Editorial Articles

The face of marketing is changing rapidly and the ‘shop front’ is no longer just the store and website, companies are now visible and can interact with customers across a multitude of online and offline channels. Each channel acts as the contact between the buyer and the seller, and multi-channel marketing allows organisations to reach their audience via the customer’s preferred channel. The challenge for brands is how to reach and target its customers through these multiple channels, while remaining as personal and helpful as possible. 

Understanding who your customers are, how best to reach them, what their purchase preferences are and who their peer groups are enables brands to better target its messages and campaigns. When planning a new or revising an existing campaign, marketers first need to identify and manage their customer profiles, communities, interactions and web analytics though a variety of customer channels. This will reveal vital information that will provide a personal and targeted experience. This should be defined by time, spend and the type of product on offer. To create these analytics, companies need to invest in a web experience platform that enables a media-rich, community-orientated customer experience. From this, brands can leverage their customer’s feedback, create ratings and also introduce like-minded individuals via their social networks.

The web provides a direct route for brands to reach its customers via the wide variety of channels that consumers can express their opinions, share ideas and problems. We are increasingly seeing more ways to socialise and create networks of communication. Brands need to jump on this and recognise it as a chance to join in the conversation. The social web is full to the brim with common interests, themes and movements, where users not only want to connect with friends and family but also purchase items. Brands need to take this opportunity to attract their attention. Consumers want to be asked their opinion and made to feel important. Brands can achieve this by utilising the infrastructure and software available to them. This technology provides an insight into consumer browsing habits and the communities and social networks they interact with; collating this information will create valuable customer profiles. In turn they can then be used for direct targeting of personalised advertising and marketing efforts by organisations.

One of the key emerging channels is mobile. This is a very exciting and fast paced area for companies to work in, but as the technology evolves organisations need to as well. The ability to use mobile geo-location for the purposes of targeting, allows brands to alert consumers to promotions directly to their mobile phones. As the company knows where its potential customers are, as they walk down a given aisle or as they walk past their shop, they can send offers relevant to their location. Companies can also use mobile as another way to contact their consumers directly, be it via a personalised promotion sent via sms or mentioned during a customer service call. The mobile phone provides immediacy between web-based promotions and the in-store experience.

Through multi-channel marketing, companies can deliver tailored messages to improve the customer experience. Brands need to produce strong customer profiling through contextualised, personalised and relevant campaigns and promotions leveraged to each customer, their friends and like-minded communities of users. Understanding who your customer is critical for a next-generation, multi-channel marketer looking to leverage Web 2.0, new channels including mobile, and drive higher lifetime customer loyalty and value.

Kevin Cochrane
CMO, Day Software