Enabling Cross-Channel Marketing

Connecting Content Creation Processes to Drive Integrated Communication

Distributed Marketing Leadership Series

Contents

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

1. A Community of Ones . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

2. Managed Chaos. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

3. Connected is Better . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

4. Where and How to Start . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

5. Three Steps to a “Connected is Better” Game Plan. . 17

Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21

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Today’s marketing environment challenges marketers as never before. Distributed marketing is more complex. Customer and prospect data is available, but often unstructured. Marketing mediums are prolific, yet disconnected. Consumers no longer accept media messages; they expect to define and engage with them. And they expect consistent, relevant conversations with a brand, no matter when or where the conversation occurs.

Corporate marketers now realize that teams of creative talent or collections of tactical technologies thrown at a task will no long achieve sustainable results. To successfully drive sales, marketing has to fundamentally change.

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Introduction

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A Community of OnesPart of the challenge for marketers today is that “customers” can no longer be collectively defined and segmented into perfect categories as they once were. Today’s customers consume media and marketing messages in very different manners. While there certainly remain characteristics and motivations that are common among customer segments, in many cases marketers must deal with thousands or even millions of segments of one – e.g., unique individuals with unique media use patterns and unique motivations who each want to engage with organizations on their own terms. To address this, marketers must be able to communicate instantaneously, consistently, and across multiple mediums.

Concurrently, marketing is more local than ever. Managers of distributed marketing networks (e.g., branch offices, chain retail stores, authorized dealer networks, franchises, agencies and VAR networks) have long been faced with the challenge of making sure that corporate and local marketing

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messages work together harmoniously. Today, with consumers determining when, where and who they engage with in relation to a brand, maintaining strong synergy between corporate and local marketers is critical as the consumer expects a relationship that transcends location or a single spokesperson.

Gone are the days when corporate marketers could be extremely brand focused while local marketers set their sights solely on driving traffic and sales. Whether it’s a technology marketer running a channel marketing program, a financial services marketer addressing agent marketing compliance, a health system marketer trying to coordinate marketing across multiple facilities, a service industry marketer working with authorized dealers or franchisees, or any other manager of distributed marketing processes, making a brand hum and a cash register ring must be a team effort.

Clearly, this change is challenging. But it’s also good. The marketer who embraces the idea of connecting with today’s customers has an incredible arsenal of resources at his disposal and an incredible opportunity to create and foster valuable customer relationships.

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Managed ChaosWhile tremendous new opportunities exist for marketers today, the marketer’s world is simply chaotic. Think about it. There are:

• more mediums than ever;• more advertising venues competing for

limited dollars;• more customer engagement with brands and

messages; • customers contributing to and creating brand

messages;• a blurring number of marketing technology

providers; and• more marketing team members and agencies

touching brand messaging as it moves forward to the customer.

Often, it seems like a minor miracle that anyone is able to keep brand messages consistent, timely and relevant in this exponentially challenging environment.

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At a recent marketing leadership forum, audience participants were asked for a show of hands if they believed cross-channel messaging integration was important. Virtually the entire audience raised a hand. Next, the presenter asked for those with two or more channels integrated to keep their hands raised. Not surprisingly, a majority of the hands remained up. But when that number was raised to three, a majority of the audience lowered their hands. Only a handful of hands remained raised when asked about four or more integrated mediums.

Most marketers today know what they need to accomplish, but in the midst of an ever-changing, overloaded marketing world, effectively meeting the myriad of demands often seems out of reach.

Technology Band-Aids

As new mediums have emerged, corporate marketers have turned to technology and solution providers to help them manage and maximize the opportunity these mediums provide. For example:

• Email communication is simplified and compliance is maintained when working with an email solution provider.

• Social marketing and consumer sentiment monitoring provide excellent access to customers while numerous social marketing platforms help marketers manage this channel.

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• Landing pages, personalized or otherwise, play a key role in consumer engagement and numerous vendor options are available to support these efforts.

The list could go on and on, covering every conceivable form of interaction with prospects and customers. Multiple outstanding solutions exist in nearly every category or case.

Yet, as illustrated by the audience at the marketing forum, a fundamental problem exists – individual tactical technologies are not connected.

This is a serious issue for marketers.

Connected, these tactical marketing technology solutions could form a powerful cross-channel platform for corporate marketers and help bring order to today’s marketing chaos. Disconnected, they are but a collection of Band-Aids that effectively deal with individual mediums but do not and cannot address the need of marketers to deliver the right messages to customers when, where and how each customer wants to receive them. Ultimately these disconnected solutions, no matter how strong they are, add to the marketer’s chaotic world through redundant content creation processes, marketing staff management demands and lost cross-media effectiveness.

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Connected is BetterEnvision for a moment, how different a truly connected marketing world would look.

