“It’s no longer digital marketing or traditional marketing; it’s marketing in a digital world.”

 

Versions of this quote have become a common refrain as the lines between digital and traditional marketing approaches blur — and as digital and traditional marketing roles increasingly overlap. Even so, there are still plenty of marketers who think of themselves as either digital marketers or traditional marketers. Although some consider their approaches more effective or don’t recognize the commonalities (data!), others are keen to embrace the best of what their counterparts have to offer.

 

Whatever camp you consider yourself to be in — digital, traditional, or hybrid — it’s essential that you keep evolving your marketing skills, honing your expertise, and testing new approaches — even if those tactics are tried and true to other marketers.

 

MKTGinsight asked 13 marketing experts what one skill or technique digital marketers should adopt from traditional marketers and, conversely, what one skill or technique traditional marketers should adopt from their digital brethren. Many of the recommendations advise testing, adopting, or expanding the use of specific channels — from direct mail and print to mobile and video. Other suggestions emphasize the importance of considering new or reconsidering established approaches to acquiring and utilizing customer data, testing campaigns and tactics, and tracking results.

 

And, while some experts cautioned digital marketers to slow down and embrace research, and be more deliberate, others warn traditional marketers that speed is essential and taking too long to respond to customers will result in missed opportunities.

 

Whether you consider yourself to be a digital or traditional marketer or, simply,

a marketer, what’s most important is being open to advice and new approaches. No, you don’t have to adopt or even try everything, but keeping an open mind could lead you to that one marketing approach that outperforms your wildest expectations.

 

Contributors

Alec Casey, CMO, Trusted Media Brands

Lifetime value analysis is a critical analysis that should rest at the core of all marketing investment decisions, whether you’re managing a digital or traditional channel. More…

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Nathan Kontny, CEO, Highrise

New marketers want “fresh” ideas and somehow that means ignoring the past. Even worse, we depend too much on technology to figure it all out for us. Just don’t use it to replace the intense research needed to understand your customers. More…

 

Stacey Hawes, President, Data, Epsilon

The key thing traditional marketers can adopt from digital marketers is their focus on efficiency.  More… 

​

John Miglautsch, Owner & Founder, Miglautsch Marketing

One technique digital marketers often overlook that many traditional marketers still benefit from: direct mail. And the cost per engagement is much less than you think. More…

 

Larissa Hildebrandt, Paid Media Manager, Unbounce

Traditional marketers would benefit from adopting a mind-set that considers all stages of the marketing funnel. More…

 

James Glover, Cofounder and CEO, Coherent Path

Today’s digital marketers would benefit by taking a page from the traditional marketer’s playbook and thinking about customers through their potential customer lifetime versus just today. More…

 

Jay Stocki, SVP, Data & Product, Experian Marketing Services

Digital marketers and advertisers need to take a couple of pages from the traditional marketing playbook — specifically, always testing everything and refining target lists. More…

 

Micha Hershman, Senior Director of Demand Gen and Inbound Marketing, Eventbrite

Copywriting has been a core function in traditional marketing models; and one that digital marketers under-leverage. It shouldn’t be. The goal of writing copy is to motivate a prospect to take action — the necessary precursor to any purchase. More…

Severine Thomazo, COO, DCMN

One valuable skill for traditional marketers to embrace in 2018 and beyond is to adopt a digital mind-set.  More…

​

Michael Cohen, VP of Marketing, eRelevance

In this always-on digital world, the modern digital marketer might easily dismiss traditional print as a relic of marketing’s unsophisticated past. But multichannel campaigns should sometimes incorporate a supporting appearance from print.  More…

​

Peter Gillett, CEO, Zuant

What can digital marketers learn from  traditional marketing types? To focus their minds on both sides of the sales and marketing divide. More…

​

Tyler Holliday, Director of Marketing, Ytel

As traditional marketers continue to adopt more digital marketing skills and techniques, it’s important that they take a step back and evaluate which are most effective or most promising for their brand. More…

​

Eric Porres, CMO, SundaySky

Whether you consider yourself to be a traditional marketer or a digital marketer, you need to change your mind-set on personalization. More…

​

Responses

Alec Casey

CMO, Trusted Media Brands

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Lifetime value analysis is a critical analysis that rests at the core of all marketing investment decisions we make at Trusted Media Brands, regardless of whether we’re managing a traditional or digital channel.

