How can you Overcome the Challenges Presented by Data Management?

Following its ‘Future of Digital Marketing’ event, industry publication Econsultancy interviewed its five keynote speakers to determine what that the biggest challenge for digital marketers is over the next few years. The result was unanimous: data management.

In a round-up article based on the event, it concluded: “We’re really only just beginning to figure out how important it is to connect up data sources and form a coherent customer view across different channels.” And its research, based on nearly 400 company marketing departments and digital marketing agencies, backs this up. Alarmingly, it discovered that less than one in five (18%) marketers use a single customer profile for most of their marketing applications, and worse still, 45% don’t use a customer profile at all.

So in the digital age, how can you easily leverage the power of data management?

Embrace marketing automation

If you just want to build pretty websites then this isn’t for you. But if you want to deliver campaigns that generate results, a digital platform that helps you to optimise your content throughout the customer lifecycle.

Marketing requires you to use multiple touchpoints and messages to convert a lead into a sale. But with numerous products available on the market to help with customer engagement, many marketing professionals are faced with the challenge of delivering integrated campaigns based on information that is held in disparate systems. Using marketing automation, you can build bridges across your marketing campaigns, which encourage system integration, consistent messaging and personalised content.

Research from the Aberdeen Group concludes that market leaders are 67% more likely to use a marketing automation platform as it helps them to convert 53% more leads.

Introducing IBM Marketing

Allowing you to build bridges across your marketing campaigns and encourage integration of disparate systems, consistent messaging and personalised content, IBM Marketing enables you to:

Easily create emails that are relevant and engaging

Develop industry-leading email campaigns that deliver relevant and timely communications based on online and offline behaviours. Send personal, relevant and timely messages that incorporate your customers’ preferences and recent behaviours, trigger communications in real-time, and at the right time, and deliver a seamless multi-channel experience by integrating email with web, social, mobile and offline channels.

Engage mobile app users at the right time and place

Effectively engage your audience, wherever they are by capturing mobile insights in real-time to help you deliver personalised mobile experiences to each contact. Create multistep, cross-channel automated programmes and campaigns at each stage of the customer journey, combine and connect mobile engagement data with your existing customer profiles for cross-channel analysis, segmentation and targeting.

Collaborate across the team to design and continually improve customer experiences

Collaborate with a single view of a customer's journey and continually improve their experiences. Create a journey map by storyboarding your customer experiences, and define the details of your cross-channel interactions to create a virtual creative brief for your teams to execute, as well as gaining the ability to quickly view and understand what the customer experience looks like over time.

Interact with customers in a meaningful way through social channels

Engage with your customers across social channels by leveraging social interactions to better understand and respond to your customers. Seamlessly connect social into your broader engagement strategy, leverage existing data to execute targeted, automated campaigns that increase engagement and drive revenue and better understand and react to contacts.

Understand the paths that customers take across channels and touch points

Capture more of the right leads by closing the loop between marketing and sales to drive greater revenue through lead management features, which deliver higher-quality leads and reduce customer acquisition costs. Segment and define your ideal buyer so you can target the highest-quality leads, stay top of mind with content that keeps your customers engaged and leverage behavioural data to establish and improve sales and marketing alignment.

Discover more about how the IBM Marketing can revolutionise your campaigns…