Integrated Campaigns Deliver a [Marketing] Super Bowl!
Super bowls and championship rings are won by teams working together towards a single goal. Even Singles Tennis Champions are a result of an entire team — the coach, the physiotherapist, the nutritionist, all planning and working together for that Grand Slam title.
I’ve previously explained how Accelerating with Marketing AI is the only logical way forward. However, surprisingly, Marketing at digital-first organizations is still fixed on archaic methods of doing things manually and monotonously.
In the marketing world, the best results are achieved when all channels and sub-channels unify to achieve that ultimate marketing goal. Unfortunately, the marketing teams today represent a race track, where every channel is competing for the elusive ‘Last-Click Attribution’ finish line.
The ‘race’ has given rise to individual channel solutions which typically reflect the following behaviour:
A rigid vertical-agnostic one-size-fits-all approach
Banking vertical, with larger lead times, is treated the same as E-Commerce vertical, which requires highly agile setup.
Different ‘Measure of Success’ for each channel
It is a nightmare for the marketing decision makers to consolidate reports across different attribution models and different success measure -‘Likes’, ‘Signups’, ‘Transactions’, ‘Orders’, ‘Sales’, ‘Revenue’ across different channels.
No Cross-Channel synergies
The same end customer are bombarded by multiple channels without any capping, leading to brand fatigue and frustration. Further, there is no synchronization between channels for best selling products, seasonality trends and the conversion funnel behaviour.
Smaller institutions within the same marketing team
The Me vs. You culture sets in, where each team tries to guard its space for spends, resources and targets.
What are Integrated Marketing Campaigns?
Thedma.org defines it as
“Integrated Marketing is an approach to creating a unified and seamless experience for consumers to interact with the brand/enterprise; it attempts to meld all aspects of marketing communication such as advertising, sales promotion, public relations, direct marketing, and social media, through their respective mix of tactics, methods, channels, media, and activities, so that all work together as a unified force. It is a process designed to ensure that all messaging and communications strategies are consistent across all channels and are centered on the customer.”
Across the most successful marketing initiatives, the common theme that emerges is proof of a coordinated marketing effort towards a singular goal. The individual channel plays a part, making way for other channels to pitch in.
Imagine you are launching a new E-Commerce brand where the display and social channels create the buzz for the brand, intent-driven channels pitch in with transactions and revenue, remarketing kicks in to drive LTV and website personalization drives on-site conversions.
The other factor that works in favour of successful marketing organisations is the smart analysis of the conversion funnel. These businesses move away from binary CPO (Cost per Order)/CPC (Cost per Click) considerations, and concentrate instead on full-funnel analytics including website bounce rates, CTR (Click Through Rates), CVR (Conversion Rates), session times, Add-to-Carts, and LTV, to go with the CPOs and CPCs.
The holistic approach allows sub-channels to deliver value and ROI against the stated goal. The key here is to establish a golden source for integrated, cross-channel analytics, and build a strong data science engine which can measure and deliver incremental performance benefits.
The game is won when the quarterbacks are pinpoint accurate, the receivers catch everything, and the defenders allow nothing through.
No real surprise then if some of the famous marketing setups reflect these measures incorporated by a super bowl team. AI-Driven Suggestion engines feed actionable insights to individual channels.
These, armed with demographic and psychographic intelligence, personalized ad messaging, and acquisition channels on preferred devices driving transactions, is the indispensable, essential need of the hour to build brand loyalty and stickiness; yes, all of these, hand-in-hand with remarketing channels using every click to influence customers to travel down the funnel, are what helps build that winning megabrand! Machine-learning and automation remain the mixed-doubles champion team.
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About OnlineSales.ai
OnlineSales.ai is an AI-Driven E-Commerce Marketing Platform. Led by Ex-Amazonians the platform is made by retailers for retailers.
OnlineSales.ai is retailer’s operating system for user acquisition, retention and monetization.
At its core, the platform gathers and mines billions of data points to build product catalog intelligence, user personas and dynamics of retail economics.
This system intelligence is combined with technology automation on an OnlineSales platform that now hosts connected apps across marketing, user experience and data technologies — all on a single platform.
Originally published at onlinesales.ai on July 6, 2017.
