5 things marketers need to do in the age of 1:1 marketing

The growth of marketing technologies, micro-targeted ad platforms and audience intelligence systems has created unprecedented opportunities for advertising to become significantly more sophisticated.   Here are the top 5 things a marketer need to prioritize:

1.     Build an audience

Many marketers today have little or no data on their customers.  Some are sitting on a ton, like banks and wireless companies.  Then there are those with very little, because transactions happen through retail channels and there is little data on their actual customer behaviors.  In this case, the most they can hope for is data from a loyalty program (first or third party) or sweepstakes.  But often this data has expired or is sitting in multiple locations around an organization.   Building out a rich database of customers and prospects is key to feed insights into the marketing and media planning efforts.

In building any media plans, the funnel should be flipped, purchasing media against those who are actively in the consideration and purchase mindset, then spend against awareness and brand.  But if a company doesn’t know who it’s customers are, targeting is a massive challenge and is often starting from square one over and over again.

Building an audience is key.  Implementing programs to be able to track and understand people’s behavior across media channels and with your product are paramount and requires a significant and focused investment on determining how to get individuals to give you access to their data.  Whether this is through purchasing lists, loyalty programs, or other tactical initiatives, you must weave together the transactional and behavioral events that help you understand your best and worst customers.

2.     Go Mobile, Now

If you are not buying any media in mobile, start doing it.  If you have no means to connect with your customers while they are not sitting in front of a TV or computer, build it now.  Carve out 10% your budget and focus it on mobile.  If you are already doing that, carve out 20%.

The statistics are shocking.  Facebook Mobile usage 751M users and 60% of Twitters usage is via mobile.  1 in 3 people are researching products in store.  If you are not intercepting customers in a medium that they are spending a massive amount of engaged time, you are setting yourself up for failure.  Mobile is the web and the web is mobile.

3.     Experiment in Real-Time

Everything is a test.  Marketers need to approach everything as an opportunity to learn and continually improve.  But, this is hard.  47% of advertisers are not set up to react in real time.  This has to change.

To develop the appropriate tool sets to automate ad buying and creative placement is hard.  To develop the multiple variants of creative units is hard.  To manage multiple platforms, tools and agencies is hard.  But it needs to be done and those who accept the fact that it is hard will win.  Optimizing everything needs to be the mantra within organizations and settling for purchasing ‘awareness’ and ‘set-it-and-forget-it’ campaigns needs to become a thing of the past.

4.     Personalize Messaging

All experimentations should be focused as much as possible at segmenting users to deliver the most timely and relevant messaging to a person at any given point in time.  Unfortunately, today's systems don’t make this easy. 

Google and Facebook don’t make day-parting easy to do, because is goes against their business model to sell impressions.  Identifying users across the web and mobile is nearly impossible, but there Twitter, Facebook, Google and Microsoft are all trying to solve this problem as well as start ups like Drawbridge.

The more a company can train itself, its ad agencies and media partners to behave in this manner, the easier the change will be once all the tools are available.

5.     Let Go

Marketers need to empower their customers.  Despite the desire to intercept people with the most relevant message at the right time and place, the most powerful voice is not that of the brand, but that of the consumer.  65% of consumers research products online before purchase and the top driver of decision-making is family and friends.  Giving consumers of your product the ability to voice their opinions and give their opinion of a product/service is the most compelling and influential way to drive product interest. 

And brands are letting go.  Starwood implemented and industry first by enabling rating and reviews on their own sites – both good and bad.  And McDonald’s have been more open to answering questions that have become stuff of urban myths.

It is a time of foundational change in the advertising industry.  Tools are making it much easier to apply CRM methods to traditional media, but the pace and magnitude of the growth has made it challenging to keep up.  Those that do, will win.

Operationalizing Agile Marketing

I recently posted a presentation titled "Increasing Relevance in an Always On Marketing World" (link below).

I've received some positive feedback and wanted to expand on the notion of Agile Marketing.

What is Agile Marketing?

The 'Agile' approach is a term stolen from the software world where it is commonly used to describe a process of rapid iteration and incremental improvement on previous versions of the product.  The advantages of this are faster-to-market products and a system of real-time learning and improvement.  The growth of real-time marketing and ability to optimize communications using algorithms has led to markers looking to adopt these approaches.   

The Biggest Challenge.  Traditional Marketers.

Marketers have been doing Agile Marketing for some time, they just didn't know it.  Email, .com, Search Engine Marketing and Optimization were the first disciplines that took this approach.  Digital and direct marketers have been employing iterative approaches to communications by pivoting messaging based on user response for years.  The reality is that most senior level marketers have never been exposed to the actual deployment of these approaches and those executing have not had to seek senior level approvals for their test & learn approaches.

But the evolution of marketing is making everything digital, and thus, also creating optimization capabilities in real time.  But this is a new concept to traditional marketers who are used to highly rigid brand architectures, logo guidelines, annual planning cycles and traditional agency briefing processes.  

As brands need to create more contextually relevant content in owned properties (YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc), they have to move away from the traditional communications process of; 1) Brief agency, 2) Agency produces ads and 3) Weeks of making it 'pop' 4) Move through matrix of approvals.  Instead, companies need to empower employees and their agency representatives in the production of real-time content that drives relevance.  Both of these groups need to be able to break away from the traditional processes that they have established and move toward a newsroom type of approach in pursuit of consumer attention.

Change.  Easily Said.  But Not Easily Done.

Harvard Business Review echoed the need for brands to move to the newsroom approach

.  This approach is very easy to adhere to in theory, but the reality is that no brands are structured to produce content at the volume and frequency in which it can be deployed.  This structure needs to combine the structure of a newsroom, with more responsive and agile reporters/photographers who can deliver messages that deliver against daily (or hourly) relevance, and traditional marketing by mapping back to brand messages and key product pillars.  The structure requires that an editor-in-chief has the latitude and authority to publish on behalf of the brand, but also gives reporters the freedom to act as Agile developers - in a nimble and iterative manner.

Oreo has had it's SuperBowl post lauded as the pinnacle of Agile Marketing, responding to the power outage and posting through social channels.  It drove significant engagement and was highly relevant to a current cultural event.  But, having a team of people amassed during key events, or trying to predict when cultural movements will happen are both very challenging for marketers to scale.

 The key to scaling a newsroom+brand approach is to determine how to best harness technology, consumer insight models (predictive models, optimization engines, etc) and publishing/advertising tools to make the production and delivery components manageable.

Is the End of Marketing As We Know It Here?  No, Not really...

So with this being said, traditional marketing still has a place in the overall marketing schema.  Developing a positioning with emotional appeal to the target segment is still the cornerstone of any marketing plan.  The tactical deployments are changing.  Television still remains the most effective mass reach vehicle available.  But with increasing fragmentation of consumption (Cable, Satellite, Online, PVRs, Streaming, etc) and the impending ability to purchase advertising similar to digital (buying audience engagement instead of potential exposure), the deployment systems that exist tomorrow are going to demand the real-time iteration that the digital world is experiencing today.

Marketers need to develop new organizational structures that are going to be adaptive to the shifting deo current events and key marketing messages.