I've worked with clients throughout my career that have struggled with how best to align limited resources to make real change and at the same time exceed this year's financial goals. The latest technologies and new touch points make investment decisions more important than ever.
In a recent engagement our client in the e-commerce space employed some of the most sophisticated technologies and techniques to achieve limited annual growth. The newest tech application would be purchased annually to help them achieve a "bump up", but their basic marketing strategy lacked a fundamental understanding of their customer's needs and potential value.
Discount marketing programs based on observed behavior and the latest technically enabled trigger based campaign is a perfect example of this type of "bump" strategy. It's just not producing sustainable growth. With the advent of the "aways connected" consumer and near ubiquitous mobile access, they expect more than ever that you will know them and provide them with what they want when they want it.
Don't get me wrong, today's real-time trigger technologies are a breakthrough in 1to1, but not when reapplying the old recency, frequency, monetary (RFM) approach, or third-party data append database modeling to digital marketing. Nor is it effective to simply "observe" web behavior and produce an offer because it worked with a similar demographic. It's only through the understanding of customer needs (and how these relate to potential future customer value) that an organization can build strong customer relationships by producing contextual dialogue.
If you have a strong methodology to understand your customers and what will truly make them (and those like them) to opt-in to ongoing dialogue, you won't be investing in the latest technology to drive limited growth, you'll be setting the stage to create a competitive advantage that will have a significant impact now that will continue to grow into the future.
Before you make that investment in the latest marketing technology, make an investment in truly knowing your customers.