Are You Using Integrated Marketing to Solve Your Personalization Problem?

Marketers have a problem. It’s not the overwhelming amount of data or the number of solutions available, the problem is a little more personal. In fact, the problem is personalization, or more to the point, how to personalize online marketing material.

Simply keeping pace in the ‘New Age of Communication’ is an enormous operational burden for marketers, with the challenges of an increasingly diverse consumer environment. This is driving a shift toward integrated marketing - a recent study by Adobe and eConsultancy shows that companies were 29% more likely to have taken this integrated approach to their campaigns in 2016 than they were in 2015.

Simplification

Multiple channels, multiple customer personas, multiple territories and multiple iterations of every campaign asset have created a complicated set of tasks for marketing departments to manage. The only practical way to cope with this challenge is to implement an integrated system that allows efficient omnichannel marketing.

By using a central digital experience platform that combines , Product Information Management and Collaboration and Process Management functions in a single system, all of your departments, teams and staff have one place from which they can access data, as well as store and modify assets. This makes it easier to see, and implement, an effective personalization strategy.

Control

Uniting all of your business content, digital assets, product information and metadata in one central database also makes it much easier to categorize data. By connecting different data under targeted categories, you're able to unite granular elements into the clear patterns that enable the personalization and localization of content.

Once categories are established, any new data can instantly be made to work harder, as the system takes over much of the heavy lifting for you in managing the collation, sorting and delivery of personalized content. Integrated marketing platforms allow data to be accessed and used by all of your teams, basic tasks become faster, more effective and easier to oversee and manage - with a clear digital trail for each asset or data element.

Connections

An integrated marketing platform also means tasks can be assigned to the relevant people at each stage of the production and delivery process. Content producers can see sales material and trends, and new content can be sent to each of your regional locations for translation, localization and cultural sensitivity checking. Meanwhile, managers and colleagues all have access to the material for checks, comment or feedback.

While the most obvious and immediate benefit of this is efficiency and control, the right network, a semantic one, for example, will also connect assets to different teams that also utilize the same assets. By encouraging cross-fertilization of ideas and the ability to easily share assets, this system makes your marketing team more integrated, phasing out the kind of ‘team silos’ that are unproductive for a cohesive push to personalization.

While personalization will always require a professional touch, with the right platform in place it makes it possible for professionals to do their job well and not only personalize but localize as well.

By combining an integrated marketing software system alongside a more integrated and cross-functional marketing team, you overcome the personalization problem. For more information about integrated marketing systems, explore our whitepaper The New Age of Communications.