Effective marketing is becoming more and more of a challenge these days, because the customer is well-informed, interacts through multiple channels, uses their peers as a primary information source and wants the best customer experience possible.
Gerald Naidoo, CEO of Logikal Consulting says this is compounded by the fact that customers have many more outlets for venting their dissatisfaction than before.
“Today’s customers are completely empowered, and marketers can only hope to succeed if they put them at the core of everything they do.” He says this is where enterprise marketing management (EMM) comes in. “EMM is essentially a software technology solution that provides a complete marketing platform for managing customer and prospect interactions for the full length of the customer lifecycle.”
“The role of marketing has grown in the past few years, way beyond the traditional disciplines associated with it. Marketing is now integral to the business processes of buying, selling, servicing, and so on,” adds Ravi Bhat, COO at Logikal Consulting. “All business processes that involve the customer need to be intrinsically connected to marketing initiatives.”
According to Bhat, today’s CEO is battling with the increasing complexity of marketing. “The main challenges associated with marketing are the explosion of data, social media platforms, the variety of channel and device choices through which products and services are delivered, and of course changing customer demographics.”
He says all these elements are making marketing an increasingly complex discipline, and it is only going to get more so in years to come. “Marketing practitioners must respond to these challenges by integrating marketing across all channels, touch points and media. EMM helps businesses to do this.”
“By implementing an EMM solution, all these elements are united in one, co-ordinated marketing programme. To successfully market to today’s savvy customer, a relationship needs to be built between the companies trying to sell their products or services, and the consumers who buy them, irrespective of the communication channel, touch point or media the customers choose to interact with the organisation,” Naidoo adds.
He says that what is lacking today is a platform to manage marketing from start to finish, and to help marketers co-ordinate everything that is happening in their departments. “In addition, most marketers have failed in their efforts to formulate a total profile of their customers that captures each individual’s interactions with all marketing initiatives across all media types, channels and platforms.”
Bhat says it is paramount for marketers to understand the messages that each individual customer has been shown, their response to that message, the touch points each customer interacted with, what happened during the course of those interactions, and ultimately, which marketing efforts were successful and which were not.
He says IBM product Unica help companies optimise cross-channel marketing programs and performance. “Unica helps businesses engage each customer and prospect in a cross-channel dialogue that builds on past and current behaviour, and strategically assess, manage and plan marketing programmes for optimal return on investment.”
Ultimately, successful marketing should be able to identify what should come next in the conversation with each customer and potential customer, regardless of the number of customers a business boasts. “Once decisions are made about what needs to happen next in terms of marketing efforts, EMM makes it child’s play for marketing professionals to deliver the message, capture the response and accurately identify what further messages should be.”