Cross-Channel Marketing

In late 2013, we invit­ed read­ers to par­tic­i­pate in the Quar­terly Dig­i­tal Intel­li­gence Brief­ing with Econ­sul­tancy. The sur­vey cov­ered mul­ti­chan­nel mar­ket­ing result­ing in this report from Econ­sul­tan­cy; “Chan­nels in Con­cert: Trends in Inte­grat­ing Mar­ket­ing”. We found that mul­ti­chan­nel cam­paign tech­nol­o­gy was lim­it­ed to less than a fifth of respond­ing com­pa­nies, with more than half say­ing they were plan­ning to use such a solu­tion in the next 18 months.

In asso­ci­a­tion with Econ­sul­tan­cy, Adobe is car­ry­ing out their lat­est research for the next Dig­i­tal Intel­li­gence Brief­ing on Mul­ti­chan­nel Cam­paign Man­age­ment. Our goal for this new research is to val­i­date our find­ings from the pre­vi­ous study and gain new insights into how the B2B com­mu­ni­ty is apply­ing mul­ti­chan­nel cam­paign, now cross-chan­nel, mar­ket­ing in 2015 and what their plans are for 2016 and beyond.

The key inter­est is to deter­mine if com­pa­ny capa­bil­i­ties in cross-chan­nel mar­ket­ing have changed since Decem­ber 2013. Mar­ket­ing tech­nol­o­gy is devel­op­ing and matur­ing at a rapid rate. The dig­i­tal matu­ri­ty of your com­pa­ny is an impor­tant fac­tor to be able to add these new tech­nolo­gies to the cor­po­rate tech stack in a way that has val­ue and ROI for your mar­ket­ing effort. We pur­sue the answers to those ques­tions via this sur­vey. The cre­ation of new cus­tomer touch points via the Inter­net of Things (IoT) such as wear­ables, smart home sen­sors, and retail near field com­mu­ni­ca­tion (NFC)/iBeacon and low pow­er Blue­tooth have cre­at­ed many oppor­tu­ni­ties to learn more and more about your cus­tomer base.

In the area of cor­po­rate cul­ture and organ­i­sa­tion­al strate­gies, have you been able to break down the siloed bas­tions of data and cre­ate inte­grat­ed teams that now include mar­keters, sales, data ana­lysts, cre­ative pro­fes­sion­als and IT resources? These are dif­fi­cult things to car­ry out effec­tive­ly as change is nev­er a uni­ver­sal­ly accept­ed effort. How suc­cess­ful have you been? We’d like to know.

The 2013 study told us that only 12% of in-com­pa­ny busi­ness­es take an inte­grat­ed approach to all cam­paigns across all chan­nels. Fur­ther­more, few com­pa­nies regard them­selves as ‘capa­ble’ when it comes to relat­ed areas such as hav­ing a sin­gle cus­tomer view (26%), cus­tomer jour­ney analy­sis (19%) and data-dri­ven mar­ket­ing deci­sions in real time (14%). We hope to see an improve­ment in those percentages.

Those tak­ing part in this sur­vey will get a free, advance copy of the result­ing Quar­ter­ly Dig­i­tal Intel­li­gence Brief­ing, which will be pub­lished by Econ­sul­tan­cy in August 2015.

What are your obsta­cles to cross-chan­nel suc­cess? Com­plex­i­ty, bud­get, under­stand­ing mar­ket­ing tech­nol­o­gy, C‑suite buy-in, changes in organ­i­sa­tion­al struc­ture or some­thing else? Take the sur­vey and let us know.

Click here to take the sur­vey.