How
digital marketing operations can transform business
Struggling to keep up with rapidly evolving
consumer behavior? Digital marketing operations can bridge the divide between
what customers expect and what they get.
Marketing operations
is certainly not
the sexiest part of marketing, but it is becoming the most important one. With
businesses unable to keep pace with evolving consumer behavior and the
marketing landscape, the pressure is on to put marketing operations—skilled people,
efficient processes, and supportive technology—in a position to enable brands
to not just connect with customers but also shape their interactions.
When done well, we’ve
seen marketing operations provide a 15 to 25 percent improvement in marketing
effectiveness, as measured by return on investment and customer-engagement
metrics. Yet achieving that level of improvement is elusive for many. While
marketers are embarking on a wide array of “digital transformations” to reshape
their operations and business models, many of these efforts are stymied by
marketing’s difficulty in delivering on its aspirations. For example, one
recent survey found an astonishing 84 percent of marketers do not have a formal
content strategy or distribution process to feed their growing bevy of
marketing channels, and they lack any kind of formally managed content supply
chain. Despite this, content budgets continue to increase.
This situation played out at one global
consumer-products company, which saw year-over-year content spending rise by
more than 25 percent as a result of its efforts to become more
customer-centric. There was, however, no unifying strategy, governance, or
system to create cohesion, reuse assets, or measure effectiveness across the
company’s complex supply chain, which consisted of dozens of agencies,
production companies, and media partners, producing material for websites,
blogs, YouTube, social media, mobile, and customer-relationship management.
Establishing a center-of-excellence function
to develop and manage a consistent content operating model across divisions
resulted in transparency, new governance, and improved processes. That cut the
time to generate content, stopped the growth in costs, and brought new
discipline into managing the impact of content. As a result, marketing return
on investment has improved by more than 20 percent.
Five steps to bring
marketing operations into the digital era
Digital marketing operations involves the
application of capabilities, processes, structures, and technologies to
cost-effectively exploit and scale the interactivity, targeting,
personalization, and optimization of digital channels. As the example of the
consumer-products company shows, marketing operations has a critical role in
driving bottom-line growth. That capability directly enables the speed,
agility, iterative development, experimentation, and responsiveness that
successful companies need to react to and shape the marketplace.
Marketers are aware of what needs to be done,
and many are taking action. But that often boils down to implementing new
technology platforms, adding head count, or increasing digital allocations
within the marketing-spending mix. While these are important steps, they won’t
solve the challenge. Fundamentally, modern marketing operations calls for the
thoughtful, deliberate development of new processes, coordination, and
governance. We’ve identified five attributes of effective marketing operations
1. Truly understanding
customers
Like any meaningful
relationship, getting to know your customers well is a commitment. Tracking,
analyzing, and interpreting customer behavior and attitudes should be an
ongoing, often moment-to-moment undertaking that is critical not only to
targeting and shaping relevant content and experiences but also to optimizing
how they’re delivered—an important capability, given that during the buying
process consumers add an average of 1.7 brands to those they are
considering. This requires a wide range of data and sophisticated tools to
analyze specific customer segments and their behavior to spot opportunities and
predict future actions. Companies should map detailed customer decision
journeys for their most valuable segments, using technologies such as
ClickFox, which track customers across channels to not only determine
their cross-channel behavior but also isolate those moments where companies can
influence the journey.
Feeding these insights into marketing
operations requires processes and teams that focus on collecting and making
sense of the data, as well as quickly delivering the analysis in a digestible
form to the right decision makers—often continuously. Scaling this capability
means organizations need to automate processes that don’t require human
intervention, for example, personalizing web pages, delivering e-mail, or
generating dashboards for managers to track customer behavior.
Most companies are only at the beginning of
creating comprehensive customer-insights programs. While establishing “war
rooms” to monitor and react to social-media conversations is a good example of
how companies are moving in that direction, what’s needed are organizations
that integrate and make sense of all sources of customer insights. One global
hotel chain, for example, has combined its customer-research group and marketing-analytics
group in an effort to better understand its customers—specifically, those who
engage with their marketing, stay in their different hotels, and spend their
money once there. These two groups have been combined into one insights team
that reports directly to the chief marketing officer.
2. Delivering a
superior experience
What happens when customers have a bad
experience? They stop doing business with a company. And a souring of the
customer experience can take place at any point, which is why getting the
consumer journey right requires getting everything right. Meeting customer
expectations calls for mapping out each of the steps that define the entire
customer experience, highlighting not only the technologies and processes
needed to enable a smooth journey but also the various functions across the
organization that must coordinate to deliver it.
Marketing, sales, support, service, and
operations play key roles in many customer journeys, of course. But there are
other functions that are critical as well, such as order management and
fulfillment. Those are not typically top of mind for marketers, but the
experiences enabled by these back-end systems are instrumental to the way a
customer perceives a brand’s ability to deliver on expectations.
Consider the technology and operations
required for L’Oreal’s Makeup Genius app, which uses webcams to enable
customers to virtually try on different shades and styles of makeup. To the
customer, it is an easy, seamless, and enjoyable experience. But it is enabled
by complex technology that involves coding dozens of makeup shades, matching
them to a near infinite variety of skin tones, and collecting data on which
types of customers try on which shades, then tracking their satisfaction levels
after purchase—all of which are analyzed to further refine the matching process
and improve the customer experience.
