In the same way that money doesn’t buy happiness, strategy doesn’t guarantee digital marketing success. You can be experienced, calculated, more tactical than Arya Stark with a vendetta — and still — important benchmarks get missed. In fact, almost 85 percent of enterprise marketers and CMOs in a recent study admitted their organization falls short in key marketing areas. But we’ll get to that.
What the heck is going on?
Per the usual — we have consumers to thank for mounting marketing challenges. Their expectations and demands. They want it all!
We can’t blame them for wanting to be treated as individuals instead of generalized personas. But it’s impossible to concoct this quality of brand experience without incorporating the buyer’s entire history of engagement with your brand, including:
Every detail you know about a prospect must go into the fabric of the relationship you’re crafting with them. It’s tedious stitch-work.
As a result of all these demands, two colossal challenges have emerged—and they’re entangling even the most experienced digital marketers.
Clearly, we’re dealing with a gaping disconnect between marketing intention and the practical ability to execute. Marketers are hung up on fragmented moments instead of strategizing to leverage the “critical moments of engagement.” Customer engagement strategies compete for attention with customer experience strategies. Actually, a successful digital marketing strategy prioritizes both equally.
To master the moments, we must define the setbacks…
At the beginning of this article, I mentioned an alarming statistic. This information came from a recent survey conducted by RedPoint and CMO Council. The survey involved 263 marketing leaders (including VPs, directors and CMOs), mainly from organizations with more than $500 million in annual revenue.
Shockingly, only 16 percent of respondents felt that their organization was handling engagement and brand experience well.
According to this survey, here are four factors that top marketers identified as the reason for underperformance.
54 percent of marketers surveyed said an inadequate budget is to blame (at least in part) for their lack of engagement strategy.
Based on the annual revenues of the organizations surveyed, this statistic isn't the result of unavailable funds. More likely, marketers either are neglecting to measure and analyze their campaigns or struggling to communicate the value of their strategies to the C-suite.
We’ve got some advice to help your marketing team prove its case. Click here for a free guide.
43 percent of marketers surveyed reported their organization lacks a customer-centric culture.
A customer-centric culture prioritizes the customer experience above all else (including products or services). These types of organizations spend time learning about and understanding who their customers are. It’s an initiative supported by every level of the business. They also have tools in place to help them achieve this understanding through data aggregation. Predictably, their marketing teams are all about personalization and real-time response.
Organizations that are not customer centric probably lack in several areas. They likely function on siloed information about the customer, which hinders marketing and sales performance. They probably don’t have key technology platforms to manage and make sense of data. Without sufficient, centralized data support, their digital marketing strategies pale compared with a brand that knows and shows its understanding of target audiences.
Transitioning your culture to customer-centricity isn’t easy. You need buy-in from the top, education and training, awareness and reward initiatives and a complete shift in focus from the solutions you offer to the people you serve.
32 percent of marketers surveyed attributed their shortcomings to a lack of senior-level support.
Workforces take cues from the top. C-suite is the gatekeeper of your budget and the drivers of cultural change. Without their buy-in, it’s nearly impossible to evolve. If you can’t convince them to support your goals, your digital marketing strategy will remain limited by resources.
Refer to the guide mentioned in factor No. 1. By improving your communications with the C-suite, you will strengthen the relationship and share a better understanding of what both levels of business need from each other.
Only 7 percent of participants claimed the ability to deliver real-time, data-driven engagements across physical and digital touchpoints. Only 5 percent of respondents said their engagement strategies revolve around data, and 28 percent admitted they don’t understand how data relates to the bottom line.
Why such low percentages? Organizations are failing to centralize data, focus efforts on data aggregation and make it accessible across the organization. After all, the buyer experience doesn’t end with the marketing team. Every department perpetuates it. The inability of organizations to manage and keep pace with evolving technology is partly to blame. Others can’t upgrade from complex, antiquated processes to newer, streamlined approaches.
Why do you think that is?
The answer is (D).
Much like the season finale of Game of Thrones, this isn’t going to be a feel-good ending. But sometimes tough love is necessary. If you haven’t already figured it out, the four stunting factors are synergistic. They profoundly influence one another. And while it is possible that your organization only identifies with one, it’s more likely that improvement is necessary in multiple areas. The good news? Now you know where to begin your journey to improvement.
If this feels like more than your team can handle, an outside digital marketing agency is a wise investment. From inbound strategy and planning to marketing execution and data analytics, they have the resources to complete your team and deliver the results you’ve been struggling to achieve.