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The concept is simple enough: Create a P/L representing the five-year customer lifetime revenues and costs for every source of business. Some of the key components, such as organic SEM or inbound customer service, will be wildly profitable but not particularly scalable.

Others, such as paid social or direct mail, may be highly scalable but require significant initial

investment. Among the elements that you may need to take into consideration are: realistic payment rates; whether customers will opt in to automatic renewal; and, long-term pricing for existing and new products.

 

Lifetime value analysis can also allow you to consider other parts of your overall business model, such as how much to spend on advertising for customer acquisition and whether there’s an opportunity to cross-sell new or current customers additional products or services.

 

Until all these elements are combined, you can’t really know if you’re spending the right amount of money in the right sources to drive your business. Lifetime value analysis will let you see if you have truly optimized your marketing mix across your new and traditional sources and ensure that you are building a solid revenue foundation with your customer base.    Back to Contributors list

Nathan Kontny

CEO, Highrise

@natekontny | @highrise

 

The Man Who Knew Infinity is a Hollywood film based on a brilliant, real mathematician named Srinivasa Ramanujan. What makes Srinivasa such an interesting story is that he self-trained in advanced mathematics while living in extreme poverty as a child. He’d absorb any math he could from people who crossed his path. He’d devour any book he could get his hands on.

 

He was eventually discovered by more classically trained mathematicians who helped get Srinivasa out of the dire situation he grew up in. Today, mathematicians are discovering

things in his notebooks that continue to advance our understanding of numbers. He’s among the greatest mathematicians who ever lived.

 

One thing has always stood out to me about Srinivasa: He spent a great deal of time in his youth proving and discovering things that people had already proven and discovered. Of course, he did. His early self-education in math was full of holes that more classically trained mathematicians easily filled with books, classes, and mentors. Srinivasa was forced to figure it all out on his own.

 

I wonder how much more advanced our understanding of numbers would be if Srinivasa had been given the education his peers had so that he could leverage their work in his own.

 

I feel like too many people force themselves into positions like Srinivasa’s. Most of us get some form of education, which is largely a study of the past, but often after school we treat things as if we need to figure it out fresh and all by ourselves. We stop studying what has come before.

 

I see it with marketing all the time. New marketers want “fresh” ideas and somehow that means ignoring the past. Even worse, we depend too much on technology to figure it all out for us.

 

A simple case in point are headlines. The headlines of your ads, landing pages, emails, whatever. Given how our tools now allow us to split test an infinite number of mediocre combinations cheaply, that’s usually what we rely on.

 

In the past, traditional marketers didn’t have the same tools or mediums for testing that we have today. They tested, but it was expensive sending out real mail with different ad copy to see which converted. It wasn’t like testing 20 different Google Ad variations.

 

Because of that lack of ease to test with, traditional marketers often knew their audience better. They were forced to. The alternative was too expensive.

 

I think the number one thing to look back on and take from marketers doing things more “traditionally” is simply the amount of research they did.

 

David Ogilvy, the “father of advertising,” credits his success to deep research into the customers buying his clients’ products — a skill he honed when he worked for George Gallup (of Gallup Polls and research). Even his title when he started his own advertising agency was director of research.

 

As Ogilvy said, “Advertising people who ignore research are as dangerous as generals who ignore decodes of enemy signals.”

 

Then there’s William Bernbach, one of the founders of DDB, who’s behind the famous Avis Rent A Car campaign, “We try harder.”

 

When Avis came to Bernbach about becoming its advertising firm, Bernbach made the Avis CEO give his team 90 days just to research and learn its business. Ninety days of research before starting a marketing campaign? I don’t see folks spending that kind of time today on research.

