It’s a mad, mad, multichannel world

You must be mad to be a dig­i­tal mar­keter. Just look at what’s going on with the con­sumer jour­ney: it’s a tan­gled maze of chan­nels and devices. But cheer up; it’s only going to get worse! New dig­i­tal chan­nels and devices will make the con­sumer jour­ney – and your abil­i­ty to deliv­er a con­sis­tent, rel­e­vant and engag­ing expe­ri­ence – even more complex.

It is gen­uine­ly dif­fi­cult to man­age con­tent across your web, social and mobile apps and prop­er­ties (in mul­ti­ple regions, no less). It gets even hard­er to deliv­er that con­tent across dif­fer­ent devices with dif­fer­ent screen sizes and res­o­lu­tions. To make mat­ters worse, con­sumers’ atten­tion spans are shrink­ing, so you’ve got less time than ever to engage the con­sumer. Oh, and the half life of con­tent is shrink­ing, which means you have to cre­ate or source more con­tent more fre­quent­ly to keep things interesting.

Quick recap: con­sumers need more and more con­tent that you need to seam­less­ly deliv­er across a grow­ing num­ber of chan­nels and devices and do so in real time. Yes, you indeed must be mad to be a dig­i­tal marketer.

For­tu­nate­ly, con­tent man­age­ment is grow­ing up and mak­ing this night­mar­ish job a man­age­able real­i­ty. In fact, many Euro­pean com­pa­nies in numer­ous indus­tries are re-plat­form­ing their con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem (CMS) to keep up. Lon­don-based Investec pro­vides a seam­less expe­ri­ence across its glob­al web­sites using Adobe Expe­ri­ence Man­ag­er, and dou­bled their site traf­fic in the process (read about that here). If you are attend­ing Adobe Sum­mit: The Dig­i­tal Mar­ket­ing Con­fer­ence, next week in Lon­don, you’ll hear from sev­er­al com­pa­nies that have recent­ly re-plat­formed to meet the chal­lenges of the increas­ing­ly com­plex cus­tomer jour­ney. These com­pa­nies include:

• Shawn Burns, Glob­al Vice Pres­i­dent, Dig­i­tal Mar­ket­ing, SAP, who will dis­cuss how com­pa­nies are con­nect­ing to cus­tomers by build­ing brand engage­ment through per­son­al­ized con­tent and expe­ri­ences (How to stand out: Sur­vival of the most rel­e­vant, April 24th at 14:00, ses­sion #24202)
• Stevin Treurni­et, Senior Mar­ket­ing Con­sul­tant, DSM, who will dis­cuss insights learned as DSM re-plat­formed to deliv­er rich, engag­ing con­tent to audi­ences across devices world­wide (The marketer’s guide to solu­tions for build­ing brands online, April 2th at 11:40, ses­sion #25205).

Last­ly, lead­ing inde­pen­dent research firm For­rester recent­ly issued “The For­rester Wave™: Web Con­tent Man­age­ment For Dig­i­tal Cus­tomer Expe­ri­ence, Q2 2013” report. (You can click on the hyper­link above for a free copy of the report), which stress­es the impor­tance for com­pa­nies to move beyond using CMS as a means to sim­ply man­age con­tent and strate­gi­cal­ly uti­lize it to cre­ate dig­i­tal expe­ri­ences. Think of this as CMS 2.0. They eval­u­at­ed 10 web con­tent man­age­ment sys­tems in light of this new chal­lenge using 100 cri­te­ria and named Adobe the leader. How­ev­er, we are still in the begin­ning stages of com­pa­nies re-plat­form­ing so they can indeed use con­tent man­age­ment to bet­ter con­nect with customers.

We are excit­ed to help com­pa­nies nav­i­gate their way through the tan­gled mess and mire of deliv­er­ing more con­tent across more chan­nels and devices and doing so in mil­lisec­onds. It may seem a her­culean task, but real­ly the explo­sion in dig­i­tal con­tent, chan­nels and devices is an incred­i­ble oppor­tu­ni­ty for mar­keters. If we get this right, our cus­tomers will love us. If we get this wrong, our cus­tomers will quick­ly find more user friend­ly, rel­e­vant alternatives.

It may be a mad world we live in as dig­i­tal mar­keters, but it cer­tain­ly isn’t boring!