Today's blog post is written by Aleksandr Peterson is a technology analyst at TechnologyAdvice.
According to Salesforce’s 2015 State of Marketing report, this year’s top marketing strategies will include email marketing, social media advertising and listening, data targeting and segmentation, and location-based mobile tracking. These multi-channel trends are being driven by increasingly nuanced consumer preferences: people want to be known and understood by businesses. They want to be courted. For example, over forty percent of respondents to an Axicom survey said they would value a brand more if it remembered their buying and browsing behavior.
The indiscriminate “batch-and-blast” approach is quickly becoming an anachronism for successful companies, replaced by more precise tactics that respond to customer data in near real time.
Engaging the right prospects at the right time is a matter of contextualization. For example: If someone just posted a vitriolic rant about how terrible your services are, and you ask them to recommend your company to their friends, you’re delivering the right message in the wrong context. Multiply that customer by a dozen, or a hundred, and you’ve got a big problem.
On a larger scale, contextualized marketing relies on big data to track and respond to cues. This has become easy to talk about (mine your data, turn big data into “actionable intelligence”), but difficult to accomplish. A recent study revealed that over 60 percent of companies are planning to expand their big data marketing budgets. But delivering timely, context-specific content isn’t just about the “bigness” of data. It’s about turning big data into relevant data. What you know about your prospects should determine how, when, and where you engage them.
In the previously mentioned State of Marketing report, the three most important technologies for serving the customer journey were reported as CRM software, marketing analytics, and mobile applications. And in reality, these systems work best when they work together. As consumers’ digital lives become increasingly splintered, brands need to implement systems that provide central control and visibility across multiple channels. This need for unification, plus the reciprocity between marketing data and customer identity makes CRM software an obvious choice for many marketing teams, especially since CRM suites can incorporate social data and often include built-in marketing automation tools (or can integrate with dedicated programs).
Contextualization is a little more complicated than mail merging names into your subject lines, although that’s a nice touch. In addition to data analytics and contact management, contextualization requires the ability to segment prospects based on events and behavior and deliver dynamic content at the most opportune time. Some of these deliveries can be automated, depending on the medium (such as email, web content, or sms marketing); others may require manual execution (such as social media posts).
There are several different kinds of data you can use to do this:
Using these data points as a springboard, you can program a rule schema into your marketing automation software. These rules trigger marketing actions based on prospect behaviors or events, such as a “change in state” or passing of a threshold. Here are some examples of common trigger sequences:
There are hundreds of different triggers you can use to contextualize your marketing efforts across every channel, whether it be email, social media, ecommerce, or mobile. These triggers help you divide your market into smaller pieces. Instead of a one-size-fits-all approach, where you market to prospects as a monolithic group, data-driven marketing acknowledges the diversity of subsets. It tailors timing to behavior and content to context, which is a fancy way of saying it delivers value. Soon, everyone will be doing it, and yes, that makes it cool.