It has taken a long time—maybe the entire history of advertising—but today’s iconic brands are finally discovering how to balance the art of marketing with the science of data to connect with more customers. In most cases, the secret is using technology that can deliver and simplify the science in ways that nurture creative innovation.
That was the takeaway from our first conversation with Oracle Marketing Cloud’s Kevin Akeroyd. We got the big picture, but a number of additional questions were raised about how technology can simplify marketing at a moment when it is more fragmented than ever. For example, is it really possible to run inspiring campaigns when users are continually jumping from device to device and from one social platform to the next?
To gain more insight on what successful marketing looks like today, we asked Akeroyd to continue the conversation from where we left off.
Bryan Bartlett, Adweek BrandShare: We’ve talked about the balance between the art and science of marketing, but can today’s brands ultimately solve the marketing puzzle and provide that perfect customer journey?
Kevin Akeroyd, Oracle Marketing Cloud: Unfortunately, the perception that a perfect customer journey is something that you can plan weeks or months prior is really a myth—a myth that somehow never goes away. There’s no such thing as a static pre-planned journey that customers follow blindly and consistently, it simply doesn’t exist.
BB: So, you’re saying the marketing puzzle is unsolvable?
KA: No, not at all. What we’re simply saying here is that the notion of a few canned scripts and business rules being called “customer journeys” is not the solution to the puzzle. Most of the CMOs I speak with share this opinion and, as surveys have shown, customers still don’t seem to do what we expect, even after all the tech innovations of recent years. As a result many CMOs are still struggling to manage the customer experience. This is not surprising, though. As any parent will tell you, people have a funny habit of not doing what we want them to do. The trick is not to try and guess their next 50 moves ahead of time—but rather, dynamically react to those moves as your customer makes them.
BB: If predicting customers’ actions is like being a parent, marketers are almost certainly doomed, right?
KA: You’re only doomed to failure if you believe you can perfectly predict how a customer is going to interact with your brand weeks or months ahead of time. But great digital marketing doesn’t require you to do that. Instead, marketers should begin with the assumption that customer journeys don’t follow linear paths. Then they can focus on what they really know about customers and tune content, offers, help, products, etc. to each individual customer based on their actions.
BB: How do they do that?
KA: It’s all about understanding how customers are engaging with the brand and identifying key moments when individualized content can have the biggest impact. The term we’ve coined for years is “digital body language.” By listening and capturing contextual and behavioral data across social, mobile, Web, email, video and other digital channels, as well as offline behavior, we can gain all the insights needed to tailor content and experiences to individual customers. When we capture the right data, and act on it in near real-time, it works. For example, if someone has just purchased something on the website, don’t target them with a tweet offering the exact same product.
BB: I see. So if marketers don’t need to focus on solving the marketing puzzle, what should they be focusing on?
KA: The most successful marketers today prioritize data-driven marketing. And that’s not about focusing on more data. It’s about focusing on the right data—and making that data actionable in the right channels at the right time. They know they can’t afford to sit on valuable data while their CRM systems try to perform tasks they were never designed to do. And they know that a new and modern approach is needed.
BB: But is it really possible to react in real time when you’ve got data pouring in from so many different places at once?
KA: It’s entirely possible for marketers who take the right approach. That approach starts with the tools to quickly execute on a strategy on a per interaction basis. They don’t just rely on the old fashioned “campaign” that’s scheduled and based on dated segmentation techniques. Using a marketing cloud, for example, that connects data, content and execution all into one hub, can change the game.
BB: What exactly are the benefits to using a marketing cloud?
KA: By using a marketing cloud, marketers can quickly and easily access an open ecosystem of hundreds of marketing apps, media and data providers in one enterprise-ready system. Not only does this remove the time and cost of separate systems, but it also means that marketers can manage the customer’s expectations, experience and expression in one place. And this is a critical point as it is the only way to avoid delivering a fragmented and disappointing customer experience. While we as marketers often break down these three key areas into separate stages and use multiple tools to manage them, our customers process them all in real time and in one place: their brains. Ironically, we’re not talking about more technology. We’re talking about less technology—that’s better integrated, more holistic and more usable.
BB: Is this the approach marketers are using to balance the art and science that we previously discussed?
KA: With this approach, you’re ultimately embracing rather than fighting against the unstructured nature of customer data. And you can do that because you’re connecting behaviors that take place across different offline channels to one person—and then responding instantly to the insights you glean. Best of all, when you’ve brought all of your data to one platform, it suddenly becomes so much easier for marketing teams to create, manage and scale marketing content across any channel. That’s where the art comes in. The best marketing tech shouldn’t turn marketing into something that can only de done by data jocks. It should make marketing straightforward so that creative thinkers have more freedom and power than ever before.
BB: You had me worried there for a moment, but this actually sounds pretty promising. Any final insights?
KA: The lesson of modern marketing is simple: The marketing puzzle might be broken up into lots of little pieces, but all of those little pieces are starting to come together. From a data, technology and process standpoint the tools are there. We just need to adapt our organizations, our thinking and our approach to take advantage of them.
