Modern Marketing Utopia: It’s a Journey, Not a Destination

What marketer doesn’t want to achieve a Modern Marketing utopia?  Lots of marketers the world over are always seeking that holy grail or silver bullet.

But the utopia we seek is not a destination. It’s a journey.  It’s something I truly believe and it’s something CEOs believe. Many tell me what excites them most is the journey, how they are getting there in new ways with new capabilities, and having the opportunity to change their entire business.

Achieving marketing success in today’s hyperactive, always-connected world may sound daunting, but there are solutions on the market today aligned with proven best practices and real-world use cases that can help you achieve the level of success you seek.

Start With the Stack

There are lots of differing definitions of the term marketing stack.  Here’s how we define it:

A Modern Marketing stack enables marketers to work within a single system on an open platform, which acts as the hub for marketing campaigns and customer data. This includes the most robust third-party data available and a complete view of customer preferences and profile data.

An integrated marketing stack is a requirement for running complex marketing campaigns using marketing automation (B2B) or cross-channel orchestration (B2C) supported by a data management platform (DMP), content management, social marketing, testing and optimization, and a wide variety of third-party apps.

Advanced marketing stacks connect directly to commerce, sales, service, website content management, and social relationship platforms to deliver a holistic customer experience.

And to say the marketing stack landscape or ecosystem is a crowded space would be a massive understatement. According to Scott Brinker of chiefmartec.com—the man who tracks this data—there are nearly 4,000 different martech solutions on the market today.

The average enterprise marketing stack today consists of as many as 17 or more tools, requiring dozens of custom integration projects that few marketers have time or budget to support. With this increase in point solution technologies, marketers are starting to become confused by the complexity that creates data silos and disconnected customer experiences.

To help navigate this incredibly large number of martech vendors, your stack needs to:

• Touch virtually every aspect of the customer lifecycle.
• Orchestrate 1:1 customer touchpoints at scale across email, mobile, social, and display.
• Be an open platform to allow for continual enhancements.

More on the necessity of an open platform a little later.

If vendor overload wasn’t exhausting enough, today’s consumers are moving faster than most modern day companies can keep pace.

For example, according to Forrester, more than 60% of all retail purchases will be affected by digital interactions—even the ones that happen in store—which remains the majority.

This isn’t just about customer centricity. Instead, this is about agility and the ability to keep pace with customers.

Easier and More Engaging

Providing a complete set of solutions to help marketers and advertisers touch virtually every aspect of the customer lifecycle is a prerequisite. The best marketing stacks don’t just enable communication—they actually make marketing easier for brands and more engaging for customers.

And the best marketing stacks take full advantage of something that is always in full supply: Data. But of course we all know it’s not big data. It’s the right data. The solution you use should help you connect relevant data—be it 1st, 2nd or 3rd party data—to achieve a more comprehensive view of your prospects and customers.

In addition to data found online, the solution needs to also account for and incorporate valuable data from offline purchasing into the overall mix. While the digital revolution has had a profound impact on brick-and-mortar locations, there will always be a need and desire for consumers to go into stores.

Moreover, research from Google busted a myth, in which retailers believed that online shoppers who search online will only visit e-commerce sites. In reality, three out of four shoppers who find information in search results helpful are more likely to visit stores.

Failure to attach offline data with online data will result in losing valuable customer insights, whereas combining the two provides marketers with a better understanding of the customers. The right data provides a truly holistic view of the entire customer journey.

Then there’s the marketing performance data you require to measure results. You need to meet overall company goals for your brand and show the growth numbers that the CEO sets with a variety of key performance indicators (KPIs). You need to test, optimize, and then validate the impact your marketing campaigns or strategies with revenue or pipeline attribution.

DMP: Easy As A-B-C

At its most basic core, a data management platform (DMP) is the center point for a Modern Marketing organization and the key to enable cross-channel orchestration by connecting online and offline interactions to a single customer.

The right DMP gives marketers one consolidated view across all of their marketing data to which they can build and refine key target audiences for numerous campaign scenarios. This is vital given the fact that in the US alone, 50% of consumers use multiple devices when shopping.

Apparently the word is out too when it comes to the importance of utilizing a DMP as part of an overall marketing stack. According to research from Econsultancy, the proportion of organizations planning to increase investment in data management platforms had doubled in the previous 12 months, from 15% to 30%.

The bottom line is that the right data management platform provides marketers with centralized control of all of their audience and campaign data. It helps them manage and analyze this data to craft, target, and optimize campaigns that reach more of the right people and drive improved ROI.

Open Platform

As I mentioned earlier an open platform allows for continuous innovation by adding your favorite marketing apps. An open platform means you can find what you need, add it to your stack, and it just works. Out of the box, as they used to say. Instant activation, immediate functionality, and you’re up and running faster at less cost.

What more could you want?

The problem is there are so many options—and more arriving daily— that identifying the right ones and getting them to work together is not easy. Modern Marketers need to spend more time innovating and less time integrating.

That’s why an open platform that offers not only pre-integrated apps, but also an open infrastructure to make future innovations, is essential to success.

Maintaining an open platform is required for a variety of reasons, the most obvious is that marketing technology is constantly changing. A partner ecosystem allows customers to leverage a wide variety of additional features in emerging areas of digital marketing through plug and play pre-integrated apps.

Hopefully this vision and approach works for you. We know it’s worked for hundreds of our customers who are creating marketing stacks that make Modern Marketing work by delivering the best of their brands. It’s not a fantasy. It’s all too real. And it’s all about success.

What Success Looks Like

Let me share an example of just one customer that has embraced the Oracle Marketing Cloud stack and achieved success.

Juniper Networks challenges the status quo with products, solutions and services that transform the economics of networking. Juniper co-innovates with customers and partners to deliver automated, scalable and secure networks with agility, performance and value. Additional information can be found at Juniper Networks or connect with Juniper on Twitter and Facebook.

They had some big, bold marketing objectives: accelerate time to revenue, provide differentiated stories that matter to customers and advocates and create a remarkable digital experience across all touch points. To accomplish this, they needed to cultivate a modern marketing mindset and technology environment.

The foundation of Juniper’s technology ecosystem is centered around the Oracle Marketing Cloud, which currently includes Eloqua 10, BlueKai, and Maxymiser, combined with key ecosystem partners.  And as a result what used to take 6 months of lead-time to design and create a campaign can now be architected in weeks if not days.

Moreover, their campaign strategies are now driven by data, and they have the ability to rapidly deploy more engaging campaigns that deliver better results.  Because of its data-driven approach Juniper was able to improve their messaging, targeting strategy, and their ability to nurture customers and prospects throughout their buying journey.

Author: Laura Ipsen, Oracle Marketing Cloud
This article was originally printed in our Inspired Marketing Magazine.