Pressure from all sides

Marketers today face a two-pronged challenge. First, consumers are expecting a more relevant brand experience. Today’s consumers have different needs— and they demand a different kind of interaction with marketing, balanced between newer digital channels and traditional offline channels.

At the same time, marketers must still deliver measurable results. Internally, the C-suite continues to demand efficiency and accountability for every endeavor, especially from marketing, which is under a microscope more than ever as every decision is scrutinized like never before. And this drive to produce credible, tangible metrics is happening at a time when marketing is continually asked to do more to help expand the consumer base while retaining existing consumers.

Internally, executives are demanding accountability. Externally, consumers are demanding a relevant experience. How do marketers address the needs of both of these unyielding audiences?

Since consumers can call the shots in how they interact with your brand, attract their interest with intelligent one-to-one engagement, and relevant offers delivered on the right platform, timed to reach customers when they are ready to listen.

“Companies synchronizing their cross-channel account engagement activities with an eye toward consistency improve customer satisfaction by twice more (5.9% vs. 2.9%) year-over-year, compared to businesses without such consistency.”

- Aberdeen Group: “Customer Experience Management: Using the Power of Analytics to Optimize Customer Delight” Jan 2012

Integrated marketing Management: a tool to satisfy the Consumer—and the bottom line

Recent advances in marketing automation enable marketers to regain control of today’s complicated marketing environment. Integrated Marketing Management (IMM) provides the tools needed to not only streamline your workflow, but also interact with your customers and consumers in innovative and personalized ways. Your team will become more efficient and effective—and you’ll be able to prove it.

Integrated Marketing Management helps bring these benefits to your organization

Data-driven value and insights

IMM lets you extract relevant information from the constant deluge of digital data. Once aggregated and analyzed, these insights are easier to communicate and share.

• Builds measurement into the process. You can’t manage what you don’t measure, and IMM helps develop metrics and benchmarks.
• Shows results. These days, accountability is key. IMM enables deeper analytics which, in turn, help demonstrate return on marketing investment (ROMI).
• Improves collaboration. IMM permits coordination between both internal teams and external resources (agencies, print shops, etc.), putting the entire marketing eco-system on the same page.
• Spurs innovation. IMM creates the awareness required to optimize future campaigns.

Clearly, an IMM implementation can tear down internal silos, simplify workflows, and improve campaign efficiency and effectiveness—all while helping to validate the true significance of your company’s marketing spend. That should go a long way to helping satisfy the corner office. But you can also translate this new marketing integration into a relevant and satisfying consumer experience. The first step is understanding the needs of today’s mediaempowered consumers.

Highly mobile and constantly connected

The attribute that most distinguishes consumers now is choice. Today’s highly mobile, continually connected consumers vote with their clicks. They expect immediate gratification when presented with marketing initiatives, whether that takes the form of useful information or a timely offer. Communications are expected to be personalized— and always relevant to current needs.

With so many other vendors in the mix, the more you can assure your consumer that you know them, the better your chances of making a connection. And that’s an absolute requirement when talking to repeat consumers.

Control of your brand has also passed into the hands of your consumers. Channels such as YouTube, Facebook and Twitter provide easy outlets for observations, opinion and debate, and today’s successful marketers recognize that the value of their brands is increasingly measured by how many “likes,” “thumbs up,” or “fans” their offerings can earn from the often fickle whims of consumers.

Creating an experience that translates into loyalty

When you successfully build relationships with consumers, you create a positive buying experience that consumers want to replicate. That translates into higher satisfaction and loyalty, recommendations to friends and family, increased frequency of shopping, increased average purchase price, and even a potential reduction in the number of returns.

Integrated Marketing Management (IMM) provides the tools needed to not only streamline your workflow, but also interact with your customers and prospects in innovative and personalized ways.

“Customer experience is the reason you have customers in the first place. An absence of technology that adds to the customer experience, allowing customers to engage, self-segment and self-personalize, and have access to communication that is relevant to them, will stall customer growth and increase customer churn.”

- Gartner: “Balance Customer Experience With Marketing Productivity in Marketing Automation Initiatives” Sept 2011

Therefore, the goal of marketing is now to give customers and consumers what they want, when they want it. Offers must be timely, messages must be relevant, and all personalization must be based on behavioral or buying history gleaned from data.

There’s a word for that: analytics. And that happens to be a particular strength of a well-executed Integrated Marketing Management environment.

The stages below detail how IMM can be used to tie together analytics, creative development and campaign execution to create a valuable consumer experience.

Marketing analysis phase

Through the marketing analysis phase, the marketer can see every data point that will add to an understanding of consumer behavior, including:

• What was purchased and when
• What channel was used
• Whether incentives were a factor
• How items/offers were discounted
• What items were purchased together
• What item, if any, was returned
• What were the reasons for a return
• How purchaser behavior can influence recommendations to others
• Store placement, demographics, geography

Questions such as these have given rise to a new type of business intelligence role: the data scientist. It’s no longer enough to simply examine data; the data scientist also explores consumer relationships in order to understand who is influencing the consumer. Through that combined knowledge, marketers can deliver more effective and relevant consumer messages.

