Mappting Your Position on the Digital Spectrum
01 - Sharing Your Story 02 - Starting the Dialog 03 - Engaging in Conversation 04 - Understanding the Dialog 05 - Refining the Dialog
Keyword: Testing
06 - Mass One-on-One Dialog 07 - Become a Digital Business
assets

If you've been moving along the path from Step 1, you probably realize you have a lot of digital assets by this time. Often times, these platforms are not integrated. If they were built with the end in mind, they should be. At a minimum, you should ensure the following assets within each system below are "talking" to each other:

Marketing Systems

Marketing Systems are a general way to describe platforms that offer drip, automated and triggered marketing. You have heard of HubSpot, Marketo and Salesforce for example. Each varies greatly in functionality and finding the right one for you depends a lot on your digital marketing efforts.

Financial Systems

We all have Financial Systems. But did you know many are hosted on the cloud and offer API integration? The digital business of the future will be able to track the entire customer path, including financial returns on the marketing efforts directed at each prospect. It may be time for you to consider a new financial system if yours isn't already capable of talking to your other systems.

ERP/Operations Systems

Along with financial systems, ERP/Operations Systems will be the last systems to integrate into marketing and give us a single view of the customer. From inventory management to picking and order entry, these systems should eventually integrate to provide the big picture of the prospect-to-customer-to-repeat customer cycle!

Key question: If your systems are not integrated, what is the reason -- age of the systems, lack of an API, worry about security? What systems can be replaced by more current technology? Would it be better to build something new and own it rather than license an expensive platform(s)?

marketing & sales

With the data insights you gained in the previous step, it's time to begin tailoring your content to your various audiences. Your digital platforms by this step should provide for:

Personalized Content

As we gain the ultimate single view of the customer, the customer will expect marketing to speak more specifically to them. Affinity programs will no longer suffice. With the power of data, customers will expect we know who they are and what they want. Personalized Content is one way to offer it to them.

Dynamic Content

Like personalized content, Dynamic Content is based on what you can learn about a user before they ever engage with you. With Profiling and Lead Scoring, content should appear dynamically based on what you can guess about a user. It's only one tick from personalized content.

A/B Testing

While big data should tell us what customers want, marketing still deals with the illogical brain. So when you don't know... TEST! A/B Testing is a great way to learn the effectiveness of your message and what does a better job of converting prospects to customers!

Key question: What metrics did you establish to determine the best-performing personalized and/or dynamic content? What response analysis methods are you using to establish a control message? Who is developing the tests against the control and how are they basing these tests?