 

During meetings with Avis employees to learn the business Bernbach’s team would ask, “Why does anybody ever rent a car from you?” And they kept hearing: “We try harder because we have to.” That research gave them exactly what they needed to create one of the greatest marketing campaigns ever.

 

The copy wrote itself.

 

There’s nothing wrong with relying on the wonderful technological advancements we have today to test dozens of ideas. But don’t use that to replace the intense research you need to understand your customers’ or your clients’ business. That research will make all the difference.                Back to Contributors list

Stacey Hawes

President, Data, Epsilon

@EpsilonMktg

 

Keeping my pulse on the data industry for more than 15 years has meant that I’ve had to evolve my role as traditional and digital channels have come together. Through this transition, I’ve learned that the key thing traditional marketers can adopt from digital marketers is their focus on efficiency.

 

The pace of change across industries isn’t slowing anytime soon. Customers are finding

new devices to engage with and channels to interact in. Brands must be ready to meet customers at moments of interest in a consistent, seamless, efficient, and cost-effective

way across channels and devices.

 

For traditional marketers, the foundation for building successful customer relationships remains the same. It requires rich data and insights to better understand customers, who they are, what they buy, and what they care about.

 

What changes for traditional marketers is being efficient enough to reach their customers at the right time and in the right channel.

 

Creating efficiencies to achieve this starts by building a consistent view of customers — leveraging online and offline data — to drive marketing activity that is relevant to the individual receiving it. Then, by focusing on the omnichannel activation of that data through powerful technology platforms, marketers can reach their customers in real time and at scale in the right channel. 

 

The goal is to improve customer experiences through personalized marketing communications and data is one of the only differentiators for brands to do this today. But all the data in the world is useless if marketers can’t properly act on it in real time. That’s why traditional marketers must learn from digital marketers’ focus on creating efficiencies to improve the customer experiences they’re delivering.        Back to Contributors list

John Miglautsch

Owner & Founder, Miglautsch Marketing

@JRMigs

 

One technique digital marketers often overlook that many traditional marketers still benefit from: direct mail. And the cost per engagement is much less than you think.

 

Consider what you spend to acquire a customer. The cost of a Google Adword (e.g., “flower delivery”) is about $5 per click, according to AdEspresso. Google says a 50 percent bounce rate costs an average $10 per engagement; for landing pages an 80 percent bounce equates to about $25 per engagement. Depending on how many of those engaged visitors actually buy, your cost per new customer can be hundreds of dollars. You’ve made too much of an

investment not to cultivate additional business. You’ve tried email; perhaps it’s worth upping the ante.

 

You’ve already spent $25 for engagement or more to acquire a customer. Think of that web engagement as something like getting a catalog and looking at a few pages. Industry averages suggest that 85 percent of millenials look at their mail. That means a $1 catalog only costs $1.18 per engagement. This is far less than you’re probably paying for Internet engagement.

 

Not only does direct mail often costs less per engagement, but you also can test and track it. Test two offers, establish a winner (e.g., using a source code), and then continue to test against it. This is the essence of traditional mail-order methodology.

 

Further, the physicality of direct mail increases its impact. Our brains have 10 times more neural receptors for touch than for sight, according to Sappi Neuroscience. This may explain why you remember greeting cards more than Facebook birthday messages. Perhaps it’s also why some catalog companies are still going after 170 years.                                   Back to Contributors list

Larissa Hildebrandt

Paid Media Manager, Unbounce

@unbounce

 

Traditional marketers tend to focus on awareness and top of funnel initiatives, while digital marketers target each stage of the funnel with different tactics and content. Traditional marketers would benefit from adopting a mind-set that considers all stages of the marketing funnel — from the first encounter with a brand, all the way through to a purchase, to ensure they’re taking advantage of all customer conversion opportunities. For example, using content marketing or search advertising for awareness, then retargeting website visitors with Facebook ads, and eventually remarketing to existing or inactive customers via email.                                                     Back to Contributors list

James Glover

Cofounder and CEO, Coherent Path

@coherentpath

 

Today’s digital marketers would benefit by taking a page from the traditional marketer’s playbook and thinking about customers through their potential customer lifetime versus just today. This requires a change in their mind-set and their marketing campaign goals.

