn on a dime, map and react to the customer journey effectively and, ultimately, provide evidence of the direct relationship between marketing investments and results if this is done.
