Read a great article from McKinsey that notes the importance of data driven marketing.

Due to the new models of customer engagement and the technical complexity involved in dealing with the resulting mounds of data from social networks, websites, other online media such as blogs, digital ad systems, along with various other “offline” customer touch points such as CRM and sales systems, the traditional roles of marketing are now expanding well beyond the walls of the marketing organization to other areas of the organization.

Seamless Customer Experience

The authors note: “In today’s marketing environment, companies will be better off if they stop viewing customer engagement as a series of discrete interactions and instead think about it as customers do: a set of related interactions that, added together, make up the customer experience.”  Later in the article they state, “. . .digital technology has upended the engagement expectations of customers, who, for example, want one website to visit and a relationship seamlessly integrated across touch points. Meeting such expectations requires extraordinary operational coordination and responsiveness in activities ranging from providing on-the-ground service delivery to generating online content to staying on top of a customer care issue blowing up on YouTube.”

So the questions arise:

  • How many marketing organizations have the technical infrastructure currently in place to actually tie all the various sales, marketing and operation channels together in order to view customers from a “360 degree” perspective?
  • How many marketing organizations are prepared to deal with the technical complexity involved in these integrations? Do they have the ability to work effectively with internal IT organizations in order to get these systems built?
  • How should organizations be built to effectively address this blend of marketing and technical aptitudes required to effectively engage with customers?

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Link to the “We are all marketers now”  article from McKinsey.