I would like to outline how marketers can castoff
the antiquated notions of online marketing, while
making significant market-changing moves and gaining
a greater understanding of their consumers so
everyone can evaluate and better engage the audiences
of today.
You can read about it everywhere companies are
looking to redirect millions of dollars from marketing
inefficiencies to improve profit. The smartest
are looking away from the expected places for
these savings, the most forward looking companies
will recognize their biggest wins by implementing
market-changing moves in how they engage, understand
and view the customer (Customer
Relationship Management (CRM)).
Innovative concepts will be the pivotal point
which will deliver the competition's market share
and keep your brand top of mind, wallet and attention-span.
Below I have outlined six areas for improvement
and four areas required to excel in 2007.
What our
industry isn't doing well…yet
For 2007, we all need to
master specific challenges and make strides in
critical areas of (Customer
Relationship Management (CRM).
Analytics
Before, during, and after
our campaigns, everyone must have a strong sense
of what's working and what's not. Constantly monitoring
and measuring against clearly defined objectives.
Spending is finally going to be much larger in
2007. We will have to deliver a much more verifiable
strategy. This means that, we have to deliver
a quantifiable platform that will clearly document
the reasons for supporting and increasing the
customer relationship management budgets.
We should review our concepts to verify that we're
presenting the very best and most persuasive messaging.
We must commit to searching for better approaches
for integrating offline and digital efforts, for
a deeper understanding and how more effective
synergistic efforts can be created.
We need post-campaign reviews to verify that we
did achieve our goal of building awareness and
improve purchase instances -- quite a bit more
than just the clicks and vague awareness that
everyone is reporting on today.
Larger budgets will require higher accuracy and
this will very quickly separate out the effective
marketers -- the strong from the weak, the diligent
from the unattended and the profitable from the
wasteful.
Bigger budgets will drive better benefits and
results which will further point out the successful
marketers that understand how effective customer
relationship management really is.
Too
much borrowed interest
In my opinion there's been
too heavy of a reliance on contests, promotions
and sweepstakes by unimaginative marketers and
agencies. This approach is getting in the way
of messaging that can actually drive purchase
intent.
The marketer and agencies are not the only ones
to blame, in part its due to the small budget
they've been given. So in an attempt to create
some "buzz" in hopes to prove their
worth and to demonstrate the value of customer
relationship management they accept the assignments
with the low-budget.
2007 is going to bring more realistic budgets,
So the old standbys like clicks, contest entries
and such that we've all become used to using will
no longer be good enough. We all will have to
be alert to new and engaging development indicators
such as preference, purchase intent and sales.
The upshot for consultants is these new measurements
will be a real challenge for the short attention
span of the agencies.
With more refined modeling we will rely more heavily
on pre-campaign testing, with Advanced Planning,
and or post-testing to evaluate the performance
and success of the customer relationship management
campaign.
Advanced techniques involving isolating test
markets will more than likely be required, and
even looking towards developing Cross Media Opportunity
and testing will help more clearly indicate the
optimum marketing mix for our clients
Lifetime
value
The larger budgets combined
with digital channel's potential establish long
term, interactive connections with your online
audience. It will open up the opportunity to measure
long-term relationships which will go far beyond
today's one click channels.
Just think of it as "owning" a relationship
with your customer instead of just "renting"
one. This serves up an opportunity to establish
new indicators of success, for example lifetime
value.
The notion of lifetime value will give forward
looking marketers a huge advantage, as they begin
testing and gaining insight on how to better market
to the consumer not in terms of a single transaction,
but over a longer set of highly indexed content
such as, interests, occupation, religious values
and social responsibility just to name a few.
The opportunity for the marketer is to follow
a known and self identifying consumer over time.
Beginning with the initial introduction to the
brand either online or in-store, and then follow
with the offer to purchase or repurchase over
time. In the case of Sony franchised elements
such as DVD, Music CD, even their home electronics
or any of their branded merchandise. This will
at the very least introduce statistical modeling
techniques that track core customer segments.
More advanced arrangements will depend upon investment
in database and CRM technology. There are a number
of Customer Relationship
Management providers which can be easily
found online that will allow companies to easily
track relationships with their core customers.
User-generated
content
It seems to me too many
lazy marketers just throw anything at the wall
to see if it sticks. Using that type of system
today seems more like an opportunity for disaster
than a clearly articulated strategy for a media
mix. We also need to design it so we can gain
more consumer insight.
We need to develop an approach inside our programs
that can help us learn more about what people
like, don't like and from every point of view
around our products. So we can better refine our
marketing efforts.
For example, we can introduce content for our
prospects in advance of a major campaign. By doing
this we can help boost interest in the product
and give early indications of areas of consumer
interest. If we want we can make key strategic
assets available that would mirror key marketing
touch points and features.
Your marketing team can then use this information
as a form of research for further targeting efforts.
sales
involvement
I'm starting to notice a
real interest from the sales department with regard
to the intimacy that the digital channel affords
in creating a bond with customers. We're speaking
of custom content, created with a clear digital
strategy behind it, not just repackaged advertising.
With a coordinated partnership between sales and
marketing, there's a clear ability to develop
consumer interactive relationships that support
the departments marketing goals while simultaneously
building the company's brand.
Layers of complexity within organizations make
this challenging to achieve and corporate is very
protective of their brands, but there is a huge
interest developing for good ideas here.
Certainly if you haven't developed customized
digital programs featuring the products already,
get started on implementing this marketing requirement
by building it into future branding arrangements.
Development
of long term customer relationships
You have a highly interactive
channel and devoted customers, yet you're not
doing very much to develop long-term relationships
with them. As noted above, you need to look at
how digital can drive lifetime value for the marketing
investment in the product you market.
Once you begin marketing around long term customer
understanding, you can leverage predictive modeling
and lifestyle marketing concepts to proactively
engage your customers while taking advantage of
the unique behavioral targeting capabilities of
the digital channel.
If you don't, you're going to be guilty of just
broadcasting to your customers, and traditional
advertising is already pretty good at this.
Customer
Relationship Management (CRM) section.7
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