Wiring Up your Digital Marketing Stack

Marketing Managers who still perceive Digital as just another channel to amplify mainline marketing communication, can give this column a skip. The rest can continue reading :)

Now that I have got your attention, I can safely assume that you believe Digital to be at the heart of designing consumer experiences & story telling; and that it is likely to be a key influence in driving commerce. You believe your channel’s loyalty lies in your ability to stay in real-time sync with their business, empowering them with access to tools & resources on-demand.

If both assumptions are correct, you certainly belong to the New School of Marketing that is preparing to transform over time and become a digital business. The days ahead, call for owning consumer data and profiles that will enable your brands to drive more meaningful engagement. You know that Data will empower your business to behave intelligently, while your brand’s creativity will fuel the human touch.

Skeptics be damned

Technology is too enmeshed in your consumer’s life to merit a debate. Digital Ethnography paints a vivid picture of how he pulls all the information he needs on a single touch, transacts on the fly, consumes content on multiple screens, shares his experience within a peer group and influences opinions. Digital is a label that we can now append on to his behavior and not the medium.

Now pause for a second; and compare that to the behavior exhibited by your business. Does it not remain stuck, in dinosaurian times? We use old school marketing theory to deal with your new age consumers, and don’t we all look stupid. Agencies push TV advertising on digital media, churn out stupid contests, build and abandon microsites, flaunt Facebook shares and Video Views, but know zilch about the audience; because it just does not care to dig into data and often does not know where to look.

With little opportunity to influence your consumer’s advertising saturated mind, you can outsmart your competition by focusing your attention elsewhere. You need to understand your consumers’ digital behavior data because therein lie so many opportunities to influence positive interactions. It is only the sum total of positive experiences and positive word of mouth that will help turn prospects into customers in the era of digital business.

Where do we start?

Think of your Marketing programs as a simple stack of platforms, where branded content sits atop a technology layer, using the power of media to spread far and wide. The Experience at every touch-point, physical, social, online is designed to deliver delight; while a dashboard translates the consumer behavior in near real-time to identify signals.

Assuming you have such a framework in place, and you are burning millions in media, why would you not want to own the consumer behavioral data, you pay to generate? The answer is simple. Todays marketing stacks are not wired up intelligently to better leverage common user data such as sign-up profiles, content affinity, commerce history etc.

One can argue that to do this one needs big investments in technology, but that is so far from the truth. The change required is in our own mindset while designing a program.

We all want to know what kind of content does our prospective customer like to interact with. Is he the social kind, exhibiting prolific behavior to share? Does he send demand signals — checking out product/price information and store locations? What kind of stimulus makes him return? When and where is he most reachable? All these questions have answers, if you are determined to find out.

Wiring-Up for future

Today when we talk about “The Stack” we no longer talk just OS, backend programming languages, CMS or databases. We are talking about an all-new way of designing and interconnecting (wiring) marketing automation software with content, community and media platforms.

The MarTech (marketing technology) geeks are experimenting with open and flexible systems that can be wired up to drive uniquely differentiated programs — delivered faster, better, cheaper. Jam Stack (for example) is an all new paradigm for building digital assets that delivers better performance and insights without compromising on security or scalability. Intelligent data structures that allow consumer behavior information to be encapsulated within objects, make a compelling case for real-time demand signals vs. big-data analysis. Web Services that interconnect marketing programs with 3rd party partner services may hold greater potential to delight consumers.

While some in the industry are leaning on standardization, with vendors such as Adobe announcing the all-new ‘Experience Cloud’ (integrating their advertising, marketing and analytics offerings onto a single unified platform), many remain skeptical of stack lock-in with a single vendor. When I plug-in will it light up?

The bottom line is this. Do you dream of having a system where every piece of content, commerce and experience element you produce, is intelligently interconnected to deliver consumer delight? If yes, your road ahead may lie in re-designing your digital marketing programs first, where you put the power of data at its core. Technology solutions will follow, but the vision to wire-up comes first.

Takeaway

Marketing Departments that rely on digital as just another channel to amplify marketing communication are shortsighted when it comes to leveraging the investments they make on disparate marketing programs. Millions are wasted because we build and throw stuff away, customer data included. The need of the hour is to unify your asset, content and media strategy — wiring up websites, apps, content hubs, databases and social presence. Wiring up will help you interpret the demand signals for business and in turn enable you to deliver more effective marketing programs. That will be a crucial step in your journey to become a #digitalbusiness.

(This article was first published in the Financial Express on April 11, 2017)