While marketing channels may have proliferated, consumers still demand consistency in interactions. (Read also: Why the industry is in dire need of generalist marketers) This requires a coordinated marketing effort across all channels such that marketers can respond quickly to take advantage of new opportunities and course-correct when things go wrong. (For more discussions on giving the consumer a holistic experience, join our Customer Experience Conference 2015 in 11-12 March next year.)
A recent Forrester Research report ("Reboot Your Organisation for Modern Marketing") details what marketers need to do to accomplish this.
1. Install a marketing operating system
A marketing operating system "ties marketing systems, processes, and outcomes explicitly to the unique expectations of the customer", according to Forrester. Under a marketing operating system, each marketing team has a clearly defined purpose within the organisation's overarching goal of marketing to consumers effectively. Each team is supported by robust technological know-how that consolidates planning, budgeting, KPI setting and ROI measurement under one umbrella. The purpose of this is to align incentives for effective cross-channel marketing.
2. Streamline communications using technology
Marketers should use social collaboration tools available in the cloud software of vendors like Oracle, Adobe or salesforce.com to streamline internal communications. This will allow internal stakeholders to spend more time executing their role as opposed to figuring out who they need to work with to execute correctly.
3. Instill a preference for fast experiments over full-scale marketing plans
Marketers shouldn't spend all their team creating elaborate, fully-baked marketing plans. Instead, campaigns should be deployed with the expectation that they can be course-corrected. At Dow Chemical, campaigns are deployed on a smaller scale to gauge their success, corrected where needed, and then scaled across the organisation.
4. Force your teams out of their comfort zones
Marketers need to grow their skillsets in order to remain relevant in an environment which demands cross-channel integration. At NYSE-listed American industrial materials company Kennametal, CMO John Jacko incorporates job rotation in order to force his team to pick up new skills.
5. Foster collaboration over individual channel performance
In an environment of cross-channel integration, organisations where certain channels are incentivised to perform at the expense of others will fail. Cross-channel customer experiences need to be at the heart of the marketing organisation. At Amazon.com subsidiary Zappos.com, fixed titles and organisational reporting structures will be eliminated at the end of 2014. Instead, employees will focus on the work that needs to be done to execute customer experience management effectively, and resources will be assigned according to the demands of different assignments.
6. Implement customer-based marketing teams
Marketing needs to be aligned with customer life-cycle stages in order to adequately address customer needs at each stage. Organisational structures need to reflect this. At NASDAQ-listed retailer HSN, chief marketing and business development officer Bill Brand reorganised his marketing department into teams focussed on customer acquisition, assimilation, best customers, win-backs and lapsed customers. As of December 2014, HSN is experiencing its highest number of new shoppers in the past 12 months, highest levels of total spend per customer, and the highest levels of customer engagement in its history.
For more perspectives on customer experience management from brands such as McDonald's, Subway and Toys "R" Us, look out for Marketing magazine’s Customer Experience 2015 conference, happening 11 – 12 March 2015.
To register, please click here or contact Carlo Reston at carlor@marketing-interactive.com or call +65 6423 0329, +65 9727 0291
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