The Challenges of Marketing Campaign Integration

The “always on” customer is driving new challenges in how we strategize and conduct marketing campaigns to engage those customers in personal and real-time ways. The upcoming Super Bowl is an excellent example of the challenge. Fans in the stands will have their smartphones and tablets so they can watch . . . yep, the commercials. According to MarketingCharts.com, fans at last year’s Super Bowl “were engaged on their mobile devices throughout the experience, with the heaviest use of Wi-Fi coming during the halftime show, according to Extreme networks. These fans engaged with social networking applications the most. Mobile data originating from the Super Bowl stadium broke records, according to AT&T and Verizon data reported by Computerworld. Mobile sharing was up by 67% during Super Bowl Sunday compared to 2013, with sharing on Android nearly doubling, per AddThis.”

The good news is that just as the customers drive the new challenge, they also present the answer to addressing the challenge as they engage the Super Bowl on a broad cross section of screens and devices across both online and offline channels.

Each customer leaves crumbs of data after each visit to any of these channels, whether it be to your brand’s Web properties, third-party sites, affiliate websites, or to the social media sites they use to visit with family and friends. It’s all there in that massive clump of big data your analytics tool gathers in the last millisecond of every day. Each crumb of data may or may not be part of the answer, but with that thought comes the realization that the challenge has been thrown back into the brand’s court. You must learn how to gather, process, and gain insights from the customer’s data so that you can responsibly personalize your interactions with them with the most relevant communication or offer through the right touchpoint.

Cross-channel orchestration is the challenge you face. My guess is that you have a need to transition from a multichannel culture where you have siloed teams handling social—probably a different team for every channel—maybe even another campaign team on owned web properties. And so it goes, expert teams for each channel with little to no cross channel communication or orchestration. Bottom line, you are not serving your customers well. Listen to my colleague Mathieu Hannouz talk about cross channel orchestration.

Ask yourself some questions about how well your marketing campaigns are orchestrated at your company. I’ll even help you along a bit with three questions I ask myself every day about marketing channels and execution across those channels:

Reporting and Analytics

  1. Can we orchestrate and define, from a centralized marketing console, the customer online and offline touchpoints and channels in which we choose to engage?
  2. Do we have the ability to engage with customers in outbound channels such as: email, direct mail, SMS, mobile app push, social posts, and others?
  3. Do we have the ability to engage with customers in inbound channels such as: web, social, call center, point of sale, ATM/kiosk, and others?

We need to start thinking of channels as customer touchpoints and start connecting the dots between every customer interaction in a holistic way that will win in the digital world. Our recently released Guide to Touchpoint Marketing provides the key to understanding customers’ behaviors and preferences across devices and touchpoints, which is to act locally by delivering personalized, relevant content, offers, programs, and services to them, precisely when and where they need them on whatever device they are using at the time. Our campaign self-assessment tool will broaden your perspective. The Forrester Wave™: Cross-Channel Campaign Management, Q3 2014 report also provides an excellent and thought-provoking insight on what makes a cross channel marketing campaign process valuable to the customer. It can be downloaded here.

We are now ready to talk about turning our challenges into opportunities. In the preceding discussion, we have hit upon three primary themes that must be addressed within the company.

  1. Get control of your data. All brands have a tool that they use to gather, process, and analyze data for insights into all things marketing. As a marketing campaign manager, you have your own tool for managing campaigns across all customer touchpoints, inbound and outbound, online and offline. Is your tool integrated with the analytics tool? No doubt you will have to break down an organizational silo or two to make it happen, but the grand prize is the ability to develop an accurate and instantly responsive Integrated Customer Profile that contains every relevant piece of business information about each customer at the individual level. Listen to my colleague Mathieu Hannouz talk about the benefits and value of an Integrated Customer Profile.

The key benefits of making this happen are invaluable.

Read the complete discussion of the value and benefits of integrating your campaign management tool with your analytics tool in this white paper.

  1. Organizational alignment and integration. There are many other marketing tools in use across the enterprise. These legacy tools can be leveraged and integrated for additional opportunities for both improving the campaign management product and breaking down organizational siloes. These business units, which operate other tools to document the user experience (UX) on brand owned web properties and link the valuable creative digital assets of the corporation to the marketing teams, can be matrixed into your campaign management team for maximum effectiveness in creating a positive customer experience (CX) through your efforts. Integrating UX to CX is incredibly exciting in delivering the ultimate customer personalization experience.

The key benefits of the integration of UX to CX include:

Read the complete discussion of the value and benefits of integrating your user experience manager tool with your campaign management tool in this white paper.

  1. Proof of ROI through accurate attributional reporting. We all need to know how our marketing is performing. The marketing campaign dashboard must reveal all of this at a glance across the enterprise. Adding new customer touchpoints and channels adds new reporting metrics and a need to adjust the data algorithm and integration with the analytics tool. Marketers often get discouraged by reporting abilities that aren’t robust enough for their specific use cases (i.e., they are not tracking enough/the right metrics) or that are murky about how to tie the metrics back to ROI.

The facts and figures on Super Bowl 2014 are available on MarketingCharts.com. If you need some motivation on why cross channel marketing is important, go look at the mobile marketing stats on the site. The stats below will just make you hungry for more.

Marketers have many choices when it comes to campaign management tools. I hope I’ve given you some insight into how to make the tool you choose work for your company. Adobe Campaign is an intuitive, automated way to deliver one-to-one messages across online and offline marketing channels. New Adobe Campaign lets you orchestrate personalized experiences determined by the customer’s habits and preferences. Finally, there is a solution that helps you know what customers want even before they do.

Summit
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Join us for the Adobe Summit in Salt Lake City and see Adobe Campaign up close and personal.

Yes, Adobe Campaign can keep up with the speed and hype of the Super Bowl.