Campaign Management & Conversations with Customers – so how?
Money does make the world go round – if nothing else the Global Financial Crisis has demonstrated this hypothesis in a dramatic fashion. There are global warming skeptics but few ‘money makes the world go round’ skeptics have you noticed? Arguments are generally about how much of the planetary rotation is due to currency, not if.
I digress.
Much of what our team does to make our part of the economic world revolve involves campaigns. Helping clients put the right offer in front of the right customer at the right time over the right channel. To some extent, our embrace of social media/networks/conversational marketing is so we can add a 5th dimension to this process – relevance.
2 way conversations with customers tell us directly what is important to them and what they are looking for, hopefully from us.
But scale has its challenges. Being relevant & personal to a few million customers is, ironically, tough without impersonal; automation processes, computers and mathematics.
So there is a healthy and growing market for campaign management systems that started as tools to facilitate customer list selection and then expanded to add workflow, analytics and optimization.
All enhancements that make it easier to manage the task of placing an offer that is (most) likely to be accepted in front of a customer. Inherently a one way communication, though the listening bit has got much better.
How are these tools going to evolve to deal with the growing reality of customers talking to each other about you and wanting to talk directly to you – just like they did in the marketplaces and bazaars before mass marketing?
Forrester has a good summary of the leap that campaign management systems need to take – you can download a free copy here.
I agree generally with their ‘8 Principles to Guide the Next Generation’ of campaign management systems…
- Support an institutional memory of the customer. (The ubiquitous Single Customer View requirement of CRM projects)
- Enable dialogues not just programs [campaigns]
- Bridge the online & offline gaps. (They are talking about response attribution across multiple channels, not twitter meet ups)
- Unify inbound and outbound marketing programs. (Here they mean conversations over social media I think)
- Move optimization to the forefront. (Could not agree more – put the most relevant offer to customers every time. Makes them feel better and increases your chance of a sale).
- Include social insights – incorporate listening platform learnings. (Easier said than done…)
- Provide functionality at marketers’ desktops.
- Incorporate planning and resource management capabilities. (That centripetal force again)
Seems to be a big job & opportunity to me. Will Aprimo/Unica offer a twitter module?