This two-way flow of
information is an important aspect of modern marketing operations. As an
experience is delivered to the customer, there needs to be a system to capture
how that shopper responds and feeds that information back into the
organization, which then adjusts its offer or message accordingly. And this
feedback loop is not just about optimizing the customer experience. It also
helps decision makers adjust campaign spending based on trends and
opportunities, for example, or direct salespeople to stores where product
inventory is low. We’ve found that best-in-class companies reallocate up to 80
percent of digital-campaign budgets during a campaign.
3. Selecting the right
marketing technology
Delivering on
omnichannel customer experiences requires marketing technology that can
automate processes, personalize interactions, and coordinate actions. Marketing
technologists, in particular, have a critical role in navigating the ecosystem
of more than 2,000 marketing-technology providers to create solutions that
deliver the most effective customer experiences.5 They effectively act as a bridge between the customer
experience and marketing operations.
An important element of managing a capable
marketing-operations function is building a system that has the flexibility to
work with large platforms that are becoming more dominant, such as Adobe or
Oracle, as well as point solutions that are constantly introducing innovations.
That requires developing a thoughtful application-programming-interface
strategy to make sure your system has enough flexibility to hook into both
current and emerging technologies, which will only become more important as the
Internet of Things moves mainstream.
Yet the “best” marketing technology isn’t
necessarily what’s best for an organization. For example, an overriding
consideration may be how well a particular solution integrates with legacy
systems or how well it meets specific requirements. One global technology
original-equipment manufacturer, for instance, set out to create a personalized
content-delivery system across all touchpoints. Beginning with a clear vision
of its ideal customer-delivery needs, it defined key performance indicators,
outputs, and levels of personalization, and then it set out to assemble the
technology that could do it. But it also needed a solution that could play
nicely with the company’s many legacy systems and would also be easy for a
large group of global marketers to implement and manage day to day. The company
wound up combining off-the-shelf data, content, and analytics platforms with a
personalization engine.
4. Implementing
processes and governance
Technology enables the customer experience,
but it requires people, processes, and governance to ensure technology does
what it’s supposed to do. The failure to establish guidelines for how business
units might pilot new technologies, how data will be shared across the
organization, or which capabilities will be managed in-house versus by external
agencies and partners could result in a patchwork of efforts across the
enterprise that sow confusion and hamper attempts to scale.
To address this challenge, one global
consumer-packaged-goods company rethought its entire approach to bringing a new
product to market, beginning with a complete overhaul of the marketing brief.
The existing briefing process was not standardized, which resulted in varying
levels of input, lack of clarity around the insights that were driving the
campaign, loose definitions of the goals of the campaign, and inconsistencies
regarding the specific role of each agency, as well as that of the internal team.
As would be expected, much time was wasted as both the briefs and campaign
development underwent multiple iterations.
The new approach required every agency
involved in the product launch to participate in the creation of the briefs.
Having everyone at the table formalized responsibilities, while aligning roles
and resources ahead of time helped to mitigate the “land grabs” that can occur
among competing agencies. In addition, bringing everyone together at the
beginning made for stronger briefs, as it generated healthy debate on such key
issues as which agencies would take the lead in the launch, which key
performance indicators should be measured, and how and where to incorporate
feedback loops that would allow teams to tweak and iterate after launch. The new
approach paid off: the time spent writing a marketing brief and rolling out a
new product dropped from four months to just one.
Establishing such clarity up front requires
the client to be a strong orchestrator and the agencies to stick to their
defined roles. Rather than being restrictive, this level of governance can
enhance creativity, as it frees people to focus on their responsibilities
instead of wasting time and energy jockeying for position with other agencies.
5. Using the best
metrics to drive success
Technology is now catching up to the holy
grail of marketing: the ability to monitor, track, and manage the effectiveness
of marketing investments. Measures of marketing effectiveness need to move
beyond what has often been limited to a narrow set of metrics. As companies
become more customer-centric, for example, metrics should focus on customer
activity rather than simply product or regional activity, as is often the case.
Metrics should also reinforce new behaviors and processes, such as how fast a
product is launched or how quickly lessons from the field can successfully be
integrated into the next marketing offer.
To be most effective, however, metrics need to
deliver insights quickly—often in real time—so the business can actually act.
They need to be delivered in a way that is easy for decision makers to
understand, and they need to be forward looking to identify future
opportunities rather than focus on reporting what has already happened.
It’s sad but true: marketing operations has traditionally been
overshadowed by sexier marketing tactics. Yet as consumers become increasingly
empowered and sophisticated in the way they make purchasing decisions, it’s
never been more important to use data to map customers’ DNA, understand exactly
what they want, and then take those insights to develop and deliver a superior
(and flawless) customer experience. As outcomes go, we think that’s pretty sexy
indeed.
byDavid Edelman and Jason Heller
http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/marketing_sales/How_digital_marketing_operations_can_transform_business?cid=digital-eml-alt-mip-mck-oth-1507
No comments:
Post a Comment