Feature
Capitalizing on modern shopping behaviors and seasonal trends requires robust technology that recognizes today’s mobile-social consumers and engages them with the right messages at the right times.
Today’s marketing landscape is all about omnichannel engagement -- having the ability to listen in real time to the interactions, opinions and aspirations of customers across mobile, social and web channels. It's also imperative to act quickly on what you hear — to approach each customer on his or her own terms so you can positively influence potential sales.
Go for the Data
In this omnichannel environment, fast and easy access to tightly integrated customer data is vital. Your customer data, what you do with that data and how quickly you act on it can go a long way to determining your brand’s success. If your organization has the right technological framework in place, you can leverage your data to understand each customer’s behavior, connect with these customers exactly the ways they prefer and adapt to their needs in real time to make each touch more relevant and useful.
Attaining such a state of flexibility and agility is possible -- and perhaps even easy -- with the right technology approach. At the highest level, we’re talking about a marketing architecture that incorporates:
- Real time listening across multichannel touch points
- Flexible data collection that accommodates new information gleaned from constantly changing customer behavior
- Intuitive, visual representation of data for easy analysis
- Dynamic modification to campaigns based on the flow of consumer activity throughout customers’ unique buying journeys
Taking such an approach will allow you to focus your resources on data collection and analysis -- your marketing inputs and outputs -- and concentrate your efforts on the two key, complementary strategies of Augmentation and Optimization.
Augmentation
Every organization has customer data, but does your customer data reside in a data mart that pulls information out of your siloed data stores and disparate systems? Do you have a data mart that provides fast access and synthesized insight across all channels to help you investigate and better understand your customers?
Augmentation is about building flexibility into your data mart so you can continuously enhance your customer data and build stronger, more successful customer segments and campaigns.
- Understand the past by collecting data from one system at a time – building up customer profiles as you go
- Monitor the present by collecting response data from messaging systems, like email, or by listening to social outlets or even your own website domain
- Listen for events that by themselves may seem insignificant, but when viewed over time and in conjunction with other insights may reveal something deeper. The RFM (Recency, Frequency, Money) profile of customer behavior is critical for success
In today’s mobile-social environment, you need to be listening and combining inputs from all channels. Your data mart needs the sophistication to recognize critical incoming data to accommodate more accurate customer targeting capabilities.
Optimization
Working in concert with Augmentation, Optimization is about how you react once you’ve integrated all customer touchpoints, inbound feeds and outbound campaign results with a multichannel outbound publishing and delivery capability.
If Augmentation is about understanding the past and listening to the present, then Optimization is how you engage with a customer to deliver what the customer wants, when they want it, wherever they are.
- Relies on propensity models and predictive analytics to light a path of opportunity
- But also depends on the ability to make fast adjustments to content, programs, strategies, and engagements based on what is happening now
- Visual representation of data that facilitates fast decision-making
- Adjusting segments based on what is working and what is not
With the right technological architecture in place, you can focus your energy on data collection and analysis. From clean, accurate data comes the ability to market with context and continuously optimize your campaigns as you gather new information and insights.
At the end of the day, as marketers, we want the ability to make smart, informed decisions and get better at it over time. If we can continuously augment and optimize our data, we position ourselves to rapidly pivot marketing efforts and move at the speed of today’s consumer.
