Companies have long tried to build strong customer relationships through well honed marketing programs. The challenge is that the playing field keeps changing—trends shift, new technologies emerge, and customers change and become more demanding.
So old-school marketing strategies no longer work. What companies need today is real-time marketing enabled by real-time listening.
I’ve been following this big business challenge—and been a part of it—for 20 years. As a technology journalist, I once wrote a cover story for InformationWeek magazine titled “Market of One,” about the use of data warehousing for personalized, “one-to-one” marketing. That was 1997.
Data warehousing is still popular, of course, but it’s just one tool among many that are now available to chief marketing officers.
A key component of this new and better way of engaging customers is social relationship management (SRM), which gives companies the ability to not just follow what customers are saying on Facebook,
“We’re entering an era of real-time marketing,” says Reggie Bradford, Oracle Senior Vice President of Product Development. “If you’re not engaged in that conversation, you’re going to miss out.”
Bradford was the founder and CEO of Vitrue, a social marketing platform acquired by Oracle in July 2012, which brought a full set of SRM capabilities to Oracle Social Cloud. Since then, the evolution and integration of enterprise-class social management tools has been fast and furious. In public presentations, Bradford shows a timeline (below) with two dozen tech developments over 20 months—including integration with Oracle Fusion CRM, expanded support for different languages, and the launch of paid media support through APIs.
In fact, the pace of change in modern marketing, and speed at which customers are moving, are so turbo-charged that marketing pros don’t stand a chance if they’re using outdated platforms to run old-style marketing campaigns. More than 90 percent of consumers have discontinued communications with a company because they received irrelevant messages and promotions.
As consumers ourselves, we can relate. My personal email account overflows with unwanted marketing pitches.
Source: iStockphoto
Social “listening” helps companies tune in to what customers are saying and respond in real time with messages that better reflect their here-and-now sentiments and interests, according to Bradford. And socially-enabled modern marketing delivers information, content, and promotions to on-the-go consumers through whatever channel or touch point they choose.
“Customers want to have a seamless user experience,” says Bradford. “Social is a big part of that.”
Avoiding A Crisis
He’s absolutely right that customers want a seamless experience. Unfortunately, that’s not what most of them are getting. That’s because age-old marketing systems tend to treat customer interactions as “transactions” that are stored in IT silos.
A cloud-based marketing platform helps CMOs develop and deliver integrated customer experiences by providing a full slate of complementary technologies and services to get the job done. For example, Oracle’s SRM capabilities have been integrated with Oracle Eloqua to support lead generation from social user data, feed campaign analytics, and make it easy to use third-party content for social publishing.
Such real-time awareness and responsiveness are important because consumers won’t wait around for slow-moving companies. And unhappy customers will voice their dissatisfaction whether you’re ready or not.
“If someone has a problem it can blow up into a social crisis,” says Bradford. “It creates negative brand equity.”
Companies don’t have to sit idly by. Social marketing is rapidly evolving into a sophisticated set of capabilities that enable real-time awareness and responsiveness. Oracle SRM, which already lets companies listen to social buzz in a dozen languages, will support even more languages and social platforms, says Bradford.
Thus, as more companies embrace modern marketing, there will be new ways to engage in social conversations. It’s been 17 years since I first wrote about the “market of one.” We’re getting closer and closer to that long-pursued vision.
Click timeline above for high-resolution image. Source: Oracle
For more on modern marketing, see these articles:
6 Key Steps To Customer-Centric Modern Marketing
Keys To The Art And Science Of Social Marketing
The 3 Layers of Modern Marketing: Data, Analytics, Activation
