Catering to the new customer
The democratisation of technology use is disrupting traditional marketing experiences
Customer centricity is at the heart of an enterprise’s business strategy, right from product design, brand positioning and sales all the way to customer service. Marketing communications is no different. However, among the biggest challenges that enterprises grapple with is to identify the right customers for its products, communicate the value proposition effectively and determine returns on marketing investments precisely.
So far, businesses have been relying on marketing service providers (MSPs) to get to the hard-to-define and even harder-to-comprehend entity called “customer.”
The big hole in this approach has been that the customer is treated as a passive object who can be bombarded with messages and who would then react to them in a predictable way without offering any feedback. The other drawback has been that all measurements were approximations — there is no precise way for a business or their MSP to accurately know the impact of brand campaign and have a direct correlation with increased sales.
The future of marketing communications is being shaped by the disruption in consumer behaviour coupled with the democratisation of technology usage. Marketing communications (MarCom) is slowly getting metamorphosed into marketing technology (MarTech).
With a proliferation in communication devices, lowering cost of technology, multiple channels of commerce and explosion in user generated data, traditional MSPs are trying their best to navigate the new landscape and be a key value-added provider in the consumer buying journey. A typical process cycle for an MSP comprises of campaign planning, data ingestion, segmenting, targeting, fulfilment, and finally, reporting. This has been impacted by multiple technology forces.
Faced with the onslaught of multiple sources of structured and unstructured data, marketing agencies have struggled to get a single view of the customer. 1-to-1 personalised marketing campaigns enabled through technology can be envisaged only with this foundational layer enabled.
ROI measurement demands are shifting from device-based marketing to people-based. Rather than targeting advertisements to devices, marketers can now reach people across the many devices they use, thanks to persistent identity. To deliver this, brands and marketers need to have the ability to modify content in real time based on signals and devices and measure impact based on user responses and actions across digital channels including newer ones like augmented reality, virtual reality and Internet-of-Things (IoT)
In addition, enterprises are expecting their marketing agencies to provide value added services like customer insights through analytics, automated marketing processes using artificial intelligence and managed services for big data.
The need of the hour is to have an integrated marketing campaign approach with an omni channel view of the customer buying journey which is contextualised based on the buying stage and the device in use.
The key to success then is really to marry traditional marketing experience with new age technology solutions. This is where we see MSPs experimenting with new innovative business models and partnering with the extended technology and consulting ecosystem to provide value to their customers.