The law creating a national health insurance program for older Americans was signed in 1965 after a long political battle. Renee Montagne talks to Edith Mitchell of the National Medical Association.
Thursday, July 30, 2015
The Path to Adaptive Marketing: An Introduction
“I only live in the past and the future; my existence is solely devoted to a) thinking about what will happen next and b) thinking back to what’s happened before.”
Chuck Klosterman, one of my favorite essayists, wrote the quotation above. It comes to mind whenever people say, “live in the moment.” As a motto, living in the moment fights human nature at its core. History tells us that our future will be riddled with surprises, whims, phases, excitement, boredom, delays, milestone successes, and abject failures.
The majority of companies and brands don’t consider life’s lack of predictability when they build customer journeys. Instead, they sketch out a hypothetical path that’s flattering to their view of the world economically. Although companies leverage data available to them, customers deviate from the prescribed journey due to changes in environment. If you want proof, a recent myth-busting survey by Aberdeen found that 96% of chief marketing officers (CMOs) are not satisfied with their ability to deliver customer journeys. Another by eConsultancy found that only 12% believe their marketing is real-time enough to keep up with customer needs.
Data science and automation play a part in solving this problem, but that’s only part of it. Companies must surrender to the fact that customers move about the world in a sporadic and fickle way. In the age of Digital Darwinism, customers move faster than the companies trying to reach them with products or services. It’s not enough for brands to predict, respond or even react to customers anymore.
They must adapt.
Introduction to Adaptive Marketing
My definition of adaptive marketing is the use of data, technology and processes to build customer experiences that evolve instantly based on the behaviors, interests and needs of real people. The goal is to create a more malleable strategy for engaging customers across channels. Adaptive marketing assumes that people’s lives take non-linear paths. Rather than try to guess those paths – or automate them into hypothetical journeys no one follows – companies should let customers dictate their own path and have a system that adjusts quickly and intelligently for them on the fly.
In my mind, there are three core areas of focus needed to start your path to adaptive marketing.
1. Pragmatic Identity Management, Both Online and Offline
Marketers should shift their focus from “a universal customer profile” or “360-degree view” that spans all systems and applications. Sure, it looks beautiful in a consultant’s slide and utopian in software demos. But the reality is, it’s expensive and it usually doesn’t work (read: last twenty years of software history). That’s because those systems operate on inherent structure in a decidedly unstructured world when it comes to customer identity.
As customers vacillate between digital devices and offline channels – such as going to purchase something at a retail store or doing research on their phone – they create disparate identifiers about themselves. When on a desktop computer, they generate a cookie. On a mobile phone, they generate a device ID. A customer relationship management (CRM) system, data warehouse and email system weren’t designed to understand those interactions. Even when force-fitted to ingest that kind of data, they do so with great latency. This hinders marketing’s ability to reach that customer quickly and consistently across paid, owned and earned media.
Adaptive marketing acknowledges the complexity of all these IDs by leveraging an ID Graph. The ID Graph understands, ingests and ultimately links these IDs together. These IDs can be generated from anonymous interactions – say with digital advertising. They can also be generated through known interactions on your earned and owned digital marketing channels, such as website, social or email. In some cases, it will make sense to federate all of them to one ID. In other cases, maybe for privacy reasons, they should remain separate.
2. Actionable Audience Data
Once we have a better approach to identity, companies must re-think how they fill in the picture of their customers with relevant data. An adaptive marketing system connects valuable data from known systems – such as email, CRM and web analytics – and leverages it alongside third-party data used for advertising.
To be clear, this doesn’t mean CRM or other transactional data warehouses don’t play an important role. Far from it! Instead, let them do what they do best. They should store transactional data and make it persistently available to the adaptive marketing system when needed to orchestrate a consistent experience for an individual audience.
This pragmatic approach to leveraging customer data for journeys supports what Andrew Frank at Gartner would call a push from personalization to persona-fication. Essentially, this means that while it’s well and good for companies to have a goal of delivering individual experiences by unifying data, the bigger goal should be to have a system that connects with the right data for specific audiences that share similar attributes. For the customer, the result will feel personalized and relevant. For the marketer, they have an approach that scales.
3. Behavior-Based Orchestration
An adaptive marketing platform recognizes customer behavior, preferences and interests. It then evolves instantly based on those factors. This is done through marketing orchestration. When done correctly, experiences are not only determined based on binary forks in the road, such as whether someone purchased a product or opened an email. The experience adapts based on the totality of behaviors the customer might perform, such as engagement with specific content or activities that happen offline. It also needs to be fast. In today’s world of instant gratification, customers want what they want quickly, even if they’re not yet ready to buy.