 

The traditional marketer thinks about building a long-term relationship with the customer, whereas the digital marketer is typically focused on, “What is the right thing to sell you today?” Building long-term customer relationships require not just personalizing an
offer today, but also making sure that customers’ profiles are actionable to allow for

personalized campaigns over time.

 

With this long-term relationship in mind, digital marketers should act as “personal shoppers.” This means offering content that matches the tastes and preferences of each unique customer, while surfacing new products and categories they might also like. To achieve this, it’s necessary to first observe how a customer behaves, act on that information, and then take their response into account during future interactions. Tracking customer behavior over time will help distinguish between something a customer likes, something a customer is in the mood for at a particular time, and how that may change over time.

 

Marketers can only paint a complete picture of how customers interact with their brand by aggregating data based on each customer’s interactions over the long term.

 

When it comes to treating customers like they have a personal shopper, digital marketers need to avoid being the proverbial pushy salesperson who, in the digital world, continuously exposes the same products. Neiman Marcus once described it as following someone around the store after they put a dress back on the rack and saying, “Are you sure you don’t want to buy it?”

 

So, marketers need to think about how much content to use and the variety of products to promote to keep a customer engaged. Yes, leverage information about what a customer seems to be in the mood for, but also surface content around what a customer probably has a taste for and likely hasn’t seen yet. For example, let a customer know of upcoming product launches that might be of interest given past purchases.

 

Also, think differently about how to get the most from your creative calendar. Maybe send a specific customer the ‘back-to-school’ email next week if there’s a better option to send that customer this week. Or resend an email that a customer didn’t open that may be more interesting to them now than the promotion coming up on the marketing calendar.

 

To engage and retain customers in the long term, digital marketers need to adapt their mind-set to that of a personal shopper. Curate communications and content not only to meet a customer’s needs and preferences at the moment, but also to present them with content that will be of interest as their tastes and moods change over time.                                     Back to Contributors list

Jay Stocki

SVP, Data & Product, Experian Marketing Services

@jstocki | @MktgFwd

 

As digital marketers and advertisers, one of our primary objectives will always be to have meaningful interactions with the people we want to reach. But to do so, we need to take a couple of pages from the traditional marketing playbook — specifically, always testing everything and refining target lists.

 

Direct marketers always test the audiences they’re trying to reach. When something works, they amplify the approach. They never assume one tactic is the end all, be all.

Additionally, direct marketers suppress their active customer base and remove people who they shouldn’t market to; for instance, customer opt-outs, non-responder segments, and the deceased, to name a few.

 

Before, it used to be expensive to be wrong, but nowadays it’s not as costly, so some digital marketers don’t go through the trouble to take these additional steps—but they should.

 

Today’s advertising cycle may be shorter, and the options may be a bit overwhelming, but we as marketers need to take the time to better understand the message, creative, and channels that resonate with our audiences. We need to make sure the message we’re communicating to consumers is meaningful to them — otherwise, we’re wasting the consumer’s time, as well as our own advertising dollars.

 

Further, marketers cannot assume that one tactic will always work. Each person is different and consumes information in their own way. It becomes a question of, “How do we make the customer experience pleasant and beneficial to them?” Sometimes, we need to dig into an old bag of approaches to help get us there.                                                                                   Back to Contributors list

Micha Hershman

Senior Director of Demand Generation, Eventbrite

@mdhershman | @eventbrite

 

Consider any single element of your digital marketing output. It’s absolutely crawling with letters, words, sentences, and paragraphs. Words, or “copy” in the parlance of the traditional marketer, are everywhere. Copy permeates your email, website, advertising, direct mail, social media, sales collateral, live events, and everything else you do. Even your most intensive visual media — say, your Instagram account — relies on good copy to engage customers.

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Copy has been a core function in traditional marketing models; and one that digital marketers

under-leverage. It shouldn’t be. The goal of writing copy is to motivate a prospect to take action. And action — whether clicking a banner, sharing on social, or signing up for a product demo —  is the necessary precursor to any financial transaction.