Connecting all mediums – email, landing pages, print ads, social media, banner ads, etc. – through a single content creation platform would create efficient marketing operations and coordinated cross-media messaging including:

• efficient content assembly;• delivery using each customer’s preferred

mediums;• coordination of agencies and suppliers; and • multi-phase, multi-medium automated

customer engagement.

Take that a step further by adding connected customer intelligence (e.g., CRM, analytics, location data) with dynamic content assembly to enable real-time, trigger-based, multi-channel intelligent messaging.

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This combination results in:

• more relevant messaging;• always improving outcomes;• stronger offer management;• more sophisticated ROI calculation; and• closed-loop marketing feedback.

Now envision the implications of a connected system on the corporate marketing team…

Connecting agencies and suppliers into one platform would result in:

• specialty expertise retained and collaboration attained;

• elimination of redundant tasks; and• resource sharing.

Connecting divisions, regions or other internal groups with one another would result in:

• better continuity;• sharing of resources;• message consistency;• replication of best practices;• collaboration; and• elimination of redundancy in campaign/

content creation.

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Connecting corporate and local marketers would result in:

• more synergistic brand consistency and messaging;

• more intelligent marketing;• local engagement;• effective use of resources; and• faster speed-to-market of messages.

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Where and How to StartA connected marketing platform requires three primary elements: foundational technologies, consumer engagement points, and marketing process enablers.

1) Foundations

To facilitate connection across all marketing processes there are five key, fully-connected foundations that must be in place. Foremost of these is a strong digital asset management/enterprise content management (DAM/ECM) repository.

A well-structured enterprise content management system enables all internal parties and external audiences to draw on a single content reference point. Web pages, emails, social media posts, printed materials and any other marketing content can be generated from this single repository and can share a single set of resources (such as an image or copy block), resulting in greater integration between mediums.

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A second foundational element is customer relationship management (CRM), analytics and other customer/prospect data repositories. This connection is critical for meaningful customer or prospect engagement. The data within these repositories can be used to influence content, offers, location-based information and more. Real-time connectivity is also vital for driving instantaneous content or message decisions and fulfilling trigger-based marketing events.

Dynamic cross media content assembly is a third critical foundational component. While fixed content will always play a role in marketing communications, in today’s digitally driven world dynamically generated, personalized content is quickly becoming the norm. Only real-time content assembly across all channels can ensure focused, consistent and engaging messaging.

A fourth foundation for a connected marketing platform is marketing fulfillment automation. Marketing automation ensures that marketing and customer engagement processes run smoothly with very minimal human involvement. It is essential for message fulfillment and, while largely unnoticed, serves to eliminate costs, reduce errors and rapidly deliver marketing content.

Finally, a fifth key foundation for a connected marketing platform is role-based system access, which ensures that the users of the connected marketing platform experience the solution through

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their unique role. This not only makes a robust system easy to navigate and use but also ensures that all corporate marketers, agencies, suppliers and consumers only have access and exposure to the information appropriate to them for their interaction needs.

2) Consumer Engagement Points

With the foundations in place, connected marketing communications can now occur. Whether it is an email, web page, banner ad, print ad, social network or any other medium, each communication is dynamically generated using content from the common marketing asset repository, which may include images, logos, templates, etc. The marketing vehicle is created using content assembly rules from the asset repository and content selection guidance from the CRM/analytics repositories. The piece is then assembled dynamically and processed via marketing fulfillment automation.

FoundationalTechnologies

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For example, a web banner ad would be generated with the proper location, offer and image.

While multiple agencies might have participated in the content creation, multiple vendors might have been used for fulfillment while multiple corporate marketers might have assisted in campaign set up and design, managing content creation and marketing fulfillment. Because all of the involved parties used the same platform for content creation, the corporate marketer is assured that brand graphic standards are consistently applied, that brand messaging is uniform across all channels and that message delivery timelines and cadence across the various channels are coordinated.

Additionally, by connecting content creation in one environment, fully integrated cross-media campaigns are enabled. A landing page, for example, can be connected to multiple mediums so that a prospect’s path leads him to a common web page regardless of which medium prompted his response. In addition, trigger-based, follow-up communication can be dynamically generated and delivered to the medium of his choice.

Finally, by organizing content creation through a connected platform, the corporate marketer can easily

enable others to version (e.g., customize) content. While content can be generated based on customer data and rule sets, it can also be versioned within a tightly controlled framework using point-and-click

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web interaction. Local marketers, for example, might be given the ability to version marketing materials for use within their own local market such as adding a timely, locally relevant special offer. For example, a car dealership might choose to promote an all-wheel drive vehicle during a snowy winter.

By using a single, connected platform, brand compliance is protected while local intuition is used to create effective, relevant market messaging. So too, customers might be given access to use the system to generate content for viral marketing applications.

