Technology brings opportunity, but it also brings complexity. As technological advancements continue to ramp at an accelerated pace, marketers must stay abreast of the current trends and modern marvels that promise to elevate customer engagement to new heights.
New mobile devices, digital analytics, and social channels are constantly emerging to provide brands with the tools necessary to deliver the personalized customer experiences that can drive true brand loyalty. This is all good news. The problem, however, is that many are struggling to keep up.
More and more are turning to outside help to maintain a high level of technological prowess, and IBM just came out with a powerful new platform to help brands address these concerns.
It’s called the IBM Marketing Cloud, and it will allow marketers a greater ability to engage with customers as individuals, while concurrently simplifying the entire customer engagement process.
IBM developed the product after conducting an IBM/eConsultancy study that found only 35% of consumes reported to have meaningful and relevant contact with favored brands. Furthermore, the vast majority of consumers (80%) also stated than brands neglected to see them as individuals.
Most marketing experts have long understood the value of developing highly personalized customer experiences. But as these opportunities to personalize increase so too do the complexities involved. This is why implementing the right technology becomes crucial.
“IBM is providing innovations such as Journey Analytics to allow marketers to gain insights into customers at depths they could never have imagined just a few years ago,” said Deepak Advani, General Manager of IBM Commerce. “Teams can then turn these insights into campaigns to deliver powerful experiences that engage customers in-context and ultimately build advocacy.”
IBM Journey Analytics, which produces real-time relevancy by precisely visualizing and quantifying data acquired across all customer journeys, is just one of the features included in the new suite. IBM Marketing Cloud also includes IBM Journey Designer, a simple drag-and-drop virtual whiteboard that allows brands to map customer journeys and helps to generate well thought-out marketing decisions.
IBM Customer Experience Analytics seamlessly combines and integrates all digital analytics to give a complete and easy-to-understand view of how customers are interacting with a brand on numerous levels. Finally, IBM Commerce Insights provides a host of predictive analytics to help brands quickly respond to changing market forecasts, evolving customer behaviors, and shifting competitor tactics.
IBM continues to move forward with plans to provide simplified marketing integrations for brands. Committed to maximizing the capacity for brands to effectively wield the full power of data analytics to create relevant customer experiences, IBM has also recently announced a new collaboration with Facebook to connect the “right people at the right time with the right message.”
“Marketers are the gatekeepers to the customer and have the opportunity to understand each individual and guide them on the path through a mix of campaigns designed to nurture brand loyalists,” Advani said. “To succeed, however, marketers must embrace technologies that offer them the opportunity to build two way engagements with each customer and deliver a meaningful and relevant experience.”