Skills Marketers Need to Learn to Stay Competitive

The Big data boom, calls for personalisation and providing for a seamless omni channel experience are some of the terms marketers are going to sleep with. While marketers are having sleepless nights, business heads are up on their toes asking for more action, more traffic more conversion. The development in technology sure provides for the opportunity to marketers to silence their superiors by driving meaningful successful campaigns run on insight from the huge amount of data available. Making use of in vogue programmatic advertising, using predictive marketing or account based marketing are just a few way you can surge ahead of competition, keep your customers happy and expect favorable returns.

Mentioned here are some ideas shared by senior executives in an interview provided to Direct Marketing Network, on ‘Skills marketers need to master in 2016.’.

Matt Goddard Chief Executive Officer, R2INTEGRATED mentions that marketers or their chiefs have to ensure that the data silos available with each department are unified elaborating that, technology, brand, media, and content disciplines should be brought together as a cohesive to provide a customer experience ecosystem. He adds, ‘now marketers need to master connecting the experience across channels. From the banner ads their customers see, to the search results and the native Google sponsored promotions that appear in email, to the social, mobile, and Web messaging—marketers have to connect the dots. They have to master bridging the experience through content, images, and calls-to-action that matter in the right moment for their customers and that will drive a measurable result for their own business objectives.

Rebecca Kaykas-Wolff, Director Product Marketing, Oracle Marketing Cloud, echoes Goddard’s view adding further that getting all the data as a cohesive is important, but what will also be required are operational design efficiency, partnership alignments and laser focussed commitment to concepts like centers of excellence and thought leadership. She goes on to say,’Data will continue to be at the center of these conversations, but having the right process, partnerships, infrastructure, and technologies will be critical.’

Mike Finnegan, Vice President, Programmatic, Live Nation, believes that content targeting and analytics should be the key skills marketers need to concentrate on in 2016. He mentions a study from emarketer stating 36% of U.S. social media users find banner ads to be effective, compared to sponsored messages on Periscope (61%), Snapchat (58%), or Instagram (56%). He further adds, ‘This shift reflects the move from conventional ad placements to an “in-the-trenches” battle for consumers’ attention. Mike mentions that placing advertisements is one thing but evaluating and analysing their impact and outcomes is absolutely essential for any marketing team.

Adam Padilla, Co-Founder & President, BrandFire, touches on the importance of partnerships between like minded product manufacturers, service providers with aim to give the customer an advantage, the combined efforts will inadvertently give an advantage to all parties involved. Citing an example he says,’It’s all about letting specialists stay in their lane, and be experts rather than jacks-of-all-trades. A consumer product that wants to offer delivery is best served partnering with Uber or Postmates than trying to create a delivery system themselves.’

I am sure the insight provided by senior management executives can impact your efforts as a marketer. What can also improve your connect with the customer is providing for easy seamless access to your web properties by enabling customer identity management solutions. CIM as a cloud based solution not just provides for easy authentication and authorisation for your customers, it stores on valuable first party data that they enter while registering. The data is stored securely to give you peace of mind additionally it provides customer insights that can help in your efforts of personalisation, segmenting and targeting. Customer not willing to have a separate identity for accessing your web property can use their existing social id’s to get easy access through social login, a CIM enabled application feature. All in all CIM as a new age customer identity management solution is an enabler for all your marketing efforts and an absolute must for customer facing web businesses.