Data Management and the Customer Interaction

This is the final blog of a 4 part series on how data management is impacting the role of the CMO and marketing.

This is the final blog of a 4 part series on how data management is impacting the role of the CMO and marketing. Check out part one, part two, and part three in the series if you haven’t already.

Data-influenced marketing, Self Service and data awareness are three trends that have helped to create a fourth trend, which is the realization that customer interaction, once initiated by marketers, now is in the control of the consumer. Technology and data availability through smart phones, smart televisions, digital and social media have turned control of the customer interaction completely on its head. As marketing professionals, we have to realize that and cater our marketing campaigns to these sources of information or risk irrelevance.

Brand awareness in a digital marketplace means that your offering and message need to be ever-present. Today, no response is a response. Measured in touch points, consumer interactions may culminate in instantaneous offers to consumers in close proximity to your products or services. If an organization’s brand is not alerting a consumer’s ecosystem via sophisticated devices, multi-channel as they might be, meaningful business does not occur.

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Consumers that interact with your brand, educate themselves on your offerings and enter the buying cycle at a time and a place of their choosing. So, will they like what they see?

The buyer today is at the center of his or her own universe of interactions and they are accumulating a single version of your organization based on how you interact with them. Ten years ago, very few visionaries saw a future in which a consumer could walk into a brick and mortar store and conduct a transaction without ever interacting with a single employee. (With the exception, of course, of Steve Jobs.) However, we now have that very capability in every Apple store and many others.

The good thing for marketers is that digital footprint is every bit as understandable, and capable of being scored for analysis, as if the consumer had picked up a phone and interacted with a call center.

Marketing’s frantic chase to provide and enable powerful and meaningful customer interactions by keeping pace with the rate of change in Social, Mobile and Cloud environments, is a massive challenge today but brimming with all kinds of business benefits. Data Management plays a pivotal and fundamental role in assisting marketers in culling through and analyzing data to help them evolve from the four Ps of marketing to a much more complex set of go-to-market strategies that help sellers engage with buyers.

The best practices of marketers, given the visibility into data that make up customer interactions, the ability to improve, enrich and append data with relevant content, and a means to measure outcomes, demonstrates the importance of managing data by knowledgeable business stakeholders. The question is, Are You Ready?

by Len Dubois, SVP and Chief Marketing Officer, Trillium Software