Today’s digital marketing landscape is a complex ecosystem created by emerging touch points and new inter-dependent media channels. Consumers now have direct access to information and a higher expectation for relevant and personalized content at their finger tips anytime & anywhere. Conventional approach by marketers to this complexity has been rather ad-hoc and disparate in terms of technology solutions resulting in a fragmented consumer experience especially in a multi-channel, multi-brand environment. The big challenge & opportunity lies in creating a consistent brand experience with a global, engaging and multi-channel online presence that creates seamless, integrated and long lasting relationships with customers.
The world of WCM (Web Content Management) or CMS (Content Management System) is undergoing a purpose shift as a result of this challenge. The focus is shifting from managing and delivering digital content to creating & delivering a compelling and personalized Consumer Experience. It is not just a web based content management system anymore but a consumer based experience engine with the consumer at the center of a multi-channel digital ecosystem, creating a deep, rich and relevant digital experience to give consumers what they need to deepen their connection with the brand. A CMS here is just one piece of the puzzle, the value comes from bringing all the different pieces together not only to co-exist but to constantly learn about the consumer behavior and contribute towards the most personalized, optimized & relevant experience. It is an ongoing & automated process of collecting, understanding & analyzing small & big data to deliver personalized content for most effective experience & engagement that would eventually leads to brand connection. The content relies on a unique 360 view of the consumer at all times across all channels. It is reducing the path & time between analytical, behavioral data AND delivering personalized & accurate content real time. Consumers today have moved away from generalized content, they demand relevance & accurate prediction based on their digital self. A quick high level view of a DEP:
WCM – No doubt this is the engine, your CMS collects and publishes your most valuable asset: content. The content delivery capability is not limited to the .com anymore, it is a common engine & repository that can dynamically deliver relevant content across social, mobile, email, TV & other digital channels covering the entire spectrum of brand’s target audience. Offers both flexibility & scalability to create, curate & push content and usually integrates with a Digital Asset Management (DAM) system to gain efficiency & reuse of digital assets across multiple marketing initiatives. DAM plays a key role in managing & effectively optimizing a common asset repository and the entire creation & approval workflow.
Social Integrations & Consumer Promotions – Emphasizing the fact that the content creation & delivery capability are no longer limited to just the .com(s), the core solution could be used to quickly launch social initiatives on facebook, twitter, google+ and other social networking platforms. It has the ability to execute various digital tactics as part of the broader marketing strategy, launch consumer promotions like sweepstakes, contests and other consumer engagement & activation ideas.
CRM – The digital self of the consumer today goes beyond just demographic & behavioral data, it is spread across offline, social, mobile & web. Facebook has your likes & dislikes, twitter knows what you are writing about or reading, spotify has your favorite music and other location based social platforms would know places you are checking in and much more. The CRM brings these data signals from all possible online & offline channels to predict and establish a complete consumer profile and use that to deliver the most personalized, targeted and tailored communication & brand connection.
Analytics & Reporting – Real time analytics & reporting is key to identify not only an accurate return on the spend but also proactively optimize the spend across various digital channels & opportunities. With ongoing evolution around big data and new analytics platform that are able to collect & analyze terabytes of data effectively, the need to optimize both experience & spend is vital. A multi-channel enterprise analytics solution will allow marketers to slice & dice the data to create recommendations & optimization decisions, it will create an end to end consumer journey covering various brand touch points along with a complete conversion funnel for the consumer from an initial impression to the final transaction, offer the ability to create overarching dashboards, interactive consumer views that give key insights into various consumer segments.
Campaign Management & Marketing Automation – An easily forgettable block in the overall platform is the ability to tie, measure & view the performance of your digital initiatives under the umbrella of a cross channel digital campaign. A campaign management & optimization tool allows you to manage & optimize your spend and reflects that results using the analytics & reporting capabilities. It can also execute automated re-marketing & consumer targeting strategies and establish a direct consumer connection and ongoing brand loyalty.
Having said that, building an enterprise digital marketing or digital experience platform is not an easy task, it is a thoughtful integration of various disparate & isolated systems that are otherwise solving one problem at a time. However once established, it provides speed-to-market, digital innovation & brand loyalty through direction & personalized consumer relationships, more accurate & holistic consumer understanding and intelligence that leads to higher content relevance and finally an in-depth view of your digital spend and an ability to always learn & optimize it to maximize the return.