Senior analyst Rob Brosnan with Forrester Research, Inc. joined Anametrix CEO Pelin Thorogood as a guest speaker this week for a stimulating webinar exploring issues vital to marketing teams everywhere. With radical change underway in how consumers engage brands and what prompts them to buy, marketing teams are under pressure to respond in what Rob calls the “true age of the customer.” Now as never before, he told webinar participants, “customer knowledge drives competitive advantage.” The webinar – 3 Steps to Actionable Insights from Customer Data – is now available by replay:
Rob, who is an expert on customer analytics and technologies that make customer insight operational, looked across a broad arc of business history, noting that the most successful organizations today are those with the power to optimize customer-facing interfaces. Marketing teams need to:
- Engage the new digital buyer,
- Improve relevance and performance with customers, and
- Enhance multichannel marketing performance.
The irony, of course, is that marketers have never had more information about consumers. Everything seems measureable, but then we don’t what it means, the marketing team might say. In this multichannel world with exploding digital connections, marketing organizations still report struggling with organizational silos that treat channels in isolation while lacking tools needed to integrate multichannel marketing data. Or as Rob says, “silos trump data.” Creating a single view of the customer with other marketing channels was cited by companies surveyed in a Forrester study as the biggest challenge with marketing programs. (Source: Marketing Technology Adoption 2011, Forrester Research, February 28, 2011)
What’s clear is that the “path to purchase” is no longer linear. Consumers follow circular movements of discovery, search, research, purchase, use, share, personalizing and eventually evangelizing to social networks and friends. Marketing organizations need to know how to build the relationship, not within the traditional marketing “funnel,” but across a fluid, digitally driven customer ecosystem. The marketing team also must understand not just how to deliver a message, but who the customers are and how and why they buy. And in this circular “path to purchase,” a post-purchase strategy is crucial to nurture customers across these channels and methods of engagement to drive customer lifetime value.
What’s evolving is what Forrester calls the “always-addressable consumer,” defined as someone who goes online three or more times a day using multiple devices from multiple locations. Forrester in 2011 found that 38 percent of U.S. adults were in that category, but Rob believes that number increased significantly in 2012. (Source: ”The Always Addressable Customer”, Forrester Research, September, 26, 2012)
How do you gain customer intelligence from the data generated across the customer journey? How do you manage campaigns based on comprehensive customer insights? Rob and Pelin discussed key places to begin:
- Rationalize Marketing processes – the marketing organization needs to streamline the use of data in an ever-growing set of tasks. The organization must look at restructuring marketing processes with a focus on the customer and the data that’s generated about them.
- Invest in a new analytical methods and technologies. Marketing teams today need real-time campaign optimization, coupled with predictive capabilities to provide recommendations for changes to marketing programs, and reveal performance optimization opportunities. And, according to Pelin, they can do this with the type of new advances in digital analytics captured in the Anametrix analytics platform, which enable organizations to connect vendor data and integrate multichannel information in real time, opening the door to managing campaigns across the full customer lifecycle and identifying the true levers of change.
- Create a united roadmap. Marketers need to align the organization around the customer. It’s not enough to invest in a single new data source or technology or project. It’s instead better to think about the entire program involving customer data, centralized marketing processes and the technology investments.
Don’t forget – if you haven’t heard the webinar, you can still catch the replay. And please share with us your stories and views on customer intelligence, multichannel marketing and the analytics you need to make it work.