The Business Case for Marketing Orchestration
New research by Marketing Orchestration Platform provider Kitewheel (formerly Provenir) has found a major disconnect between customer and marketer attitudes and capabilities. For me the following statistics highlight a problem that Marketing Orchestration Platforms are in a unique position to solve.
The Connected Customer
The CMO
What struck me are the major differences in the opinion and the capability.
In-Moment Offers
Firstly, 91% of customers felt an “in-moment” offer could influence their choice. To stress the point; that’s nearly every single one of your customers who could be influenced based on you understanding their context and then being able to respond.
To pull this off you’ll need the ability to listen with real-time tracking on your website, iBeacons in stores or tracking who is calling your call centre.
The next capability is deciding what to do with that information. Do you offer a discount, a bundle or an alternative? Then you need to decide what channel… Mobile, social messaging, a call, email or even directing an in-store sales rep to approach the customer.
It’s all possible.
Orchestrating Mobile Messaging
The second major point that strikes me is that half of marketers are not managing communications to mobile devices.
Seriously?!
If you’ve not read it yet, I recommend Google’s Zero Moment of Truth paper on how mobile web search has levelled the playing field for customers.
Essentially customers can get all of the information on your brand or product in a matter of clicks on a mobile device. This isn’t just theory either, over two-thirds of customers are checking reviews and prices on their mobile device.
Owning and managing that channel is a huge opportunity to close out more sales.
Why the Marketing Orchestration Platform
I strongly believe that we need to move from campaigns to event driven moments. Today’s enterprise marketing platforms needs to:
a) Be listening and waiting for individual customer events (I also consider no event occurring as an event)
b) Be able to respond on any channel to a customer event
There are over 126 marketing channels available to the modern marketer and they can’t expect to control customer communications with a set of loosely integrated platforms.
Data needs to flow in near real-time. Processes need to learn. Overarching contact rules need to be applied. Full data and insight should be available to make decisions. It shouldn’t need an army of marketers to manage.
In my last post I talked about managing the moron. The marketing technology is a moron (despite what vendors may claim). It only responds to pre-built commands and rules. Therefore you need to apply thought in managing your moron, giving it good instructions to work with and holding it to account for results it achieves.
A Marketing Orchestration Platform makes a good marketing moron; it can listen to huge amounts of event sources and it can pick up and work with any API driven channel.
Used well it will help you serve in-moment messages over every channel. It seems to me that this marketing middleware, whether off the shelf or home brewed is the ideal way to close the gap between your current capability and your customers needs.
The business case is simple. What’s the opportunity cost of delivering a capability that will influence 91% of your customers to spend more?
For the full Kitewheel report visit: http://kitewheel.com/goodies/consumer-brand-disconnect/
Photo Credit: Luigi Rosa has moved to Ipernity via Compfight cc
David Sealey is a trusted adviser to senior executives on getting the most from their investment in digital and data. David created Storm81 as a place to share his passion for business, digital technologies, multichannel marketing and everything else around these topics.