Key Priorities for Leading Marketing Organizations

Guest post by Ryan Greene, ActionIQ

Leading marketing organizations prioritize these three principles:

1. Integrate one’s technology stack. Research shows nearly 7 of 10 consumers will transact with another brand due to a disconnected experience (source). Leaders should prioritize establishing a single customer view that contains all of their customers’ historical interactions, while making it available to all customer facing solutions across marketing, service, and commerce channels. Leaders should also prioritize connecting their non-customer systems for efficiencies too (e.g. content management solution, workflow management solution, etc.). Manual processes and incomplete customer intelligence consistently undermine innovation.
2. Enable data democracy. There’s no faster way to scale customer intelligence and employee productivity than to put the power of data in your workforce’s hands. In fact, McKinsey says personalization is impossible if marketers don’t have the means to understand the needs of customers on an ongoing basis (source). Leading organizations fully democratize access to data, insights, and analytics.
3. Activate, measure, and iterate. No matter how super one’s intuition is, it should never be considered a substitute for ideation, testing, and iteration. For example, McKinsey research finds it typically takes four to five refinements of a personalized trigger to capture the first 80 percent of its potential value (source), underscoring the value of testing and iteration. Leaders should instill a culture of testing by gaining executive sponsorship, creating performance goals, and following testing best practices.