Grocery and drug stores do this extremely well and provide coupons for frequently purchased items based on history. In the end, it’s this type of analysis that drives the relationship parameters (channel preference, brand name preference, product combos, thresholds for incentives and so on) to create and deliver a very much appreciated incentive for the consumer.

Planning and operational phase

Once you have analyzed your consumer data, you have the basis for planning the tactics for your upcoming campaigns. When personal consumer engagement is your objective, IMM can help you coordinate decisions such as:

• Number of campaigns for the year
• What are the best campaign formats-- email, direct mail, mobile, or a combination
• What will the promotional calendar look like and what are the steps needed for each campaign before the marketing department can hit “send”
• Budget for each campaign
• Based on consumer history or preference, what channels will be used
• What graphics will be used
• Which agencies will be needed
• Segments to be targeted
• Role of social media in the mix

Execution phase

When the analysis is done, and the creative has been developed and reviewed, the execution stage is initiated. Here, your IMM environment can be used to implement your planned segmentation and begin your campaign delivery. Integrated automation tools can help you:

• Deliver personalized messages and relevant offers
• Assure that messages go out in time so as to avoid coupon expiration dates, missed holiday sales or other windows of opportunities
• Track responses to measure the success rate for the campaign and allow you to potentially stop or redirect an under-performing campaign
• Allow you to demonstrate your knowledge of a consumer and continue to build that relationship.

“Marketing technology that takes direct customer input (e.g., social CRM/social marketing, Web analytics, event-triggered marketing and realtime decisioning) into consideration tends to score higher in overall customer experience.”

- Gartner: “Balance Customer Experience With Marketing Productivity in Marketing Automation Initiatives” Sept 2011

Continuing the process of refining your view of your consumer, campaign results are fed back to the analysis group to mine the data yet again to look for new trends, new insights and to potentially correct the course of a campaign that is underperforming.

Consumers demand the experience marketing integration makes possible

Consumers crave the type of interactions that can occur when an IMM solution gives a marketer the space to create relationships, drive loyalty and improve satisfaction. But the reverse is also true. Lack of integrated phases can cause breakdowns that create bottlenecks and, in turn, create delays and increase the potential for mistakes such as undeliverable emails or direct mail. Over time, this can be disastrous for consumer satisfaction levels, as too many bad experiences or repeated mistakes will cause desertion and ultimately declining revenues and profits.

Success stories: using integrated marketing management to enhance the consumer experience

Leading marketers are already beginning to chart this new way forward, using IMM to drive revenue, not by focusing on the product, but on the consumer and their experience.

International speedway corporation (isc)

ISC is the world’s leading promoter of motorsports, catering to four million racing fans. The company owns and/or operates 13 of the nation’s premier motorsports entertainment facilities, including legendary tracks such as Daytona, Talladega and Watkins Glen. ISC’s goal is to make the fan experience flawless—before, during and after over 100 events each racing season.

ISC recognized it needed to become a relationship builder, which led to a new infrastructure of people, processes and technologies that helped them cultivate a 360 degree view of their consumers. By investing in an integrated marketing approach, ISC was able to develop an award-winning CRM initiative, fanMAX, which delivers personalized, relevant and timely messages directly to fans. Results have included:

• Advanced segmentation capabilities permitted communications opt-in, granted by 56% of new consumers
• Initial project and annual costs were returned within the first year (2009)
• Estimated 50% improvement in bringing projects and campaigns to market

European insurance company

A well-known insurance company in Europe saw the need for a strategy that would win and retain more consumers, improve loyalty and maximize lifetime consumer value. Unfortunately, they were using disparate technology, including databases, campaign and consumer management systems. The company realized they needed a more integrated approach in order to achieve their goals.

“Data scientists turn big data into big value, delivering products that delight users, and insight that informs business decisions.”

- Daniel Tunkelang, PRINCIPAL DATA SCIENTIST AT LINKEDIN

“Perhaps most telling about the true value of Teradata is we have since seen an increase in the average customer lifetime value by 25%, which must be a testament to our overall improvements in customer communications and, in turn, are at least in part due to the Teradata solution.”

CRM Manager, EUROPEAN INSURANCE COMPANY

The Teradata solution was implemented and integrated with their consumer database, helping the organization maintain a real-time, total view of their consumers. Enhancing consumer relationships and dialogues through more relevant and timely content has achieved significant results, including:

• Sales volume increased by 38%
• Consumer lifetime value increased by 25%
• Administrative task implementation time reduced by over 80%

Conclusion

Marketers are being challenged from all sides: while newly empowered consumers demand more timely and relevant offers, delivered on their terms, management pushes for better accountability on all marketing initiatives. As a marketer today, the more automated and coordinated your channels, the better chance you have for furthering the interest of a consumer—and thus the better chance for a sale.

This era of increasingly empowered consumers coincides with the arrival of Integrated Marketing Management (IMM), which combines the operational, executional and analytical areas of marketing into one integrated process. Through the use of IMM tools, such as those provided by Teradata, marketers are finding real, measurable improvements in their return on marketing investments, as well as the kinds of enhanced experiences that add to consumer value and loyalty.