Reimagine marketing: Today, tomorrow and in times of disruption

Putting the customer first isn’t exactly a new concept, but it’s never been more important than it is now. According to the Experience 2030 survey, brands that succeed in the coming decade must put aside their preferences and biases-- and deliver the services, features and technologies that customers seek.

Brands must be agile and adaptive to ever-evolving consumer needs. They must reimagine their customer operating models and technology in order to act with accuracy, agility and, above all, empathy.

In its tech trends 2020 report, Deloitte reinforces the need for empathy, understanding and contextually relevant communications by highlighting human experience platforms. They posit that the ability to leverage emotionally intelligent platforms, to recognize and use emotional data at scale, will be one of the biggest and most important opportunities for marketers going forward.

At SAS, we believe marketers are embracing the challenge. The 2020 CMO survey reveals that spending on the customer experience (CX) has increased 71% over the last three years--from 8.9% of marketing budgets to 15.2%,with marketers expecting to spend 36% more (up to 20.6%) of their marketing budgets on CX in the next three years.

Mapping martech to the marketing lifecycle

Fortunately, marketing technology is undergoing a renaissance at just the right time to facilitate this reimagining. Channel-focused solutions are fast becoming extinct. Upheavals in markets, societies and technology are becoming the norm. To deliver a self-reinforcing cycle of tailored and empathetic customer experiences, organizations must adopt a new generation of martech systems that deliver unprecedented levels of customer intimacy, targeted engagement, and quantifiable impact.

One way to make sure you’re prepared for the new reality is to look at each step in the marketing process (the marketing lifecycle) and map martech capabilities into the lifecycle, based on what you are trying to accomplish with each step.

Marketing data management

It goes without saying that a true omnichannel view requires accurate and comprehensive customer data. Capabilities to look for here include:

• A digital customer profile. Known and unknown digital activity should be linked, and every digital interaction consolidated to the customer level. PII-free identifiers should help synchronize customer data sources —whether offline, geodemographic, account level insights, call center interactions, and more. Data should be presented in an open data model that can be combined with non-digital customer data and shared across marketing and analytical tools.
  
  
• Rigorous data management capabilities. These should include data access, data quality, data integration, data federation, data governance, master data management and data streaming.

Marketing planning

Marketers can streamline operations by managing all marketing processes across the entire marketing lifecycle for greater consistency, efficiency and effectiveness – from marketing strategy development and planning to content creation, journey activation, and post-campaign analysis.

Coordinated and consistent planning, and the ability to dynamically tune marketing activity as customers change their journeys, is vital for this reimagined environment. An integrated planning tool should include:

• Adaptive, agile methods that facilitate planning top down, bottom up, or via a combination. A variety of levels should be supported – brand, product, program, or campaign - with the ability to adapt and change quickly and easily. Complete visibility should be provided into timeframes, costs, overruns and performance via calendars, a user interface, and contextual reporting.
  
  
• Analytically informed planning -- including integrated attribution, market mix modeling, data unification and embedded analytics -- should be available at the point of need. Planning tools should allow for better, faster decisions, enable more effective budget use, and facilitate adjustments in real time.
  
  
• Cross-team and cross-application collaboration -- via public APIs and UI-level connectors -- should be available to support integration with other martech and collaboration systems. Marketing contributors should be able to work independently, with the planning solution functioning as the main source of control and collaboration.

Journey activation with embedded analytics

Activation goes well beyond personalization engines to incorporate rich functionality for inbound and outbound campaign design -- powered by real-time decisioning that provides powerful customer analytics and artificial intelligence capabilities across all interaction types. Capabilities for personalizing each journey step include:

• Guided analytics. Integrated analytical guides, such as automatically derived segmentation and applied optimization, should be available to empower truly predictive and prescriptive marketing -- without the need for data scientists.
  
  
• Out-of-the-box reporting. Extensive out-of-the box performance insights and AI-driven attribution to maximize marketing investment are needed, as well as techniques such as automated segment discovery that uncover opportunities for cross-sell and up-sell, providing significant value. Out-of-the-box reports that require no data manipulation to help surface both business challenges and customer activity, can be a valuable addition for marketers.
  
  
• AI-powered decisions to extend and improve the customer experience are possible through artificial intelligence capabilities which can be integrated into marketing activities to provide additional insight into customer interactions. Embedded AI in response creation, testing and deliverability management will help minimize costs and lower risks. Decision and engagement engines should empower marketers to make decisions quickly, and scale and push those decisions across the organization in real-time.

Wherever you are in your reimagined marketing odyssey, understanding which martech capabilities are needed throughout the marketing lifecycle will help you develop a technology strategy capable of producing empathetic and contextually relevant engagements across the entire customer journey.

About the Author

Lisa Loftis is a Customer Intelligence thought leader at SAS, where she focuses on customer intelligence, customer experience management and digital marketing. She is co-author of the book, Building the Customer Centric Enterprise. She can be reached at Lisa.Loftis@sas.com.