Marketers need an integrated approach in order to fuel genuine, rewarding relationships with consumers
More than ever, consumers have a choice when it comes to how they interact with brands—from the products and services they favour most, to the personal information they share. But amidst email, SMS, Twitter, Facebook, and other interactive channels today, the biggest consumer choice of all is deciding how they communicate with brands—or rather, how to allow brands to communicate with them.
It’s evident that consumers have exercised this right: ExactTarget’s Subscribers, Fans, & Followers research reveals that 20 per cent of consumers indicate they’ve started following a brand on Twitter in order to interact with that company, while nearly 40 per cent of consumers 'like' a company on Facebook. But this doesn’t mean social media has trumped all other interactive channels. Think email is old news? Think again: 96 per cent of daily email users subscribe to at least one brand’s email messages, driving more purchases than any other channel. So while email isn’t new, it certainly isn’t dead. The question is, how can interactive channels come together in an integrated, unsiloed interactive marketing approach?
Strategy: start with what you know
•Begin by defining your core brand promise:
• What does your brand stand for?
• What are your unique value props?
• What do you promise your customers?
Knowing the ins and outs of your brand will help define the way you approach interactive marketing, too. Why? Because an unsiloed approach helps you deliver that promise across all channels, reaching consumers where they are, in the channels they’re already using. Whatever characteristics your brand embodies, knowing your brand 'personality' will help you to know your customers better, leading you to the channels they’re most invested in.
'Unsiloed interactive marketing' doesn’t mean having to choose one channel over the other. While Twitter and Facebook may be rising in sophistication and popularity, consumers still prefer email by more than three to one. By having an integrated approach—when email, mobile, client support, social, and all your other customer interactions come together, it creates a uniform view of the customer, helping you fuel more genuine, rewarding relationships.
Finally, define success. Some of the best marketers view unsiloed interactive marketing through a service model, measuring improvement in products and services while listening in the social space. After all, every customer interaction becomes an important measurement in the success of your programme. If 90 per cent of firms are listening to the conversation but only 15 per cent are actually doing something with the information, the smartest marketers will be the ones who look at the steps they’re taking and realise the cost-benefit.
Technology: choose the right solution
Software is not always the right place to start when building an interactive media presence. Interactive channels don’t exist in silos—and neither should the technology that powers it. Without a strategy to apply it to, software compounds the challenge of unsiloed interactive marketing. But when customer interaction is approached as a horizontal function across the business, it becomes a key enabler to power success.
According to a recent study conducted by Richard Lees in Econsultancy, 98 per cent of marketers use at least three channels to deliver multichannel messages to their customers, but more than half still store the data they gather from each channel in separate, siloed locations. No matter what channel you’re using to engage a customer, every interaction you have with them is highly influential to the way the client will view your brand.
Operations: the hub and spokes model
So, who owns the responsibility of managing interactive marketing? The answer is everyone. With more and more CMOs managing the technology budget, it’s natural for interactive responsibilities to fall to marketing. But if employees are interacting with customers every day, doesn’t it make sense that the task of managing the real-time conversation should be divided as well?
While email and mobile campaigns remain central to marketing, social media presents new opportunities to expand to the larger organisation with a framework we call the 'hub and spokes' model, utilising employees throughout the company to maximise impact.
A team of social media 'specialists' acts as the expert—the hub—in delegating and carrying out the company’s interactive strategy. Other departments throughout the organisation (sales, PR, marketing, customer service) function as extensions—or spokes—of the company’s overall interactive programme, enabled to interact with consumers and share responses to customer messages by incorporating their own expertise and specialty within the organisation. This method of 'air traffic control' enables the people behind a specific matter to actually answer the questions as quickly as possible.
Enabling every department in your company to interact with customers and view previous dialogue opens the door to more meaningful, more valuable dialogue with consumers. If you expect your brand to have a relationship with the people who interact with you online and purchase your products, it’s imperative that you equip your business to manage the brand conversation. Consumers want to be treated like people, and they don’t care if your social media, customer call centre or email marketing departments fall in different areas of your business. They expect your brand to know them no matter who they interact with at any given time.
Authentic conversation
Consumers have more choices than ever when it comes to interacting with brands. They already receive enough irrelevant messaging in their mailboxes, inboxes, and cell phones. And yet, some brands continue to pre-plan tweets and Facebook posts or automate batch and blast emails without regard to previous interactions, forcing messages out to consumers who have no interest in listening. Today’s top interactive brands are the ones who create authentic conversation, letting consumers speak first, and then responding appropriately.
So, how can you be sure that they’ll choose to interact with you? Luckily, driving authentic conversation doesn’t require you to hire a small army of 'digital dialogue specialists.' All it takes is data. Authentic conversations happen when the dialogue is driven by information—everything from email open and click-through data to analytics on recent purchases. Breaking through the clutter is achievable by listening to what consumers have to say about your brand and then responding through the appropriate channel in an appropriate manner.
Get unsilioed – move up the curve
As brands increase their level of interactive sophistication, their revenue begins to increase as well, forming a diagram we like to call 'the relevancy curve.'
Organisations whose strategy begins to adapt to the relevancy curve (increasing in sophistication and generating more revenue over time) have one thing in common—they didn’t go from simple to strategic over night. Building a successful interactive marketing programme takes time, careful planning, and nurturing. Adding data sources one at a time (whether CRM, web analytics, or even social media channels) slowly and efficiently plants building blocks to developing an integrated, 360-degree view of the customer. Thus, brands can never begin at the top of the relevancy curve. It’s only through diligent cultivation of the unsiloed framework (strategy, technology, operations) that they earn the opportunity to arrive there instead.
Conclusion: fuelling the digital dialogue
The best marketers today agree on one thing: interactive marketing channels provide an unparalleled opportunity to engage with customers—and it can’t be operated as a silo. Through an unsiloed approach, marketers can create real interactive success, getting the most out of these evolving channels in the real-time era. With the ability to execute on a solid framework of strategy, technology, and operations, marketers can transform interactive marketing management into something that extends beyond marketing alone, permeating the entire enterprise and enabling the brand to successfully engage with consumers.
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