There’s a reason why the stories of those who have broken the grip of convention tend to endure. Whether discussing art or science or anything in between, the people who have dared to seek new routes have often made crucial advancements in their fields. The customer experience and brand loyalty marketing landscape is no different. And as the world around us continually advances at a frightening pace, now, more than ever, we need those that are willing to trail blaze new paths.
“Challenging Convention: Disruptive Modern Marketing” was the title of the session that focused on this very topic. Presented by Oracle at the Modern Marketing Experience conference in Las Vegas, the panel, hosted by Andrea Ward, VP Marketing for Oracle Marketing Cloud, featured an interesting discussion with several leading professionals.
The panel included: Megan Lueders, Vice President of Lifesize; Kathryn Schottoefer, Senior Vice President of HeavenSpot; Sandy Viteri, Vice President of comScore; and Neil Rongstad, Global Manager of Marketing Demand Central at Rockwell Automation. The panelists discussed examples fof new marketing techniques that can help cut through the noise.
This is becoming increasingly vital as almost all industries are going through many disruptive changes. Sweeping migrations to the cloud, social media connectivity, and advanced mobile capabilities are all transformative factors. And regardless of how brands feel about these changes, they are significantly affecting customer engagement and, inevitably, must be addressed.
Many traditional marketers, however, have been hesitant to make any dramatic changes to the way they orchestrate campaigns. But during this session, the speakers offered a number of examples of how some evolving strategies are beginning to make headway in this technologically advanced environment.
“Every single element of marketing really requires a transformation and continues to require constant testing of what messaging works,” Lueders said. “We have a greater ability to test what works and what resonates with different customers at different times and across different channels. And through that, we have been able to restructure how we approach investments in technology.”
This technology, of course, can help in innumerable ways, but increasingly it is become an essential means to capture, analyze, and effectively use data to drive new marketing measures. Viteri spoke at length regarding how her organization approaches data integration and the customer segmentations it builds.
“We used to just bombard our customers with email, but now it has really moved beyond that,” Viteri said. “It is really analyzing that data and actually looking at the specifics such as personal preferences, demographics, and conversion rates to enhance targeting.”
Viteri encouraged all marketers to start thinking about data in this way.
Neil Rongstad expanded on the importance and usefulness of data by discussing aspects of outbound channel optimization. By combining internal data, advanced management platforms such as Oracle, and even outside data streams, a much greater range of dynamic content can be offered to customers.
“This allows us to really hone in on our market because we are B2B-focused, but Rockwell Automation is really a small niche within B2B,” said Rongstad. “So combining our data with third-party data streams allows us to focus on very specific audience definitions. So when we activate data to different platforms such as paid search or display or video or mobile or social, we can be very specific around an audience.”
In the past, Rockwell would have retargeted a general message to a virtually anonymous website visitor, but now detailed precision is heighted to a substantial degree.
“Now we look at ‘this’ individual, in ‘this’ country, in a specific industry,” Rongstad continued. “Let’s say this person in the food and beverage industry is an electrical engineer and is at the director level. So we can be very specific in terms of the types of messages that we deliver. It is very revolutionary in terms of being able to target individuals.”
Another dynamic and nascent space that marketers are now forced to contend with is the social media sphere.
For far too long, marketers have been hung up on the idea that if they create content, then it somehow spontaneously brings intrinsic value to the customer experience. But Schottoefer was quick to caution that just because marketers are excited does not mean that the consumers are.
This chain of thinking must be broken, and social media is helping the transformation take place. Used in the right way, markers now have the relevant contexts and powerful platforms with which to gauge customer interests and to open a meaningful dialogue.
“We as marketers tell ourselves a lot of stories about how much consumers want to hear from us,” Schottoefer said. “Creating content that is worthy and integrating it into the right platform and serving it to the right consumers at the right time, while making sure that we are respectful of their time and attention - that is when we see the rise in personal interactions and engagements from customers.”
This social “front door,” as Schottoefer called it, is a great place to be friendly, engaging, and personal. To build strong and personal customer relationships going forward, marketers will have to start connecting digital and social elements with the human components of their business.
And along with comprehensive data integration, diversified customer segmentations, and precisely targeted messaging, this dynamic social sphere is just another frontier that some innovative marketers are already fruitfully exploring. Soon many more will likely follow in their stead, and not only to these new horizons, but on toward the countless others that surely lay ahead.
About the Author: Mark Johnson
Mark is CEO & CMO of Loyalty360. He has significant experience in selling, designing and administering prepaid, loyalty/CRM programs, as well as data-driven marketing communication programs.