Database Marketing in today’s Social World

Like me I’m sure you are daily bombarded with offers by email, app, text and advertising through every social channel.

The best can feel well-timed, appropriate and convenient, but too many fall short. When marketing is obviously aiming to be personalised, timely & relevant, it’s as obvious as a fish out of water when it fails.

Given the amount of advertising in trade press and events, you would think that technology is now here to take care of that for today’s marketer. With some of the admin and time-consuming elements of content & campaign planning, that is no doubt true.

But, as ever, it’s what you do with it that counts. That is why I feel the two most powerful elements today’s marketer needs to bring together are:

• An awareness of what today’s technologies enable
• Skills in applying timeless Database Marketing principles

By the latter I mean the skills to truly understand your target customers, appropriately select & use data to reach them, plus good judgement in customizing content to engage them in relevant conversations. All that, together with a test & learn, scientific mindset, that designs robust experiments and continually refines on the basis of constant measurement.

So, to balance our normal focus on customer insight skills and principles, here is a quick round-up of some of the technology developments relevant for such insight-led digital/social database marketers.

Twitter introduces event targeting

Involving 3 main tools: event calendar, event insights & event activation. This new development helps: “activate around live moments, quickly and easily… discover and plan for these moments, learn more about the participating audiences through valuable insights, and with one click, create a campaign that delivers the right message to just the right users as the event unfolds.”

Introducing event targeting

Millions of people rely on Twitter to discover and engage with a variety of live events. Whether it’s a presidential election, Coachella, Mother’s Day or the Super Bowl, if it’s happening in the world, it’s happening on Twitter. Starting today, advertisers will be able to reach audiences interested in these events with a new feature called event targeting.

LinkedIn launches improved campaign management tool

This is a new Campaign Management Tool to manage and optimise Sponsored Updates and Text Ads. Apparently LinkedIn have “completely redesigned and rebuilt the LinkedIn Campaign Manager to provide [their] customers more control and visibility over their LinkedIn campaigns.”

Announcing Our New Campaign Management Tool for LinkedIn Sponsored Content and Text Ads

We are excited to announce the launch of our new Campaign Manager, the tool that enables you to manage and optimize your Sponsored Content and Text Ads on LinkedIn. We’ve completely re-designed and rebuilt the LinkedIn Campaign Manager to provide our customers more control and visibility over their LinkedIn campaigns.

It is, of course, to early to judge how useful either of those developments will prove to be in the arsenal of today’s omni-channel marketer. But both look worth investigating further.

Top 10 most loved Marketing Technologies so far

Meanwhile, eCommerce Insights on their blog, have shared the experience of a survey at two major marketing events this year. This is presented in the form of an infographic about the Top 10 most loved Marketing Technologies:

https://insights.ecommerceexpo.co.uk/infographic-top-10-most-loved-marketing-technologies/

Congratulations to Hubspot & Buffer for topping the list. I have certainly found my own move to CoSchedule + Buffer has developed my social marketing media to be better planned than when I was using Hootsuite.

What’s perhaps more interesting about this list is the dominance of two types of marketing technologies which were much more niche a few years ago. Marketing Automation (Hubspot, Market) and Content Management Systems (WordPress, Drupal). These are testament to the increased complexity of modern marketing, with the expectations that markets will use technology to engage prospects with content that adds value even during the early stages of a ‘purchase funnel’.

But I am struck by how much each of these technologies (including email, analytics & social tools, as well as the above) requires customer insight to work effectively. Without use of wider holistic customer insight to understand your audience and appropriate data/models/triggers to target actions all this technology will fall flat. Let’s hope today’s new technologies can avoid the mistakes of CRM systems of yester-year. The key will be focussing on the customer & business need, not technology for technologies sake.

Any advice from your experience of using such tools for database marketing?