Consumers have grown weary of old-style marketing campaigns which bombard them with emails and offers. We hammer our customers and prospects with more, more, more.

However, becoming customer-centric isn’t just a state of mind. It means learning new skills so that you can take today’s rapidly emerging marketing automation tools, and apply them to create relevant, targeted, and valuable customer experiences. You won’t be surprised to learn that modern marketing is tightly tied to social. Nurturing one-on-one relationships is really the only way to build new revenue streams, to cut through all the digital clutter and to keep consumers’ attention long enough so they can hear your message.

Let’s touch some key challenges holding back many of today’s marketing efforts:

1. Poor marketing experiences: Here’s the difficult truth – many companies’ marketing experiences are just plain broken and fragmented.

2. Widely dispersed tools: Marketers often lack a centralised place to create, manage and devise customer experiences.

3. Little access to big data: Businesses simply can’t leverage the potential of big data when it’s dispersed among numerous silos. They don’t have a common and consistent view of what your customers are doing, and what they want.

4. Sophisticated customers: More than any other single factor, today’s savvy buyer has created the modern truism that one marketing message no longer fits all. Through the major social channels, your potential buyer essentially has access to everything that’s being said about your brand by every other customer.

Keeping up with all the channels that touch customers nowadays means creating more content, more campaigns, more promotions, more emails, more social messages, and more ads, and handling this with point products is difficult at best. It is better to aggregate multiple tools under one cloud umbrella, so you have everything at your fingertips. This forms the foundation for unified marketing.

There are some steps which CMOs and their teams should apply to orchestrate and run successful marketing campaigns.

Connect with buyers by understanding their “personas”: People are smart; they get it when they’re spammed with one-size-fits-all messages that do not speak to their needs. That’s where personas can help you focus your communications so they hit the bulls eye every time. A persona helps you see a mental picture of who you’re talking to, so you can craft a message with the correct tone, imagery and content to reach that customer where they live.

Engage across multiple channels: Cross-channel marketing is great in theory, but it’s become increasingly difficult to manage the marketing sprawl of multiple campaigns running across online, mobile, email and social channels. Simplification should be one of the big value propositions of the marketing cloud solution.

Optimise campaign effectiveness through performance analytics: Keeping track of engagement metrics, like email-open rates, will enable marketing teams to continually fine-tune their copy and customer targeting. This maximises effectiveness and reinforces ownership and accountability within your organisation. To get the biggest bang for your marketing buck, everybody on the team should be able to see the performance stats.

Use intelligent content to deepen your customer relationship: This is where the marketing pedal hits the metal. Targeting and optimisation is important, but no promotion will deliver if your message is outdated, unfocused or just plain boring. So get serious about content and deliver messages and material that resonate with each and every customer.

Leverage social media for social marketing: If your organisation hasn’t started to get social already, light a fire under someone and get going. But if you already have advocates, both inside and outside your company who are actively engaging in organic discussions on the important channels such as Twitter and Facebook, modern marketing tools will help you take this to the next level.

Manage your database to enhance its value: Customer and prospect information is the lifeblood of your business. The names, email addresses, organisations and job titles in your database represent real buyers. So don’t spam. Instead, connect and communicate. That’s the low-hanging fruit to drive new revenue and build long-term loyalty.

When you cut to its essence, customer-centric marketing is all about creating ideal customers — satisfied buyers and advocates for your brand. By extension, this means that a successful marketing automation journey is actually the beginning of engaging a customer for life.

Technology helps us do this on a grand scale, but what’s really important is that when you strip away all the automation, we’re supporting the essence of what marketing is all about — interacting with each person — customer or not — as a unique, intelligent being.

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