First, it is imperative to determine what lies in the “social silo” that will impact other channels. For example, data-driven profiles, plus segmentation and models of highly engaged high value Facebook fans, can be used in all channels. We know that all fans are not high value, but high value customers are often fans — and socially active. So it’s important to be able to leverage social intelligence in customer marketing strategy and plans, thereby making the intelligence actionable for improved program results.

So what’s the best way to do this?

Let’s look at a Facebook roadmap for social intelligence:

Leverage Open Graph in Facebook with offers to encourage fans and customers to connect, not just to increase the number of fans, but to gather opt-in data. Make a compelling offer in customer emails, on your website or on your Facebook page. (Make sure the privacy policy and the permissions you display cover as much data as possible.)

Once you collect this valuable information don’t just file it somewhere. Treat it as a valuable feed of customer information. Using email or other collected data, link the Facebook information to your customer, compiled demographics, attitudinal, and behavioral data.

• Flag this insight within your customer database so that you have a more complete view of your customers.
• Understand which social connectors are prospects, leads or existing customers.

Create profiles and add to models and segmentation frameworks.

This roadmap allows you to use social intelligence anywhere in your marketing programs across all channels for activities like:

• Developing marketing tactics for prospects, leads and customers.
• Targeting high-value social customers with tailored offers and messaging.
• Creating campaigns in the social space targeted to higher value fans.
• Adjusting campaign messaging in all channels.

Since social activity is very dynamic, you’ll want to manage the Open Graph opportunity on an ongoing basis, rotating offers and placement. And remember you can offer a discount, for example, but a sweepstakes or other offer aligned with your brand can also be extremely effective. The data you gather gives you a dynamic portrait of your most engaged customers. You can use it for more refined and effective marketing investments. You might also want to leverage a marketing services partner with linkage, quality data and analytic expertise to get started.

The payoff…

For the social team:

• A clear, data-driven picture of your brand’s most engaged fans, leading to smarter social display ads and campaigns.
• A way to communicate clearly to marketing colleagues about the social customer ¾ beyond likes, posts and sentiments.

For the CMO:

• An understanding of the types of customers invested in social media helps calibrate marketing spend.
• A sound way to evaluate social media investment.
• A more complete picture of customer behavior.

For other marketing teams:

• A valuable customer attribute that can be used to help refine segmentation and targeting strategies.
• Clear understanding of how to target customer segments and which channels are likely to be most effective.

Knocking down the “social silo” is necessary to gather compelling data that’s useful in every marketing channel AND to be able to improve the customer experience. Building social intelligence is a key activity to keep in step with today’s dynamic customer, and to make sure your marketing is relevant and timely.

86% of U.S. online adults are taking part in at least some form of social interaction

None of the marketers in the room were surprised to hear Rob say that social media has become increasingly mainstream, though it was interesting to learn that according to Forrester, 86% of U.S. online adults are taking part in at least some form of social interaction.

This was good news for the marketers in attendance, many of whom are in the retail and travel industries, and all of whom are increasingly turning to social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest to promote their brands.

Also not surprising was Rob’s breakdown of challenges that marketers face, the biggest of which is creating a single view of customers across channels – picked by 50% of respondents in a recent Forrester survey. Not surprisingly, according to Rob, organizational silos contribute heavily to creating this challenge.

Measuring results was chosen by 45% of respondents, 39% cited improving expertise in new channels (i.e., social and mobile), 37% picked capturing customer insight to drive decision-making and 33% said managing data quality.

Smart cross-channel campaign management is critical to solving all of the above challenges and Rob had these thoughts on the topic:

• Campaign management applications are needed to enable more customer-centric approaches, but core CCCM capabilities are now quite mature
• Integrations, customizations and licenses are expensive and this sometimes prevent firms from incorporating campaign management applications
• Marketers need more support in social, mobile and local, but often native social listening, mobile push notifications and location-based communications are poorly supported or absent from the mix
• Marketers are asking for more help from their vendors as they often have the right vision and an interesting perspective. The vendors’ biggest challenge is simply a matter of moving fast enough to satisfy clients’ needs

Ultimately, Rob’s advice to marketers for getting to optimized cross-channel campaign management was this:

• Map your customer’s journey across key touch points
• Look for opportunities to integrate data and automate operations
• Create a 3-5 year technology strategy and implementation roadmap
• Prove ROI in high-value interactions – quick wins make it easier to get funding

A big opportunity for marketers in a digital world is to synchronize these moments. As we know, the digital era was ushered in by search engines, which created a new moment of truth and enabled advertisers to align to buyer interests via the new discipline of Search Engine Marketing.