3) Marketing Process Enablers

The foundations and cross-media communications of a connected marketing platform cannot function optimally without the organizing presence of marketing process enablers. These connectors include marketing operations management functions such as campaign management, budget management, measurement reporting and marketing workflow.

Consumer Engagement Points

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To be fully optimized, however, a connected marketing platform should also facilitate the creative interactions of the different users of the system.

Knowledge sharing is key to ensuring that best practice campaigns and marketing collateral are highlighted and used. Collaborative communications help ensure that marketers are connected not only at the system level, but also at the purpose and mission level.

Finally, management of distributed/local marketers and marketing processes should be viewed as a key element in any connected marketing platform. Without coordination between local marketers and the corporate marketing department, the timely and relevant, yet consistent communications customers expect cannot be possible.

MarketingProcessEnablers

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Three Steps to a “Connected is Better”

Game Plan

Step 1:Create an Inventory of Your Current Systems

Most corporate marketers are surprised to learn how many different systems and solution providers are being used across their organization. First, using the Customer Engagement Points and Process Enablers graphics introduced in the Where and How to Start section, create a quick inventory of the marketing systems used by your organization or by entities on behalf of your organization. Using Worksheet 1, list the function of the system, and how, when and why it is used.

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Step 2: Identify Opportunities for Connecting Systems

Once you have completed Worksheet 1, use Worksheet 2 to identify redundant tasks, inefficient processes, disconnected communications and missed opportunities. Pay particular attention to the

Worksheet #1

Current Marketing Systems

System/Provider Functions/Purpose Use Case Example

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foundational technologies and keep in mind that you don’t have to replace all of your existing technologies in order to connect them.

Worksheet #2System ConnectionsGrade yourself. Look at the common effectiveness robbers that most corporate marketers face and assess how you are performing.

Task

My campaigns are integrated across multiple mediums.

My ads across all media direct the consumer to an interaction page.

My local and corporate messaging are in sync.

I create content once and apply it cross media.

I automate repeatable tasks.

Grade

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Step 3:Design a Connected is Better Program

Using the knowledge gained from Worksheets 1 and 2, create an outline in Worksheet 3 for preparing your marketing organization to meet the demands of an engagement-based marketing world. Start by simply identifying three actions you can take now that will make an impact on your organization’s marketing performance. Then set a target date for completion of a full “Connected is Better” program outline.

Worksheet #3

My Starting Point

The most impactful change I can make now is:

The first two processes/mediums I want to connect are:

An obvious inefficiency that I can resolve is:

I will complete my Connected is Better program plan by:

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Summary

Envision for a moment, how different a connected marketing world would look.

For example, connecting all mediums – email, landing pages, print ads, social media, banner ads, etc. – through a single content creation platform would mean efficient marketing operations and coordinated cross-media messaging. Take that a step further by connecting customer intelligence (e.g., CRM, analytics, location data) with Dynamic Content Assembly to enable real-time, trigger-based, multi-channel intelligent messaging.

Now envision the implications of a connected system on the corporate marketing team.

Every technology addressed above as a foundation, a customer engagement point or a marketing process enabler is available from multiple technology firms or marketing services agencies. Many outstanding solutions exist. But they are all missing a fundamentally important need that marketers must urgently soon address. They’re not connected. As a result, assets must be in redundant systems.

Marketing staffers have to coordinate scheduling between multiple vendors to fulfill a single campaign

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that spans multiple mediums. Often, message synergyfrom one agency to another is loosely connected, if at all. Meanwhile, social media might drive customers to one landing page while search marketing or email campaigns drive them to others. Print may have no destination at all. The list goes on and on.

Sometimes you can have all of the right things in place – really great vendors, really good software, and sometimes even strong siloed results. But ultimately, the current structure will result in disconnected, inefficient, frustrating, costly and fragmented marketing. Until you have all of your external and internal activities working together to create the right environment for your target customer, you will be unable to meet the demands of customers and prospects in an engagement-based marketing world. And if that happens, there will be another marketer from another organization ready to give your customer the experience they want and they will inevitably take your place.

Today’s marketing environment, while at times challenging, is immensely exciting. Never before have corporate marketers had so many resources and tools at their disposal. Connect them, and you and your organization will thrive.

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Saepio empowers marketers to plan and execute meaningful and engaging marketing campaigns across distributed networks and around the globe – ensuring local relevance, brand consistency, speed to market and significant cost savings. The world’s best known

brands turn to Saepio’s powerful software platform and extensive portfolio of support services to automate the marketing process, eliminate redundancy and ensure that all marketers connected to the brand – whether

global, distributed, franchise, VAR or chain store marketers – have the assets and tools they need to

quickly customize and execute campaigns.

For more information, visitwww.saepio.com

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