Integrated Marketing Technologies

In order to help your customers in a time of a pandemic, understanding them from a multi-channel point of view is crucial. As my fellow Blender published on Wednesday, the Pareto rule demands we do not treat every customer the same. In these uncertain times, now is the best time to use the technology available to us as marketers to really amplify our messaging. This should be done by understanding our customers’ needs and wants, both in message and channel.

The technology today allows for the right message at the right time in the correct channel, yet few businesses are exploiting these technologies. We're now up to 7,040 solutions on the 2020 Marketing Technology Landscape. While these numbers are staggering what is worse is the lack of integration amongst key players.

With integrated MarTech stacks, delivering the right message at the right time in the correct channel is available to organizations today. Yet few organizations are executing on this ability. Why?

Clearly most organizations have applications that are touted as integrated marketing applications but if we look at reports by Gartner or Forrester, the true real-time communication aspects lag what is considered personalization today.

The real key we believe is three-fold:

1. Organizational Structure

2. Data and Governance

3. Bonus and Incentives

Organizations Structures:

We’ve observed in large, multi-channel, multi-LOB companies with which we’ve worked the problem originates in the org chart. The one box that has both responsibility for customer experience and the span of control to impact it broadly isn’t usually found more than 1-2 levels down from the CEO. This allows for confusion on what is the goal of the customer experience practice within a organization.

Bottom-line, the organizational structure creates significant barriers to improving the customer experience in a way that feels satisfying and consistent to those customers experiencing it.

Data and Governance:

Few organizations truly understand the value of their operational data. They have not spent the time or the energy to identify, catalog and inventory all aspects of their organization to highlight where key data resides. After the identification of those data and elements are understood, few companies understand how to transform that raw information into customer intelligence.

This customer intelligence data must then be brought to Customer Intelligence Hub so that it can inform the Martech stack allowing for true customer experience enablement.

Bonus and Incentives:

Accepting that corporate decisions are made in alignment with organizational structure and their inherent effect on compensation, it’s no wonder that most customer experiences are optimized by channel, LOB or product because that’s how the organization is structured. This is not aligned with customers at all.

So how does an organization go about getting through these barriers?

We should use this time to regroup and think about our customers. When brands truly believe their customers are their life blood, then the three factors above can be changed overnight.

Move the customer to the front of the line in your organizational structure, treat all relevant data as sacred as your most valuable asset and create bonus incentives around your organization’s maturity on the customer experience curve.

By implementing these changes today, we can have a large impact on our clients tomorrow.

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