Download Make Three Changes to Achieve Integrated Marketing Success

white paper
Make Three Changes to Achieve
Integrated Marketing Success
Make Three Changes to Achieve Integrated Marketing Success
Table of Contents
Customers Expect Integrated Marketing
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Customer Behavior Has Changed — Has Marketing Responded Accordingly?
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Beyond Consistent Messaging — Marketing Must Create Consistent Engagement 2
Sacred Cows Beware — Integrated Marketing Requires Change
Change #1: Rethink Roles and Processes Within the Marketing Organization
Change #2: Eliminate Technology Silos Change #3: Start Measuring Engagement, Not Just Clicks 3
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It’s Time to Embrace the New Marketing Paradigm 5
About Sitecore 6
Make Three Changes to Achieve Integrated Marketing Success
Copyright
Copyright © 2012 Sitecore. All Rights Reserved.
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This document may not, in whole or in part, be photocopied, reproduced, translated, or reduced to any electronic medium
or machine readable form without prior consent, in writing, from Sitecore. Information in this document is subject to
change without notice and does not represent a commitment on the part of Sitecore.
Trademarks
Sitecore is a registered trademark of Sitecore. All other company and product names are trademarks of their respective
owners.
Make Three Changes to Achieve Integrated Marketing Success
Customers Expect Integrated Marketing
At the risk of stating the obvious, marketing has radically changed in the past few years. Technology is certainly
at the root of much of this change — the rise of social media, the megatrend of mobile with its location
capabilities, the ease of publishing information online, and more. But the linchpin of change at the marketing
level is the shift of power to the customer made possible by these technology trends.
Now a force to be reckoned with, today’s empowered customer has changed the fundamental way in which we
market to our target audiences. In particular, consumers expect brands to engage with them in the channels of
the customer’s choosing, and switch back and forth between channels seamlessly. This is confirmed in a report
from Capgemini focused on the retail sector that states: “shoppers are not loyal to one channel but expect a
seamless integration across online, social media, mobile and physical stores.”12
No matter what you call it — integrated, connected, conversational, or unified marketing — it all comes down
to creating a consistent, seamless experience for the prospect and customer across all channels. That’s the
minimum requirement for attracting, converting, and
retaining customers today.
Obviously, it’s not easy for companies to achieve
integrated marketing, but it is possible. In fact, you
could argue that the move to integrated marketing
is an imperative that marketing executives and
managers must undertake today to maximize
marketing effectiveness and return on marketing
investment.
“Companies that implement and execute
[integrated marketing management] IMM
will achieve a 50% higher ROMI [return on
marketing investment].”
— Gartner2
This white paper looks at the benefits and requirements of integrated marketing and why companies must
embrace it now or risk declining performance and lower returns on marketing investments. We will also
review the three major changes marketing organizations need to make to successfully execute an integrated
marketing strategy.
Customer Behavior Has Changed —
Has Marketing Responded Accordingly?
Whether it’s for a television, vacation rental, or auto insurance, today’s prospect shops and makes purchase
decisions in a dramatically different way than before. Let’s think like a customer for a moment. What’s the first
thing you do when you are considering buying a new product? If you’re like most people, you research it online —
what is everyone saying about it? Where is the best place to buy it? Which model is the right one for you?
Then you might go to the brand’s website or a brick-and-mortar location — how’s the experience? Did you get
the information you needed? Can you try it before you buy it?
1. “Digital Shopper Relevancy,” Capgemini, July 10, 2012
2. “7 Marketing Management Problems that Tech Can Solve,” Stephanie Miller, ClickZ, August 8, 2011
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Make Three Changes to Achieve Integrated Marketing Success
After you look at the product, you have a question and decide to post it on the brand’s Facebook page — Did
you get a timely answer? Was it helpful? Did it relate to what you had already experienced with the brand?
Your buying decision is impacted by the sum of that total experience — across both digital and offline channels.
The problem is that, more often than not, our marketing strategy, tactics, measurement, and even roles and
responsibilities haven’t been aligned to this major shift in buying behavior. We’re still focused on individual
channels and campaigns, with little understanding of the back-and-forth interplay between channels.
