The Missing Ingredient of Modern Marketing What is needed is a complete solution for your digital needs that's designed to work in tandem with your existing infrastructure.
By Ekaterina Walter Edited by Dan Bova
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You've heard this before: Your brand is the sum of customers' complete experiences with you across all touch points.
Your brand isn't your company. It isn't your marketing message. It isn't even your product. It is an experience -- a holistic experience a customer has with your product, your content and your employees. It is the reason to choose you over your competitor.
Relationship capital is arguably the most important goal any business has. After all, there is no such thing as a self-made man. We all depend on others in our success. Businesses depend on partners, investors, vendors and employees. But the most important relationship a business has is with its customers.
Oh, that "relationship" used to be easy. Several key channels (print, TV, radio, phone), one-way broadcasting, millions of impressions as a goal. Things didn't change much over decades.
Related: The 4 Pillars New Brands Must Communicate to Their Audience
Then the digital revolution came and, with it, brought new channels and new challenges. Web and email started to take over. And just when we thought we got those mastered, the pace of change became unsustainable.
Dozens of social channels, as well as the rise of the citizen journalist brought blogging, newsjacking, podcasting and social posting. With those, the need developed for listening, real-time engagement, managing digital crisis and more. The pace at which social network features, rules and capabilities change is staggering. The number of niche tools supporting various functions of creation, publishing, distribution, management and reporting grew to hundreds.
For those business that recognized the seismic shift in the marketplace, managing consumer experiences through the rise of the social tsunami became not only a challenge, but a priority. But as they started to implement strategies, solutions and tools across the organization, one critical gap became widely apparent. No matter how much you try to serve your customers, if the organization is internally siloed in mentality, processes and technology, no amount of delight will ever deliver a truly holistic experience that your customer deserves.
Sales funnels don't exist anymore. We now have a sales zig-zag. Every day, our customers are consuming information from many devices through more than 50 channels and engaging with you through thousands of touch points. They are educated, globally connected, impatient and have a high BS radar. They expect that you are listening -- on every channel! -- and demand a real-time response. They trust their friends over advertisements and brand messages. They buy brands they have relationship with.
Successful business isn't about impressions any more. It is about building relationship capital through smart experience management. And the only way to achieve that is for all parts of the organization to work together, to become a connected company!
Related: 3 Social-Media Mistakes That Are Killing Interest in Your Company
What is desperately needed is a set of critical capabilities that would work across a lot of channels, to be implemented across a variety of teams, a number of product lines, in every market. What is needed is a complete solution for your digital needs that's designed to work in tandem with your existing infrastructure.
What's needed is an integrated business nerve center.
But the reality is a bit grim. A 2014 study by Signal states that organizational and technological integration is a key problem for businesses. While respondents recognize a range of benefits to a fully integrated marketing stack, around half of respondents said their marketing data and technology are either managed separately (10 percent) or that only some tools are integrated (41 percent). Just 4 percent reported having a completely integrated stack.
While 53 percent prioritize developing a single view of each customer (a high priority for marketers around the world, according to MarketingCharts), they're faced with technological challenges such as multiple/duplicate records (41 percent), too many systems/difficulty keeping track of where data is housed (38 percent), and siloed data (37 percent). As a result, 59 percent of respondents felt that it was a priority to have a single system to deliver customer experiences across all potential digital channels.
Consumers experience our brand through different life moments and in a variety of places: at the store, on our website, through social conversations. This is a remarkable opportunity for brands to connect. Most important, an opportunity to track, manage and align these moments to drive brand love, advocacy and loyalty.
Bringing the voice of your customer into the right business context, at the right time, is the first step in that transformation. To do that, organizations need to build an integrated business nerve center that sits at the core of the enterprise and connects all of the people, processes and systems within it. This is the only way we will enable innovative, positive social interactions that build long-lasting relationships with people who matter.
Related: How to Set Social-Media Goals That Will Move Your Marketing Forward
