Achieving Relevance in Direct Digital Marketing: Marketing's Influence on Technology Is Vital
- Author:
- Bryce Marshall
- Source:
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In the first installment of this series on relevance in digital marketing, I defined "relevance," specifically in the realm of direct digital marketing, as follows:
Tailoring direct digital marketing communications to customers and prospects, and ensuring that the information, offers, and calls to action are optimized based on a user's known attributes, behavioral attributes, and past activity.
The five keys to achieving relevance in your direct digital marketing are these:
- Overcoming organizational barriers
- Piecing together the technology puzzle
- Segmenting and optimizing
- Taking an incremental approach
- Having a plan
I focused, in the second installment, on overcoming organizational challenges as the first key to achieving relevance because that starting point is often overlooked. For many marketers and brands, the most significant hurdles to delivering relevant and timely marketing communications originate within the organization.
Now let's look at the second key—technology.
Technology is a big piece of the puzzle, potentially as significant as—and closely related to—organizational challenges. Technology is so important that marketers and brands that are dedicated to relevance need to roll up their collective sleeves and shake up the technology infrastructure of their organizations.
Why? It may sound obvious, but relevance with your consumer communications requires technology that makes the process more efficient and more effective, not painful and prohibitive.
Consistently maintaining a relevance-centered communications strategy can be difficult with a patchwork approach—whether it extends to your organizational structure or technology base. The content and data gymnastics required to deploy a relevance-focused multichannel campaign are daunting.
So how does the marketing team piece together the technology puzzle? There are two critical steps every brand must take....
