Gartner’s recent Magic Quadrant for Multichannel Campaign Management shows digital marketing budgets are growing twice as fast as overall marketing budgets. What’s more, digital marketing now represents roughly a quarter of organizations’ overall marketing budgets.
To compete in today’s ever-evolving digital marketing landscape, however, companies must adopt solutions that encompass both online and offline channels in order to fully engage customers. Multichannel Campaign Management, according to Gartner, is a collection of technologies that enables businesses to define, orchestrate, and communicate inbound and outbound offers to customers segments across marketing channels (i.e., websites, mobile, social, direct mail, and even call centers). At Adobe Neolane, we prefer the term cross-channel campaign management to refer to the ability to ensure coordination and consistency across these channels.
So how does this all work?
Strong Data Management Across Channels to Drive Results
Born digital, many of Adobe Neolane’s core capabilities (i.e., email, mobile, social) fall into the digital marketing realm. But we also know that effective marketing campaigns break down silos, unifying customer data from across channels to deliver the right message at the right time through the appropriate medium.
Take Facebook marketing, for example. “When you think about it, Facebook is perhaps the largest and most accurate database of customer information ever,” says Adobe Neolane’s Kristin Hambelton. “Consumers willingly list and share tremendous amounts of data on Facebook—from their name, location, and email to their interests and even what they’re doing at this very minute through updates, pictures, check-ins and Open Graph actions. Marketers are discovering that the social network’s real value is in tapping this data goldmine and using it to engage fans in one-to-one dialogues across all communication channels.”
In order to be truly effective, Hambelton claims data captured through Facebook must be part of a larger communication strategy: cross-channel campaign management. By unifying multiple channels and devices, marketers can ensure customers and prospects receive the most relevant message or offer during each and every interaction, she says.
Data collected from across channels should be aggregated and used as foundation for the development of a single marketing view of the customer; at Adobe Neolane, for example, our platform allows us to extend the master customer database with social data. Once these profiles have been created and have had time to mature, it then becomes possible to identify trends in purchasing behavior, offering marketers an opportunity to send triggered messages at the right time.
Real-Time Personalization Leads to an Improved Customer Experience
In order to reinforce a consistent customer experience online and offline, brands can use SoLoMo marketing to offer real-time personalization to customers and prospects. While there are a variety of ways for marketers to capture the real-time location of their customers, including mobile apps (iOS and Android), social media opt-in (Facebook/Foursquare check-in), proximity-based offers (e.g., push notifications), etc., the key is to go beyond simply targeting customers across social channels to encourage mobile engagement and instead focus on creating a unified customer experience that caters to the individual.
Larger merchants like Nieman Marcus and Whole Foods, for example, are incorporating more localized marketing strategies based on demographics and psychographics gathered across channels and integrated into a cohesive platform. Just as small and medium-sized merchants remember customers’ faces and purchasing histories, these larger brands are using social media to promote in-store events and sales and tailoring print and digital advertisements based on geographic location. Doing so allows these big-box retailers to offer more personalized experiences to their customers across multiple channels.
Final Thoughts
As the marketing landscape increasingly goes digital, marketers must evolve with the times in order to fully connect with their customers. But it doesn’t stop with digital marketing. Instead, brands must adopt strategies that encompass both online and offline channels to drive results and ultimately improve the customer experience.
Gartner claims multichannel campaign management is not so much a single technology but rather a collection of technologies. How is your company keeping pace with the shift digital marketing landscape? What new offerings or capabilities are you incorporating into your campaigns?
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