Take the retail sector, for example. In a Capgemini survey of 16,000 digital shoppers, nearly 60 percent of
respondents said they expect channel integration to be the norm by 2014, but more than half said that most retailers
currently are not consistent in the way they present themselves across channels.34
Does your organization deliver a seamless,
consistent experience across all channels
and the customer lifecycle? That’s where
integrated marketing comes in. It enables
you to deliver consistent engagement across
all channels and customer touch points —
optimizing both the experience for the
customer and your marketing outcomes.
“The most important element remains that customers
want and expect a consistent experience across all of
their touch points with companies and products.”
— Dwight Griesman, Chief Marketing Officer,
Forrester Research4
Beyond Consistent Messaging — Marketing Must Create
Consistent Engagement
Many people believe that integrated marketing means simply having a consistent message across channels.
But it’s actually more than that — much more.
It’s creating consistent engagement across channels. This means not only being consistent in message, but
consistent, responsive, and relevant in action and content to engage prospects and customers. You can think of
it in terms of having an ongoing conversation with members of your target audience — a series of interactions
that maintains context from one interaction to the next and provides value to the participants. As in a natural
conversation, you remember what the person was interested in and you pick up where you left off before.
Creating a consistent experience that drives deeper engagement is what integrated marketing is all about.
Done right, an integrated marketing strategy delivers new levels of visibility and control to enable you to
improve marketing performance and your return on marketing investment. For instance, integrated marketing
can enable you to:
•Understand and measure the customer experience at an individual and segment level
•Engage in a consistent dialogue across channels, keeping the context of what has already been said, no
matter where the conversation started or left off
3. “Digital Shopper Relevancy,” Capgemini.
4. “Integrated Marketing Communications — Then and Now,” Steve Olenski, Forbes, May 31, 2012
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Make Three Changes to Achieve Integrated Marketing Success
•Guide the prospect with contextual offers at exactly the
right time
•Prompt the prospect’s buying journey with suggested
next steps based on what has already happened in the
conversation
Learn more about breaking the
“random acts of marketing” barrier.
•Anticipate next steps beyond the purchase and engage
with customers to improve customer retention and
lifetime value while building brand advocates
As you can imagine, you can’t simply flip a switch and have all
your marketing efforts integrated across channels. It requires
addressing three core pillars of your marketing organization.
Watch the full video here.
Sacred Cows Beware — Integrated Marketing Requires Change
Integrated marketing is as much an organizational approach as it is a marketing strategy. From the CMO on
down, truly embracing integrated marketing will affect nearly everyone in marketing — from how they do their
job to how performance is measured.
Moving from managing single campaigns and channels to managing the entire conversation can’t be done
without foundational changes. And without these changes, you won’t be able to reap the full benefits of
integrated marketing.
There are three main areas of change that you need to address: people and processes, technology, and
performance measurement. We’ll go through each in a bit more detail:
Change #1: Rethink Roles and Processes Within the Marketing Organization
Marketing has evolved into tiny fiefdoms operating in a siloed manner — the web team, SEO strategy,
email marketing, social media strategy, advertising, creative, PR, and others. Roles and responsibilities and
processes are typically defined by channel or a narrow focus area, with no one group owning
the entire customer experience.
Often this structure creates redundancy and inefficiency as multiple groups reinvent the
wheel. Each team may measure performance in a different way, with none of them measuring
the level of customer engagement across channels. Worse yet, the prospect or customer
doesn’t perceive a seamless, consistent experience across all channels.
To move towards integrated marketing, you need to rethink functional and departmental lines and begin
organizing around the prospect and customer experience. Eliminate silos and artificial departmental lines to
unify functions and processes across channels. To do this likely means tackling some sacred cows including
budgets and authority, as well as resistance to change.
Ultimately, however, aligning roles, responsibilities, and processes with the customer experience can set the stage
for achieving far greater results than can be achieved with a traditionally organized marketing department.
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Make Three Changes to Achieve Integrated Marketing Success
Change #2: Eliminate Technology Silos
As the marketing department evolved into siloed functions, technology choices were also typically made along
departmental/functional lines. Email marketing tools, media monitoring tools, web analysis tools, and more ended
up being scattered around the organization, used in isolation by certain individuals and groups.
Siloed, non-integrated applications don’t provide the cross-channel automation and visibility
you need for integrated marketing. Can you track customer engagement with your current
technology? Can you automate interactions across your various channels? Can your tools
share and update centralized prospect and customer information to maintain the context of
the conversation across channels?
