To succeed in today’s technically sophisticated marketing environment requires unprecedented collaboration between a company’s CTO, CIO, and CMO.
Ready
The CTO must ensure that the company is technologically prepared to engage customers and prospects across a broadening array of technologies that comprise the modern marketing stack. In order to be able to personalize experiences for potential and existing customers, companies must first have a single customer view. A study commissioned by Forrester uncovered that the top three obstacles in achieving this view are inability to link different technologies (40%), poor data quality (34%), and lack of relevant technology (32%). Ensuring that the various technologies work both independently and cooperatively with one another is of supreme importance. Lag time is often the enemy of the better customer connection. If handoffs are not smooth (or superfluous ones eliminated) the moment of impact is often lost.
Installing a central real-time hub that takes in data from all the spokes and pushes actions back out through the appropriate channels is an absolute must.
Aim
Gathering the right amount of data from the right sources at the right time is paramount in flawless execution of a successful marketing plan. Companies identified gaining insight quickly enough (40%), having enough data (39%), and inaccurate data (38%) as some of their many challenges (Forrester). Often it falls to the company CIO to make sense of all that precious metadata. Making matters even more complex is the increasing diversity of data sources. POS register data comingles with other offline data like service tickets before getting bumped up against eComm, web and especially mobile data. Separating the data forest for the trees without losing sight of customer identification is dishearteningly difficult without a single view of the customer in all their data-creating incarnations.
Linking data to a centralized CMS where the customer is at the center of the wheel is critical to creating the kinds of personalized engagements that separate companies that have data from those that use it.
Fire
You know who you’re after and you’ve got the right tool for the job. Now what? The CMO is charged with finding that point of intersection–often very time-sensitive and device-bound– where the customer is open to the company proposition. Not the proposition you’ve cut and pasted from her neighbor who’s an entirely different person altogether. The one that’s personalized for her. The one that recognizes where she’s been and done and offers her an opportunity to go further with the brand. Think of the best waiters you’ve ever had. They weren’t cloying, hovering, interrupting, or ignoring. Just as one course was ending they gracefully swept in and presented the next. When the main course was finished they made refusing coffee and dessert unimaginable. The modern CMO must possess this deft touch and keen timing.
This is the essence of the new personalized engagement model. It’s tailored, understated, informed, and above all impeccably timed.
Bon Appetit!
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