At the PIMA Mid-Year Conference in Colorado Springs last week, a panel of marketing experts took the stage to talk about solving some of the most painful problems in multi-channel marketing. In the hour-long session, the quartet of speakers focused on five major pain points common in distributed multichannel marketing organizations.
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Managing channel silos efficiently online or offline, inbound or outbound, corporate and local.
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Building or recruiting expertise as channels keep proliferating, and the increasing complexity requires new skills that many marketers simply don’t have.
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Determining ROI with some of the newer channels — what is a Facebook fan really worth?
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Synchronizing multiple channels across a national or global organization.
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Tracking and reporting across multichannel campaigns, to arrive at a single ROMI.
Deb Gustafson, Vice President of Market Management at Epsilon Targeting, looked at the customer experience of a life insurance buyer who had seven different marketing interactions with the company before he became a qualified prospect. “This customer, Mark, had a series of unique member experiences that helped him make the decisions he made as he moved through the purchasing process,” she pointed out.
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The sales funnel has become a customer life cycle. Corporate marketing can’t take it for granted that a customer will move through any set “funnel” towards a buying decision — in today’s world of empowered consumers, marketers have to focus on interactivity that drives engagement.
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The three “C’s” — choice, consistency, and continuity — are vital at every stage of the customer life cycle.
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All customer interactions must be measured. Marketers should be measuring campaigns by segmenting internal and external data. Targeting, frequency, and consistent messaging across multiple channels control success.
For a copy of the short presentation used during the PIMA panel, click here.