“…by using a variety of channels and triggering more and more interactions with companies as they seek to meet discrete needs, customers create clusters of interactions that make their individual interactions less important than their cumulative experience.”

- McKinsey & Company, The three Cs of customer satisfaction: Consistency, consistency, consistency, March 2014

The path to purchase is often depicted as a circular journey. But buyers’ non-linear approach to researching options and making a purchase decision can include many starts and stops and varying levels of engagement and diversions at any given moment. At the same time, buyers expect personalized interactions with your brand. Anything less and you risk them turning their attention to your competitors.

To effectively engage these individuals, marketers like you need to leverage technology that helps you develop unified, up-todate buyer personas/profiles and shift from linear campaigns to continuous, interactive engagement across all channels and devices.

Why traditional digital marketing technologies fall short

Like most other marketers, you’ve likely relied on a range of tools to engage prospects and customers. These can include everything from traditional campaign management software and specialized marketing software modules to marketing automation. But these systems were not designed to support the multifaceted interactions that occur along the path to purchase in today’s omnichannel world. Nor do they satisfy the expectations of the “always on” Millennial generation.

Moreover, these systems are often purchased for standalone use by independent departments or individuals responsible for the different parts of the digital marketing continuum (i.e., web, social, mobile, etc.). Even though each group may collect data from each prospect or customer interaction, the data remains siloed. As a result, your marketing department as a whole usually lacks a crosschannel view of each person interacting with your brand.

Marketers must shift their mindsets

Prospects and customers don’t think in terms of channels or devices so neither should you. If you do, you expose channel inconsistency and frustrate your audience.

What’s required is a new platform designed for marketers. It needs to enable a consistent, personalized customer experience, and be fully integrated with solutions for every existing and emerging channel, including email, web, social and mobile. This platform should make it possible to – in real time – gather and analyze data generated as part of the prospect’s or customer’s omni-channel experience.

By tapping into this data, your brand can naturally and seamlessly engage buyers along the path to purchase. This is in stark contrast to blasting out one-way, blanket campaigns that are so generalized they resonate with few and produce lackluster results. In other words, you need to think in terms of a holistic customer experience rather than linear campaigns. And you need the technology that makes this possible.

2 out of 3 Millennials have little or no confidence that companies can market to them effectively.

- SDL, Understanding the Millennials, An SDL Customer Experience Research Report, 2014

Orchestrate continuous campaigns

To overcome today’s digital marketing challenges and engage with buyers at every stage in their individual journeys, you should take the following steps:

1. Map out the customer journey

You need to gain a deep understanding of the path that prospects and customers take over the lifecycle of their engagement with your brand. This covers all stages from prospect to customer to repeat customer to advocate. You must also use appropriate measurements to gauge how well you are engaging the right individuals at each stage of the journey. Specifically, you need to focus on metrics associated with selecting and converting the ideal prospect, not just any prospect. Typically these are customer lifetime value (CLV) and engagement metrics.

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2. Define an adaptive marketing strategy

Adjust your strategies in two key ways. First, campaigns need to be interactive and align with each prospect’s or customer’s journey to purchase. Second, the overall marketing strategy must accommodate shifting customer expectations and new channels.

3. Avoid one-off conversions

Today’s buyers often don’t make themselves known to your brand until they are far along in the purchase process. As a result, you must harness the rich data about prospects and customers that is generated via their activities in digital channels. By zeroing in on relevant data, you can intelligently personalize interactions, even with “unknown” contacts. Furthermore, once you detect patterns around these “unknowns,” you can identify prospects that exhibit similar online behaviors and deliver an experience that encourages an ultimate purchase and higher return on your marketing investment.

4. Focus on building long-term customer relationships

You must tap into all the data at your disposal to pinpoint customer preferences and motivations. By then thoughtfully engaging individuals throughout their customer journeys, your brand will reap the rewards of customer loyalty, advocacy and higher lifetime value.

5. Empower the marketing team with customer insights

Today’s sophisticated analytical tools are designed to support the needs of business users such as those in marketing. The most advanced of these support various marketing roles to deliver an experience that suits each marketing person’s need. Adopt these tools and train your marketing team so they are comfortable enough with analytics that external data gurus are no longer needed.

6. Analyze data in real time

Merge and analyze data from the web with other data sources as it is generated. By analyzing the data, you can detect patterns in the on-site behaviors of unknown prospects and correlate this to known prospects and customers to enhance future interactions.

7. Optimize results with advanced, real-time reporting

You need up-to-the-minute insight into the value your campaigns deliver to the business. Ideally, you can call upon real-time – rather than historical – reports to dynamically adjust active campaigns for optimal results. At the same time, you need to tie together buyer activities that occur in different channels so you can properly attribute them to the appropriate marketing tactics. For example, if marketing sends an email to a prospect and the prospect sends a Tweet to the company as a result, you must be able to correlate these events.