 

Copywriting offers digital marketers value in five powerful and interconnected ways:

 

1. Copy gets you found

Searching online is a pervasive, inextricable part of our everyday lives, According to Marketo, 93 percent of buying cycles start with an online search. So, marketers developed the art and science of optimizing web copy. After all, the goal of any marketer is to make it easier for prospects to find our products.

 

The good news is that search engine optimization is no longer the stuff of black magic. It’s no longer about backlinking, meta tag management, and keyword stuffing. Since Google’s Penguin and Panda algorithm changes, SEO depends on the quality of the words on your website. Quality content on your website means Google will prioritize you in its results and that customers will find your product.

 

2. Copy improves the user experience

Your copy gives readers the information they want at a glance, but even the most interested prospect won’t read every word you write. Your copy should lead them to all the right places, and make the navigation of your website, email, or live event intuitive.

 

This is what is commonly referred to as UX, or user experience. User experience is critical to digital marketers. We understand that if our assets aren’t user-friendly, prospects won’t engage with them.

 

Getting user experience right implies a careful consideration of the whole. This includes the words that explain exactly how to navigate your website, and find the product they’re looking for, in as few clicks as possible. When you write copy with user experience in mind, prospects are more likely to convert.

 

3. Copy sets you apart

There are more than one billion websites and over four million advertisers on Google. That’s enormous competition for the attention of any human being.

 

Of course, you don’t need to differentiate yourself from every other company on the Internet, but you do need to stand out from your competition. The copy you use in your marketing materials can do a lot of this heavy lifting for you. The words you choose, the tone you take, and the style you employ all have the capacity transform your brand into something distinctive.

 

4. Copy builds credibility and brand preference

Copy — or, as digital marketers call it, content — can provide your prospects with real value. It can answer a quick question from mobile search; offer solutions to a meaty problem that a prospect has been wrestling with for months; inform and educate on issues that are directly related to your product. In doing any of these things, your copy can be the bridge between a causal Internet search and the conviction that your brand is a credible authority.

 

Customers have choices, and they know it. Our goals as marketers are to make prospective customers feel like the choice is obvious, and that our product is the best solution for their needs. Every marketing asset we deploy in the minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, and years in advance of a purchase should be to build preference for our brands. When it’s time for a customer to make a purchase, we want them to think of us first and prefer us to all other options. Copy is a critical tool in establishing that preference.

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5. Copy sells.

Copy is cheaper than a salesperson, more flexible, and more scalable. An investment in copy ensures that a consumer discovers your new product on page one of a Google search. It improves the experience they have while navigating your brand microsite. It sets you apart from your competitors, establishes credibility, and builds preference for your offering. It’s the catalyst that motivates prospects to click, enter their credit card data, or call a salesperson.

 

Digital marketers under-leverage copywriting. That’s because we don’t treat it as a specialized function requiring years of experience and a finely-honed skill set. We all think we can write copy, and we can — to some extent. But consider this: Would you hire an account executive to run your email marketing program? A data analyst to design your logo? A front-end web designer to lead your social media efforts?

 

Of course not. Learn to write better copy, or better yet, get more leverage out of your marketing and hire a copywriter.

                                                                                                                                                                                                  Back to Contributors list

Severine Thomazo

COO, DCMN

@DCMN

 

One very valuable skill for traditional marketers to embrace in 2018 and beyond is to adopt a digital mind-set. Contrary to popular belief, a digital mind-set is not technology focused; rather it’s a data-driven way of thinking and doing that upends the traditional hierarchies we so often see in large corporations.

 

Digital marketers understand that to be innovative and stay ahead of the competition

they must:

Test new ideas

As marketing innovation progresses more and more quickly, many marketing executives who have relied on a traditional planning model in the past are struggling to keep up. To combat this issue, digital marketers test new ideas often and quickly, looking at predetermined metrics to guide them along the way. They don’t slow themselves down with approvals and a chain of command. Instead, they find out whether an idea works by implementing it, collecting data, and taking an honest look at the results for ways to move forward and optimize.

