Comment: Why is collaboration key to marketing success in 2016? … Jon Williams, MD UK&I, Teradata Marketing Applications

Possessing the ability to utilise multi-channel engagements to gain a better understanding of customer behaviours is still one of the business outcomes brands are tirelessly aspiring to achieve. Especially their ability to then feed that into the customer journey.

One of the biggest challenges to effective multichannel management comes down to how businesses are structured, especially when it comes to the marketing department. Despite phrases like “an integrated approach” repeatedly coming up in conversation, channel activity is still largely siloed, in our experience. The search team doesn’t collaborate with the social team, whilst the email team doesn’t necessarily get insight from other aspects of the business, which would help inform the overall message being sent.

And that’s a big problem. It’s also one that is only going to increase in importance as 2016 progresses and marketing departments look for new and innovative ways to improve the relationships they have with their customers. Marketers need to focus their efforts far more on how consumers now interact with multiple screens throughout the course of their day, if they are going to sustain an ongoing positive relationship.

According to research conducted by AdReaction, individuals in the UK that interact on multiple devices typically consume nearly seven hours of media each day.

The ability to understand the reasons behind why consumers are multi-screening in this way, and being able to manage the various responses that may come from a particular touchpoint, are crucial to managing the brand experiences they encounter online and off-.

As campaigns get more ambitious and multi-channel activity widens to cover more platforms, individuals need to make sure they are collaborating with their colleagues across departmental lines as well as looking at how they can improve their relationship with colleagues and customers in the long-term.

Consumers may not necessarily reply to a marketing message in a way that the brand expects so it’s vital that every team responsible for each touchpoint is aware of the story being told, and prepped to respond, and then share the necessary insights with the wider team to inform a long-term strategy.

Not only can collaboration impact the ebb and flow of information throughout the business and the extent to which communication materials are in line with the products or services being sold, if this communication does not take place, it can also impact whether or not they are compliant with ASA regulations. If a consumer receives a message outlining details of a particular service or product which doesn’t match what is actually available it is going to not only infuriate the customer, but fall into false advertising, which is a fundamental breach of industry regulations.

The other issue is that customers can often be left with a disjointed experience which does not provide any value or incentive to interact further. If this is not addressed, it can lead to brand disengagement.

If you are reading this and recognising that these challenges are reflective of how you are currently operating, you might be thinking that overcoming them is going to require a large restructuring of the business. Whilst changing the way you operate is not something you can do overnight, it is something that can be addressed by assessing and evaluating the effectiveness of your internal systems.

• Do you always have clarity on every piece of activity going on within the department and beyond?
• Are all the aspects of your campaign aligned and working towards the same goal?
• How are your customers responding? Could they be more engaged than they currently are?
• Do you know how to address that?

These are all vital questions to consider if you are running a busy marketing department anyway, but they are equally key to developing a more collaborative way of working focused on driving the business forward. If teams are better connected they will be able to have a far clearer picture on the activity everyone else in the organisation is working on, and how that feeds into the wider story the business is trying to tell.

Having a good team and the technical capabilities to activate campaigns quickly is only effective if all your teams are working together.  That team needs to be unified in both their approach and the technology systems they use to power their marketing activity.

Solutions focused around DMPs provide a degree of structure and clarity around the data sets available and can help shape campaigns, but it’s the way in which these are utilised which ultimately drive the real value. If both don’t work in tandem with each other the big campaigns of tomorrow will not be able to garner the response or interaction they deserve.

Jon Williams, Managing Director UK&I, Teradata Marketing Applications