Experts discuss: 3 digital marketing challenges.
For many digital marketing organizations, the inability to segment audiences, a dependency on IT for marketing tasks, and siloed content are sand in the gears of the marketing machine.
These problems are fixable. We sat down with Productive Edge Executive Vice President Raheel Retiwalla (RR), Director Will Rolloff (WR), and Senior Developer Vitesh Radhakisson (VR) – to discuss these all-too-common enterprise digital marketing challenges and identify the best approaches to solving them.
The full, in-depth conversation is featured in a new ebook, “Sand in the Gears,” which you can download here. In the meantime, here are some highlights:
Audience segmentation
Problem: Difficult to select the right targets for content distribution of digital marketing
Solution: More/better customer data and analysis
RR: The key to digital marketing success is having a deep understanding of your audiences and their unique wants and needs. When you have that knowledge -- and, more specifically that data -- you can do sophisticated analysis, discover the best prospects, segment high-potential-value audiences, map their customer journeys, and decide when (and why) to engage them in your channels. Then you can create and distribute focused, pertinent content.
VR: Segmentation is an exercise specific to each organization and unique to each organization’s products and offerings. We always advise our Magnolia DXP clients on the critical importance of audience segmentation. Once we’ve done that, we help them make the connection between customer segmentation and content segmentation.
WR: The Sitecore DXP provides tools to help our customers’ marketing teams develop customer and prospect personas, define attributes and behaviors they want to measure, and identify user types -- all with the goal of better understanding audiences so that the right content can be presented to the right people.
IT dependency
Problem: Delays in campaigns, distribution and marketing workflows
Solution: Empower marketing, create content management structure
RR: The solution is to reduce the involvement of IT in marketing activities – or eliminate its involvement in those activities altogether – by giving marketing the tools it needs to manage, create and distribute its content on its own.
WR: Exactly. Our customers want to develop content and deliver it quickly. To do that, they need tools and the ability to control their processes. Marketing must “own” its tasks and all its workflows. And the solution must offer the simplified processes, straightforward user experience and underlying structure they get with a DXP.
RR: That’s all good, but security is important. The Magnolia and Sitecore DXPs offer marketing practitioners the freedom and capabilities they need – and provide IT managers with the controls, permissions structure and multi-approval workflows they need to keep their corporate systems safe.
Siloed content
Problem: Different groups have different content
Solution: Implement create-once/publish-anywhere solution
RR: When you have multiple, siloed versions of digital marketing assets, it’s virtually impossible to deliver a unified, consistent customer experience across all your channels. A sophisticated CMS enables distributed content creation, allows different groups within the organization to create unique content as necessary, and provides control and consistency using workflows and permissions.
VR: And a CMS that is part of a broader digital experience platform, like the Magnolia DXP, is flexible enough -- using APIs -- to interact with existing content and processes.
WR: Sitecore enables content to be shared with multiple groups in the organization. It has workflows that allow groups to work independently, and have independent content, but it applies standards to ensure quality and compliance.
RR: The bottom line is that an advanced CMS lets marketing organizations create one set of content that is seamlessly available across all channels, and can be easily reused, repurposed and shared.
Contact Productive Edge at Services@ProductiveEdge.com or 312-561-9000 to learn more about DXPs and how PE can solve your digital marketing challenges.
