Sorry, spending more won’t improve your marketing

For most organizations, the digital marketing budget is growing at a rate far greater than traditional technology spend, or even revenue. This represents an acknowledgement that consumer buying activities are migrating to digital channels at a faster rate than anyone expected even a short time ago. Organizations recognize the need to do something differently.

But just spending more isn’t necessarily the way to achieve success in the new marketplace. Simply putting more dollars into digital channels won’t create greater customer engagement and will in fact just add to the noise of an already noisy marketplace.

Characteristic, Context and Channel

Marketing today is less about broad-based spending and more about understanding the characteristics of the customer, the context of the moment of engagement, and the preferred channel for communicating. These are the three elements that matter more than budgetary spend and have a better shot at increasing engagement and spend.

Make Investments in Marketing Technology

The wise way to spend on marketing activities involves investment in technology and techniques that allow an organization to hit all three requirements:

Characteristics of the customer are directly tied to knowing the customer’s history and personal information. This is something a loyalty platform is exceptionally good at managing.

The context of the moment of engagement involves knowing as much about the circumstances of the customer’s interaction as possible. Is the customer online or in the store? What is their recency with the brand? Again, a loyalty platform is the technology that makes this happen.

The channel for communicating not only depends on personal preference, but the moment as well. A text may be welcome at the point-of-sale, but an email may be the preferred channel when a customer isn’t on the website or in the store. Keeping track of communication channels is best done through—you guessed it—a loyalty platform.

The changes happening rapidly in marketing are more than just a chance for a brand to spend more…they are a perfect opportunity to rethink the way a brand interacts with the customer. They are a chance to invest in a loyalty platform that can make the most of the marketing budget.

This article was first published on the Loyalty Lab blog and has been lightly edited.

Google+

Christopher Taylor