Television advertising or a typical direct mail campaign is largely ”asynchronous” since these cannot be timed to appear precisely at the time of the viewer’s consideration and interest. A brand impression delivered when I’m not interested is largely ignored and represents wasted media budget.

Of course, mass marketing and direct mail campaigns are often timed to sync with various seasons. For example, I’m much more likely to be choosing a hotel prior to school Spring Break. Additionally, marketers may place promotions directly in the path to purchase, such as a standing display in store to align with the time of purchase. However, today we need more granular, more sophisticated synchronization; we need real-time marketing.

As Google observed in a white paper called “The Zero Moment of Truth,” the digital path to purchase generates many new occasions for truly interactive marketing. Consumer decisions are made in a wide variety of ways and are influenced by a wide variety of factors.

Well-timed, relevant interactions feel much less like advertising and more like advice.

Well-timed, relevant interactions feel much less like advertising and more like advice. It doesn’t interrupt my enjoyment of content but rather becomes content I enjoy. What are some ways to synchronize with buyer intent? Here are two key techniques:

Real-time content – Though content management has been available for years, few web sites offer content that adapts in real time based on the visitor’s profile. Most visitors are anonymous, but cookies provide bits of information including which pages the visitor touched on the last visit, or a question they answered earlier. Using these clues to dynamically alter content is now much easier with interaction management tools.

For example, a hotel chain might place an article about best restaurants in Florida on an affiliated Florida destination site. Unlike a static ad, an article can be updated based on motivational factors such as weather, recent news or a widely publicized celebrity event. Simply changing the opening line of the story, changes the relevance of the content.

Intelligent interactions – Every search result, website click or email open is an opportunity to interact and not to simply “make offers.” Rather than delivering a single message to the target, campaigns can engage visitors in a sequence of interactions. For example, a landing page on a hotel chain’s site might start with an observation and a simple poll: “Over 50% of Florida vacationers come from the Eastern United States. Are you from a) Eastern US, b) Western US, c) somewhere in between, or d) none of the above. Submit to see today’s results.”

Based on the answer, the next web page in the sequence can change, involving the visitor in an interactive experience rather than a reading experience.

These simple techniques are not employed by marketers for two reasons. First, interaction management is sometimes perceived by marketers as very technical and complicated. Second, getting even small bits of useful customer-specific data is cumbersome. However, both of these barriers are quickly coming down. Interaction management is moving from the realm of technical wizardry to simplified and integrated tools for marketers. And the safe and proper use of customer data to better serve customers with relevant content is easier today.

So what are you waiting for? A pitch in time saves nine!

For more information about real-time marketing and campaign management, please visit our website.

One of the key factors that successful baseball teams leverage these days is data. Data about how every player performs in any situation is used to make key decisions such as which relief pitcher to bring in or which pitch to throw to a specific hitter in the given game situation.
This data has to be comprehensive and actionable. If the data is incomplete or not properly aggregated, the analysis will be flawed and subsequent decisions can lead to sub-optimal outcomes. This is similar to the issues marketers face when planning, executing and measuring their campaigns.
Instead of understanding which pitch or which pinch hitter will give a team the best chance of success, marketers need to know who to market to and in which channels to communicate with them. They also need to understand which marketing activities made up the path to purchase to be able to drive future campaign success. The key to getting these decisions right is to have an accurate 360-degree view of customers and prospects across all channels.

Having disjointed data can impact decisions across all aspects of campaign creation and measurement. Imagine a high-value catalog responder opting in to an email loyalty program on a website. Not linking that information to his or her previous transactions could lead to redundant communications across channels in a best case scenario and at worst, conflicting messages.

The good news is that there are solutions available today to assist marketers in resolving their customer identities across channels to enable complete, aggregated, actionable profiles. Using referential data, marketing service providers are able to create linkages between disparate customer data points and can fill missing channel identifiers.

Getting this data management activity right sets all of your marketing activities up for success and allows marketers to ensure that the hope and excitement at the start of each campaign results in championship outcomes.

For more information about cross-channel identity resolution, download our latest white paper, Crossing the great divide: Resolving customer identities across online and offline channels.

What’s even more unfortunate is that this colleague is not an anonymous customer paying with cash. He happens to shop at this retailer regularly, using a credit card the majority of the time and he also frequents their website. He expects this retailer to know him: he has provided log-in information including his email address and mobile phone number, and has made purchases online. He loves his cell phone and texting so much that he has opted in to receive text messages from this retailer.