Integrated marketing requires an integrated system — a customer engagement platform — that lets you
design, monitor, and measure customer engagement across channels. This platform or system needs to track
and coordinate conversations across channels, while enabling you to automate your response based on all the
data the system collects about context.
Without an engagement platform, you can’t measure and optimize customer engagement, which is another
important change you need to make. Read on …
Change #3: Start Measuring Engagement, Not Just Clicks
Most marketing organizations measure effectiveness of campaigns, not overall customer engagement. And
each channel is often measured differently and independently of other channels. While open rates, number of
clicks, volume of website traffic, and other channel-specific metrics can be helpful, they don’t
shed enough insight into the impact on the prospect’s entire experience.
The beauty of integrated marketing is that we can start to correlate the effectiveness and
value of our marketing efforts across all platforms, gaining insight into the interplay between
touch points and channels to optimize the experience.
You can start by tracking and measuring engagement value. To do this, you must identify all the possible
interactions throughout the customer lifecycle. Once you have these touch points defined, you assign a value or
points to each interaction. These interactions are your conversion goals and should be indicative or predictive
of a business goal, such as revenue generation. The value corresponds to the level of engagement a prospect
or customer shows by completing the interaction. Now you have the ability to measure engagement at the
individual and audience-segment level.
By tracking engagement value, you can begin to see trends that you might not see if you’re only looking
at volume statistics and trends. With engagement value, you can understand how channels are affecting
engagement and which interactions are performing better than others — giving you better insight into the value
of your marketing spend.
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Make Three Changes to Achieve Integrated Marketing Success
Furniture Chain Provides Engaging and Seamless Online and
Offline Experience
As one of the leading furniture retailers in the UK, Furniture Village
operates 40 stores as well as an e-commerce website. To better address
customer expectations, Furniture Village decided to redesign its website,
including custom applications such as a room planner and wardrobe
configurator. At the same time, it wanted to integrate the offline
experience as well by placing more than 60 in-store kiosks, powered by
the website, where customers can access items not available in-store.
The new site is not only easier to browse and search, but features
a streamlined checkout process that reduces cart abandonment.
Customers benefit from a seamless, compelling experience across online and offline channels.
The results have been stellar: in-store visits grew more than 25 percent and overall sales
increased by 35 percent.
It’s Time to Embrace the New Marketing Paradigm
Marketing will never be the same. Technology trends and customer behavior and expectations have seen to
that. Rather than lamenting the changes, savvy marketers are learning how to take advantage of them.
Adopting integrated marketing and aligning your organization and strategies accordingly lets you take part in
conversations that help drive the prospect forward in the buying process. The result? More conversions, shorter
sales cycles, greater customer satisfaction, and improved return on investment, just to name a few benefits.
A recent Forrester study showed that 40 percent of multichannel marketers reported greater than 15-percent
increases in revenue. Sixty percent reported a gain of more than 10 percent in return on marketing investment.5
This white paper outlined the critical areas you need to address to start achieving similar success. Your action
plan is clear:
•Realign the marketing department around the customer experience
•Eliminate technology silos and deploy technology that tracks and automates conversations across
all channels
•Measure engagement value to better assess and optimize marketing efforts
The bottom line is that if your company isn’t engaging with prospects and customers in a consistent,
conversational way across online and offline, mobile and email, social media and corporate website, then
you’re missing out on opportunities to grow your customer base, revenue, and customer loyalty. Isn’t it time to
embrace the new marketing paradigm?
5. “The Multichannel Maturity Mandate,” Forrester Consulting, May 2012
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Make Three Changes to Achieve Integrated Marketing Success
More resources on integrated marketing:
Forrester Study: The Multichannel Maturity Mandate
Frost & Sullivan: Web Content Management Systems: “So Five Years Ago;” You Need a Customer
Engagement Platform
Sitecore Customer Engagement Platform
About Sitecore
Sitecore is a global software company that creates products to deliver the most relevant experience and content
to customers at any moment of interaction and via any communications channel — the web, email, mobile,
social and offline. Our customer experience management platform combines proven web content management
with customer intelligence to create a single view of a customer that drives meaningful interactions, increases
conversions and builds lifetime customers. Global brands, including American Express, Carnival Cruise Lines,
easyJet, Heineken, LEGO, Microsoft, and Nestle rely on Sitecore to get and keep loyal customers who engage
more and drive revenue growth.
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