 

Fail fast

Not every idea is a good one. Digital marketers who rely on a data-driven approach understand that to implement the right ideas, they have to sift through some bad ones. This means being open to and unafraid of failing. They fail quickly, learn from the data, and move on to the next idea. To succeed, this approach must start from the top. It has to be encouraged by founders, executives, and managers. Only then will teams know that when a project or campaign fails, it’s an opportunity to try something different and to get to success more rapidly.

 

Be agile

It’s no secret that we live in a 24-hour, on-demand, and consumer-driven world, which means that in 2018 and beyond, marketers must be nimble and action-focused. Gone are the days of taking weeks to plan and act on or make changes to an idea. Digital marketers use the data and analytics waiting at their fingertips to optimize existing campaigns or develop new ones in real time. They’re committed to making decisions as quickly as the market now requires them to.

 

Work collaboratively

For all of the above to work, teams must work more collaboratively than they may be used to. Digital marketers often work hand in hand with sales, legal, IT, and finance to deploy campaigns quickly and efficiently. For some organizations, this means developing cross-functional teams, while for others it’s a matter of creating more seamless channels of communication. Whatever the case may be, digital marketers understand that they cannot work in silos if they want to effectively test, learn, and optimize quickly.

 

We live in a world where we can drill into big data to make it smart data, and that’s exactly what digital marketers do best. They test new ideas and compile data on everything from sales to employee engagement in an effort to continuously improve. Taking this performance-based view is scary and can be a huge risk, because often you’re testing recommendations you thought would work, but may not. However, the benefits of using this approach are bigger than any potential downfalls.

 

Leading with a digital mind-set means that risk will ultimately be reduced, as you reach your goals faster and take what you’ve learned to make your work more successful.                     Back to Contributors list

Michael Cohen

VP of Marketing, eRelevance

@erelevancecorp

 

In this always-on digital world, the modern digital marketer might easily dismiss traditional print as a relic of marketing’s unsophisticated past. Undoubtedly, getting marketing right, right now, requires multichannel campaigns that digitally surround people with messages that matter. Those multichannel campaigns should incorporate SMS, email, mobile apps, social, and more—with a sometimes complementary, supporting appearance from print.

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Even with its relative inflexibility, long lead times, and high cost, in 2018 and beyond, there are lessons to be learned from print. Those lessons are rooted in the marketing basics we may

forget in our rush to what’s better, what’s fastest, and what’s next.

 

The flexibility and immediacy of digital marketing are clear benefits, but those attributes make it easy to push through a digital campaign and skip the fundamentals of marketing research, planning, and good old-fashioned strategy.

 

Even across a well-executed, multichannel campaign, message is still king. For optimal effectiveness, our messages must matter to the people who receive them—across every single channel, every single time. And that takes understanding the customer before we’re too quick to click publish or send.

 

As is and was always the requirement for traditional marketers expecting to run an effective print campaign, digital marketers must suspend the rush to execute until they adequately understand their customers and create smart messages based on customer demographics, behaviors, needs, and desires.

 

Beyond words, marketers must give careful thought to how the right words work with the right images to enhance and clarify messages. The well-choreographed dance between words and images is fundamental to any successful print campaign. However, when it can take only minutes to conceive, compose, and push out an email, or social post, or banner ad, it’s easy to forget the importance of the two working together.

 

To create engaging, successful marketing campaigns with the power to drive action, the modern digital marketer should remember that the marketing fundamentals that have always been an inextricable part of successful print marketing remain fundamental in a digital world. There is still much to learn from marketing’s more traditional, experienced, and deliberate

big sister.                                                                                                                                                                                 Back to Contributors list

Peter Gillett

CEO, Zuant

@GillettPeter | @ZuantApp

 

What can digital marketers learn from us more traditional marketing types now that the economy is growing at a healthy clip all around the world? To focus their minds on both sides of the sales and marketing divide.

 

When we’re talking B2B marketing, there is a widening gulf between what digital marketing can deliver and what the traditional sales teams do in their day-to-day business. Too much marketing content is off-target and not pertinent to specific audiences.

