No matter the touchpoint, the channel, or the device they use, a customer is still just one person. Learn how to treat them that way and adopt an effective omnichannel strategy that unifies the customer experience with Bitly’s and Shoppable’s CEOs as well as VB analyst Stewart Rogers.
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As customer touchpoints keep multiplying, so do engagement technologies — and marketers are scrambling to keep up. The latest VentureBeat Insight report, “Omnichannel Trends: Data, platforms, mobile, and commerce,” found that only 34 percent of marketing organizations have turned their focus on harnessing the power of a single engagement platform.
Mark Josephson, CEO of link management powerhouse Bitly and Heather Marie, CEO of Shoppable, the leader in universal checkout technology, joined VentureBeat’s director of marketing technology, Stewart Rogers, to discuss the report. Along they way, they shared some vital insight into how marketers can expertly juggle the proliferation of marketing platforms in a way customers will actually respond to.
One of the biggest takeaways: Data seems like it should be the key, but it might not be enough. As the platforms for capturing customer data continue to proliferate with the number of marketing channels and devices, CMOs are being showered with money and expected to turn this new data into gold.
The beauty of data is that it turns into hard numbers that can inform your decisions, says Josephson. You should be measuring at every step of the funnel, at every step of the journey, so that you can find out what’s working, what’s not, where the optimization needs to take place, or where the drop-off might be happening.
“The thing I see the most successful marketers doing is understanding who their customers are, understanding the markets and touchpoints where they want to reach them, and then having a plan for executing those marketing campaigns,” he continues. “And then measure, measure, measure to understand what’s working and what’s not.”
Marie agrees. “Really good use of mobile marketing automation technology and omnichannel is all about using data to send the right message at the right time to the right person to give them what they need,” she says. But, she warns, it needs to be good-quality engagement.
“We have to use all the data these platforms give us to inform our solutions,” Rogers adds, “but at the end of the day it comes back to treating customers like humans.”
“There’s creativity and thoughtfulness that has to go into creating the campaigns and content and the customer journey you want to take your customers through,” Josephson agrees.
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“Consumers are smart. Consumers are savvy. And they’re used to being just inundated with marketing advertising across all devices and all experiences,” says Marie. In the omnichannel world, she asserts, marketers need to first recognize that, and then speak to the customer in a way that puts their needs first. Understand the customer, what’s important to them, what their needs are, and then speak to them intelligently.
“That’s how the best marketers today are already communicating,” Josephson agrees. “You’re speaking to a different kind of engaged customer. The funnel doesn’t work in an elegant fashion top to bottom; it zig-zags across multiple channels, multiple devices, and multiple platforms, and with divided attention spans.”
And to successfully build your brand presence and keep your customer’s attention, you need to think about that entire journey start to finish. And when you reach out, it’s crucial for marketers to be authentic, to understand the customers they’re trying to reach and deliver value to them along the way.
To learn more about how marketing needs to transition to communication, find out from case studies how successful companies leverage authentic omnichannel marketing and get an even bigger taste of the VB Insight report, take a listen to the free webinar now.
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Don’t miss out!
Access this VB Live event on demand right here.
What you’ll learn in this webinar:
- Why today’s marketing automation solutions fall short of customer expectations
- How winning omnichannel marketing strategies balance push notifications, in-app messages, email, and social communications
- Why understanding users on a person level, and not device level, is critical in mobile
- Why “Marketing” is evolving to “Communicating” and how to prepare for that transition
Speakers:
- Mark Josephson, CEO, Bitly
- Heather Marie, CEO, Shoppable
- Stewart Rogers, director of marketing technology, VentureBeat
Moderator:
- Wendy Schuchart, analyst, VentureBeat
This webinar is sponsored by IBM Marketing Cloud.