In some ways, marketing hasn’t changed at all. It’s still about knowing consumers and connecting your company’s value to that audience in order to create customers.
In other ways, marketing has changed completely. A “day in the life” of marketers past might have been like Madmen, driven mainly by artists and creative types. In those bygone days, you might have evoked with great creativity in an ad how your customer would feel if they held that cigarette in their hand or offered that drink to the hottie across the bar.
Compare that to a “day in the life” of today’s marketer. While still as creative and artistic as ever, modern marketers are also like imagineers automating their creation with the most cutting edge data science and software technology in the background.
Here is a snapshot of what the day of a marketing imagineer might look like.
Day in the life of a marketing imagineer
1. Your day might begin by readying a new microsite to support a promotional campaign you want to test. But, if it took weeks to develop your site you’d never do it. So …
- Instead of leaving visitors to a “one size fits all” experience on your new site, you might deploy automated self-learning recommendations for additional content each visitor is also likely to be interested in reading based on the behavior of others like them. Or, you might recommend additional products others like them found interesting.
2. If you are in eCommerce, you are now considering the right prices to offer your digital target segments in order to increase profits, not just revenue. To calculate the right answer, you turn to your pricing, promotion, and product mix software solution rather than pulling a number out of thin air.
3. Since the spray and pray days of marketing are over, you now need to capture the moments when your customers exhibit behavior that qualifies them for these discounts. And, of course, this needs to be automatic. So, you configure yourreal time digital marketing system to extend the discount codes to site visitors while they are on the site and via retargeting emails after visitors have dropped off.
4. Sometimes discount codes don’t work like they should. Rather than shrugging and accepting that as unavoidable, you’d like to be the first to find out when customers struggle. So you configure your customer experience management systemto alert you instantly when there is a spike of promo codes that aren’t going through. Using replay, you put yourself in the shoes of the customer, see what they saw, and identify and remedy the issues.
5. But, by now those customers have dropped off the site and are probably pretty annoyed. How to win them back? You connect the list from your customer experience management system into your cross-channel marketing application. You send them an email with an offer to help. Or, you let the CRM system prompt call center agents to offer help proactively when these customers call in.
6. Since nobody is perfect, you are always measuring and experimenting to see where you can improve your marketing performance. Yet, this isn’t your grandmother’s marketing reporting either. Today, statistical marketing attribution algorithms automatically tease out which marketing touch points deserve credit for truly creating incremental revenue when customers are touched by multiple campaigns in the run up to a transaction or purchase.
All that data, science, and business machinery is humming intact in the background so that you can imagineer a great customer experience and your customers can go about hunting for discounts and have fun browsing.
In the IBM Enterprise Marketing Management product team, our job is to make yours easier. For example, we just released an update to our digital marketing, customer experience management, and pricing management SaaS solutions. The new capabilities are some of the enabling capabilities in the “day of the marketer” above. See the release launch page for all the new capabilities enabling our users to engage their customers with one voice.
To hear from a real marketer that is setting the pace and outperforming their peers, tune in on October 24 when Ewald Hoppen from wehkamp.nl explains how his team uses cutting-edge technology as well as innovative marketing techniques. Their results speak for themselves, e.g. a 273% higher ratio of sales per email sent, a 63% lower email opt-out rate, and a 15x increase in ROI for their display ads.
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Note: This was cross-posted from the original on the IBM.com Smarter Commerce blog.