This is a common scenario for retailers because information is usually collected in silos and as a result retailers do not have a solid understanding of their customers’ purchasing behaviors. If the retailer was able to identify my colleague, they could have texted an offering that was relevant to him and his purchasing behaviors. My colleague would have responded much better to a text driving him to the store for the latest fishing equipment or sporting goods items. With a plethora of tools available, marketers can reach their customers through mobile, emails, mailing addresses, online profiles, loyalty programs, social network profiles and more. What hasn’t been readily available is the ability to link these various profiles together, giving marketers a clear understanding of who is buying from them, where they are shopping and how they want to be interacted with.

This retailer has a huge opportunity to connect with customers by providing an engaging and relevant experience through the mobile channel. A mobile strategy is a critical piece of today’s marketing mix. A mobile strategy can enable marketers to drive traffic to stores with text messaging and alerts, and can surprise and delight customers with the right message.

Solutions exist today that enable marketers to identify a customer with a single piece of personally identifiable information (PII). Matching on a mobile phone number alone is difficult, but if you have captured the customer’s name and address, email or simply a zip code during the opt-in process, you can build links across channels to understand how they shop with you and who they are. This cross-channel identity resolution helps marketers avoid blundering when they recognize a customer in one channel, but treat them as they don’t know them in other channels.

Instead of simply trying to sell more of “anything” to a consumer who signs up for mobile, email or social marketing, a retailer should look for opportunities to build an engaging relationship by making shopping with them more convenient and relevant. Is the customer male or female and what are the demographic and psychographic characteristics of his or her household? Does the customer shop in store, online or both? Use the information to build relevant offers so you don’t leave him thinking, “Lime green flip flops with a big pink flower?” Showing the customer you recognize him and how he shops will go a long ways towards building a two-way relationship where he wants to engage with you instead of giving him a reason to quickly search for your opt-out button.

So the next time that this retailer sends out a text to my colleague, I hope it is for a new rod and reel or tackle box. Personally, I would have loved the flowery flip flops… but I didn’t get the text.

For more information about cross-channel identity resolution, download our latest white paper, Crossing the great divide: Resolving customer identities across online and offline channels.

The most important ingredients of a party are the guests: no guests, not much of a party. Over a long and fulfilling lifetime you make a lot of friends, so the key to planning this party was contacting our parent’s friends who now live in multiple cities.

We started by designing the invitation and, since most guests were born before Facebook’s inventors, we stuck with more conventional sharing and gave them the option of letting us know by email (on my domain) or phone (my brother’s house). This was the start of our “RSVP integration” nightmare.

Cards went out and, not surprisingly, we had a few deliverability issues including an invitation to Frank, one of my dad’s best work friends from years ago. Yes, he worked in an era when the Company was a place you worked for life, and relationships with co-workers and friends were like adjoining backyards without a fence.  Frank’s invitation came back to my brother’s house undelivered, so my dad called Frank to invite him directly. Frank later confirmed by email.

Meanwhile we received more phone calls and emails, which my brother and I traded back and forth. This is where things got really hard to track. Was the lady nicknamed “Mona,” who left a voicemail, the same household as the email from a “Mr. Bose?” The conflicting names and channels meant that when my mom called I didn’t have a simple answer to her question, “So how many people are confirmed so I can let the caterer know the count?” Well, our aggregations are probably wrong because our data quality is poor due to our inability to integrate across phone and email, “170, I think.”

A party is like a product that you market to your guests. As the marketer, you must contact your customers, engage them and end with a call to action (an RSVP in our case). Since you will hear back on multiple channels, you’d better be prepared to capture, integrate and aggregate the response from your customers across multiple channels. A marketer’s challenge is to do this for millions of customers. All marketers get anxious about a call from the “CMO,” but in my case, that means the Chief Mommy Officer.

Learn more about multi-channel marketing strategies for data quality, audience creation and response attribution tips and trends in Experian Marketing Services’ recently released 2012 Digital Marketer Report.

Ten Tips for Cross-Channel Optimized Marketing:

1. Build a comprehensive, unified view of prospects and customers
2. Link behaviors and attributes across all channels and data sources
3. Identify and address specific customer segments
4. Personalize messages and interactions
5. Engage in a consistent voice across traditional, digital, social and mobile channels
6. Respect preferences through registrations and opt-ins
7. Secure personal, sensitive and confidential data
8. Center the marketing process around customers-not around channels or campaigns
9. Strengthen relationships by optimizing the experience to customer life stage
10. Correctly attribute sales to marketing investments