Part of orchestrating the experience is predicated on the ability to optimize it. It’s vital to test, test and test again. Marketers must monitor audience engagement and how that ties to specific conversions through analytics platforms, adjusting the experience automatically based on those results.
True to its name, I expect this concept of adaptive marketing to evolve in the coming months, so stay tuned here on the Modern Marketing blog for more ideas and stories of how Oracle customers are doing it today.
Author Bio: Chris Lynch is the Senior Director, Product Marketing at the Oracle Marketing Cloud.
Download the Modern Marketing Essentials Guide to Cross-Channel Marketing and start creating the most cohesive, valuable and frictionless customer experience possible.
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Here's our recap of what happened in online marketing today, as reported on Marketing Land and other places across the web.
Please visit Marketing Land for the full article.
Please visit Marketing Land for the full article.
Email Summit 2015 Replay: Tips for tech support selection and contract negotiation
In the world of marketing, there’s always a push to stay ahead of the curve and, more importantly, ahead of competitors.
However, it’s hard to dedicate the time, money, manpower and technical know-how to launching truly eye-catching (and revenue-generating) campaigns. This is especially true for smaller companies with marketing teams consisting of only one or two employees.
Enter the potential best friend to most campaigns: the vendor.
At the MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2015 Media Center, Erin Hogg, Reporter, MarketingSherpa, sat down with John A. Caldwell, President and Founder, Red Pill Email, to discuss the finer points of vendor negotiation. Specifically, John explained what to look out for when considering tech support vendors and what you should — and shouldn’t — negotiate when it comes time to draw up a contract.
Watch the below interview to learn tips on how to handle vendor negotiation:
What to look for when it comes to tech support
John emphasized the importance of interviewing the companies you’re considering for tech support. It makes sense. Your company is going to end up spending several hours with the employees of the tech support vendor you choose.
It’s in your and your company’s best interest to make sure you’re not just looking for the best price but also the best support.
“Make [interviewing tech support people] part of the purchasing process, part of your due diligence,” John said.
When interviewing vendors, remember to keep your company’s needs at the forefront of your questioning. Specifically, John recommended asking interviewees about concerns your company has, what kind of questions they typically receive and what the vendor’s turnaround time and process is.
“There’s ticket time and there’s resolution time,” John said. “Some vendors will put a ticket in, and they have X number of hours to act on that ticket. Their ticket time may be 24 hours, but the actual resolution time is, say, an hour. That might not work with your company.”
“You don’t want to wait until you’re at the point of contract or after contract to find that out,” he added.
He also recommended asking your representative to give you the tech support line and to call it. This will give you an idea of how quickly they answer the phone.
“It’s good to interview them too. I find that helps a lot — no surprises,” he said.
Navigating the contract
John’s advice was framed primarily through his emailing background, but it’s also applicable as general advice when it comes to drawing up the vendor contract. His main piece of advice? Don’t be afraid to ask questions.
Specifically for email, John emphasized focusing on the break points.
“Little things like [penalties] can have big consequences a little further down the road. Other things you can negotiate,” John said. “There are hard costs, there are soft costs.”
For example, for an emailing vendor, a hard cost may be a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate. The cost of this certificate most likely won’t be something the vendor will negotiate because it will be paid for out of pocket. This is a hard cost.
However, if that vendor is already paying an employee to set up the systems, the vendor may be able to lower the set-up fee. This would be a soft cost.
“Don’t be afraid to go ahead and ask, ‘What can I get away with?’” he advised. “But don’t be firm on something that is a hard cost. Accept those, and hammer them on the soft costs.”
John joked, “And vendors that are watching this, they’re not going to be too happy with me right now.”
You can follow Kayla Cobb, Reporter, MECLABS Institute, on Twitter at @itskaylacobb.
You might also like
Register for MarketingSherpa Summit 2016 — At the Bellagio in Las Vegas, Feb. 22-14
Watch Full Sessions from Email Summit 2015
MECLABS Email Messaging Online Course [Register now]
Vendor Selection: A 5-step process for choosing a marketing automation solution or agency [More from the blogs]
Marketing Automation Vendor Selection: B2B marketer reduces unqualified leads 341% [MarketingSherpa case studies]
Vendor Selection: Test leads to $500,000 in revenue and 20% lead gen connect rate [MarketingSherpa case studies]
4 Time Management Tips for Social Media Managers
It seems that a social media manager’s job is never done. It doesn’t matter what time of day or day of week you’re in, there’s always more to do. Social media moves at an astronomical pace, and it can be hard to keep up.
