The marketing function is nothing short of a joy ride. All those who agree - read on!
An umpteen number of consumer devices and social platforms have opened up opportunities of engagement with customers like never before. And the ever-evolving digital advertising landscape (read: programmatic advertising) has wrested the control back from the publishers and into the hands of the marketer. All this power obviously demands investments in platforms (DMP, DSP), measurement solutions and more. Leading to the inevitable -marketing automation - to help with personalization across channels.
The one-size-fits-all strategy became old school and brought the need to develop personalized campaigns built around your customer's persona.
A superior customer experience comes from the ability to integrate data. It is said that good CX professionals use their instinct and experience to find and fix, while great CX professionals augment that expertise with big data and machine learning peering into the numbers to find larger truths.
No doubt, 2019 calls for leveraging data insights as the top priority for marketers.
No doubt, 2019 calls for leveraging data insights as the top priority for marketers.
These are significant demands that you must meet to cut through the noise (as we call it) and craft a success story. The Digital Officer, the CMO, the CIO - all are responsible for CX efforts, blurring the lines between Technology and Marketing. As rightly stated at the Adobe Summit, it's a B2E (business to everything) shift!
InHouse - Retain what's strategic;
Delegate the heavy-lifting.
To thrive, you can't function on yesterday's business models. You are expected to drive innovation and save money, while catering to your customers. No wonder customer experience is disrupting existing business models.
If an organization is "inhousing" marketing initiatives, it means that it has the right technologies to leverage data, impeccable website management capabilities, and captivating content and creative skills. The sheer array of skills required to create a holistic customer experience means that many organizations need external help for part of their processes.
In most cases, it's about control. Some organizations want complete control of their processes, encompassing all the stages from creativity to content to campaign execution and analytics. While there are those who want control on few parts of the process, so that they can focus on their core business activities. This is not necessarily loss of control, let's call it delegation. What you need is a partner who acts as your extended team!
Wave of agency:
On one hand the consultancies are acquiring agencies or forming partnerships, and on the other hand, there are smaller agencies acquiring other agencies and becoming networks.
Let's pull up some stats to see how the in-house and external agencies co-exist.
Over the past three years, established businesses have moved content marketing, social media, and influencer marketing to their in-house agency, something that was earlier handled by their external agencies.
For an experience to be truly remarkable, you need the right team mix of creativity and technology left-brainers, right-brainers, and in-betweeners.
As the "knowing-doing" gap shrinks, the
silver bullet is the access to global talent pool.
This brings a challenge and an opportunity for digital leaders to cultivate a data-driven mindset (personally and team-wide) without forsaking creativity. For you to be in the driver's seat, it's now imperative to expand your horizons. The much-needed fresh perspective to ignite CX could be right around the corner!