Digital marketers need to stand back for now and do less but better content. They also need to play the numbers game.

 

So, what are the key ingredients? 

 

First, marketers must ensure that the content they deliver on their brand’s website and electronically using marketing automation is high caliber and relevant. Then both the marketing and sales teams should be tracking open rates and click-throughs. The inside sales or external telemarketing team need to actually work with that data to deliver real opportunities precisely when someone expresses interest in what you’re selling.

 

This is really all about connection — making sure that as soon as a customer or prospect shows any interest at all they get nurtured, not just digitally, but also by real human beings following up and connecting.

 

And, of course, track your results. Publish a Sales Action Taken report split by media and show the proportion of qualified versus unqualified sales leads that each source generates. Providing real reporting on the performance of both marketing and sales working in harmony, that’s nirvana.                                                                                                                                   Back to Contributors list

Tyler Holliday

Director of Marketing, Ytel

@Ask_Holliday

 

As traditional marketers continue to adopt more digital marketing skills and techniques, it’s important that they take a step back and evaluate which are most effective or most promising for their brand. More recent trends to gauge include big data, Internet of Things, and VR, but the most prolific and adaptable is mobile marketing.

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Not only is mobile a primary touchpoint for many consumers, it’s also quickly evolving; within the next year we expect to see the next generation of text messaging. That’s why, as you evaluate various marketing approaches and technologies, it’s so important to consider

whether you’re doing enough to get the most from mobile marketing. For example, have you, or your marketing team, spent enough time strategizing how to better acquire mobile phone numbers for leads, customers, and even partners?

 

This type of data opens the floodgates for what’s next in communications, and how marketers not only communicate directly with their brand’s customers, but also how they extend their brand across the customer journey beyond their products or

web properties.

 

Having a plan for capturing mobile data isn’t just essential for the short term; it’s valuable for the long term, as well. There are three simple actions you can take to start collecting mobile data.

 

1.     Add a custom field for mobile numbers to your CRM and start updating contacts

2.     Ask for a mobile number (not just phone number) on lead-generation forms

3.     Start running promotions for customers who provide a mobile opt-in

 

Mobile is the here and now customer touchpoint. In fact, 90 percent of mobile messages are seen in less than three minutes. Mobile is not only about how customers want to be communicated with, but also when. Implementing both the how and the when into your communications strategy may seem like a massive increase in resources and capital, but that’s not necessarily the case. Through automation and AI, mobile communications will continue to streamline how and when brands interact

with customers.

 

So, prioritize how you collect mobile data. Mobile will help you have more meaningful, one-on-one conversations with customers and enhance the customer journey through human communications.                                                  Back to Contributors list

Eric Porres

CMO, SundaySky

@eporres | @sundaysky

 

Whether you consider yourself to be a traditional marketer or a digital marketer, you need to change your mind-set on personalization.

 

Personalization needs to be seen as a strategy, not just as a tactic.

 

With the rise of true universal customer profiles, it’s easier (albeit non-trivial) for marketers to seek out the right tools and technology that bring true personalization to their customers — that is, going beyond “[first name]” inserted into email subject lines.

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If Amazon represents the apex of site-driven personalization (with a concomitant valuation), then personalized video represents the apex of data-driven storytelling. The average consumer will spend 112 seconds watching a personalized video — a coveted eternity of attention and value.

 

Personalized marketing works at every stage of the customer lifecycle to communicate a brand’s story. It captures customers’ attention earlier and longer, which in turn leads to increased customer acquisition and retention. And, when done well, personalization even gives customer data back as a service to each customer.                                                       Back to Contributors list

 

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About the Author

Ginger Conlon, chief editor and marketing alchemist at MKTGinsight, catalyzes change in marketing organizations. She is a frequent speaker on marketing and customer experience, and serves in advisory or leadership roles for several industry organizations. Ginger was honored with a Silver Apple lifetime achievement award for her contributions to the marketing industry.

Find her at @customeralchemy and on LinkedIn.