Has the time come for marketers to abandon campaigns and focus on customers?
All marketers claim their efforts are customer-centric. After all, if companies aren’t squarely focused on customers, what on earth are they doing? Truth be told, many are unknowingly spinning their wheels, stuck in campaign mode.
Campaign-centric marketers compulsively ask: “How do we attract attention and increase sales?” (Important questions, mind you.) Customer-centric marketers ask: “How do we create delightful customer experiences that deliver value?”
Answer the second question, and you’ve nailed the first.
Why does the old way of thinking about campaigns as one-off initiatives fall short today?
Pitfalls of Traditional Campaigns
Predefined campaigns are held hostage by their own static nature. Billboards, magazine ads and TV commercials have limited shelf life and are aimed toward achieving the most general objective: get in front of the highest number of eyeballs during a finite time period.
Social media opens a lot of creative avenues for brands and continues to command large shares of digital marketing budgets. But even a Tweet or Instagram post can’t be customised to millions of individuals at once or change after it’s sent.
It would be inaccurate and disingenuous to say these forms of marketing have no purpose or value. But today’s pressing challenge for digital ads isn’t reach, it’s relevance. How can brands market one-to-one with millions of customers simultaneously to increase ROI?
Email is the first part of the equation. According to recent Direct Marketing Association research, email continues to be the largest driver of ROI among digital marketing channels. Context is the other (more critical) part of the equation. Context can elevate what’s essentially a numbers game into something that changes how customers perceive and respond to an email’s call to action.
Here are two highly used terms that marketers can place under the umbrella of context to transition their mindset from campaigns to customers. Context is what ultimately maximizes value for both you and your customers.
Real-Time
The phrase real-time gets thrown around a lot in marketing circles. Engaging in ‘real-time’ certainly sounds smart when your average consumer attention span is 8 seconds - shorter than that of a goldfish. But what does real-time mean and more importantly, how does it drive positive customer action?
As a stand alone marketing term, real-time doesn’t mean a whole lot. Technically, a billboard markets in real time. The message is received the instant a consumer sees it. Even in the digital world, real-time is confined to when a customer opens your email, checks their social stream, or if you’re really lucky, notices your banner ad.
Imagine a billboard that advertised iced coffee when the weather was hot and automatically changed to hot coffee if the temperature dipped to a certain level. The true power of real-time is in the ability for the content to change based on your customers’ context the moment they receive the message.
For email, this means delivering the right content depending on a whole list of known context-based variables. This brings us to the next topic.
Personalization
Personalization is an antiquated marketing concept. What used to be the number one way to segment and target customers is now the bottom rung of customized marketing. Personalization isn’t bad; it just isn’t nearly enough.
Marketers that cling solely to personalization will never elevate past stale campaigns.
Digital marketing has become more sophisticated, and technology has enabled more relevant targeting based on things like browsing history. But just because someone researched fly fishing rods for a birthday gift doesn’t mean he wants to see non-stop fishing rod ads on every site for the next two weeks.
Again, some personalization and relevance is better than none. But your existing and potential customers’ interests, desires, and needs change minute by minute as they move from one activity to another and from place to place. Ad retargeting is still campaign based.
Remember that coffee billboard that changes with the weather? That’s context. And while it’s a simple example, it’s a step toward customer-centric marketing.
For email, context means dynamic content that instantly changes when the email is opened. This could be based on a customer’s external circumstance such as weather, time of day, location and device (desktop, tablet, phone). It can also depend on the brand’s internal circumstances such as inventory or a limited sales promotion.
Like real-time, contextual marketing has become overused and misunderstood. Context is a layer on top of personalization. It’s a philosophy from which personalization tactics flow but involves a higher-level strategy that puts customer experience front and center.
The estate agents’ mantra is: Location, Location, Location. Buy the right house in the wrong location, and you’re stuck. The same holds true for marketers and context. Send the ‘right message’ (an otherwise attractive offer) to the wrong customer, and your return will suffer. Context can’t replace good content, but it does allow you to reorient your thinking around customers, which will ultimately lead to increased attention and profitability.
Vivek Sharma is the chief executive officer of Movable Ink. He tweets @vivsharma.