In fact, research has found that the top two barriers impeding adoption of social business within organizations are lack of overall strategy and competing priorities.
Raise your hand if the scenario below sounds familiar:
A Day in the Life of a Social Media Manager
6am – 12pm
- Check company social media notifications before you even roll out of bed.
- Quickly respond to any messages or tweets
- Sneakily check for brand mentions as you’re stuck in traffic
- Schedule all brand messages for the day across all social networks
- Eat lunch at your desk while checking your personal Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn messages
1pm – 5pm
- Research articles that are relevant to share with your brand’s online community
- Check your company email and social media sites for new notifications
- Respond to any brand mentions or comments
- Identify influencers to connect with
- Get caught up in not one but two trending topics on Twitter
- How is it 5pm already?
6pm – Midnight
- Review daily social media performance
- Schedule morning social messages
- Register for an interesting social media marketing webinar about visual content
- Cannot function…need sleep
Making the time to execute on a comprehensive social media strategy that garners results can rattle even the most experienced marketers. Social media marketing is flush with its own set of challenges and distractions. Below are 4 helpful ways to help you focus and manage your social media marketing activities.
#1 – Determine Which Tactics Have the Biggest Impact
Reuters estimates that the average worker loses 2.1 hours of productivity every day to interruptions and distractions. To avoid wasting time begin by prioritizing your week. While it’s true that unexpected issues can come up plan for the best and the worst. If you have 3 hours per day on average to complete tasks related to social media strategy what will you get accomplished in those 3 hours? If you were only to have 1.5 hours per day what would you want to get accomplished? Proper planning will lead to improved productivity and efficiency. Also, take some time to determine what your top distractions are and eliminate them.
#2 – Optimize for Productivity
Focus on what will have the largest impact on your productivity. Determining what time of day you are most productive, and which activities are most significant will help you to stay on track. Are you an early riser, night owl, or somewhere in between? Creating a daily schedule and routine can significantly improve your productivity. You will also want to keep in mind statistical data which points to the best times of day and days of the week for engaging in social media activity.
Neil Patel of Quick Sprout recently published an infographic that details some of the best times to publish on various social media platforms.
#3 – Tips For Better Time Management
I have often thought that I was invincible and could simultaneously focus on every task at once. A balancing act acquired from years of having too much to do, and not enough time. I considered multi-tasking an art form and a higher form of organization than my counterparts who only focused on one thing at a time. I could not have been more wrong.
In recent years I’ve had to buckle down and force myself to devote all of my attention to one task at a time. I’ve found that the quality of my work has improved and the level of my stress has decreased significantly. Some tactics that have worked for me include:
- Closing my email when I’m working on social media tasks
- Exiting from all browser windows and tabs except for the one I need to work on
- Disabling chat or closing chat windows to avoid distraction
- Picking 15 minutes a day to indulge in activities such as checking personal social media profiles, responding to texts, or chatting with friends.
- Spending 30 minutes to an hour each morning reviewing emails and responding, do the same thing before leaving at the end of the day.
It is significantly easier to stick to your schedule if you are working ONLY on the tasks you have scheduled in the time allotted.
#4 – Use Social Media Tools for Better Time Management
Depending on your available time and social media content strategy, there are many tools that can help you accomplish more with less time. Below are three different types of tools that social media marketers can use to get the most out of their time:
Content Curation Tools
Social Aggregators & Management Tools
Want more? Here’s an awesome list of 22 social media management tools
Still Feeling Overwhelmed?
In order to help you better focus on the tasks at hand ask yourself the following questions:
- What are your top 3 social media goals and do you have a plan for reaching them?
- How much time can you dedicate each day to using tactics to reach these goals?
- What steps can you take to improve your focus while completing social media activities?
- Which type of tool: curation, aggregator, or social bookmarking can you use to help save time?
Sometimes, there are just too many moving pieces for your internal team to execute on. Know when it’s time to call in reinforcements and work with the social media marketing experts to help manage your workload.
What have you found are your biggest daily distractions when trying to manage a social media marketing program?
Image via Shutterstock
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© Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®, 2015. | 4 Time Management Tips for Social Media Managers | http://www.toprankblog.com
The post 4 Time Management Tips for Social Media Managers appeared first on Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®.
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