How Marketing Systems Must Evolve to Cope With Customization

Personalizing and localizing content are among the most important tasks for modern marketing systems, with studies showing 94% of marketers see it as important to their objectives and 75% as a priority. However, less than 14% of companies say they’re strong in achieving a single view of their customer -- and 36% of marketers see it as a challenge. As daunting as marketers make the task seem, accurate customization is actually quite doable.

Break down your data

Earlier this year, a study by Dresner Advisory Services found that just 17% of companies are using Big Data. The key term here is ‘using’, because most companies have the structures in place to gather granular data on regions and customers, but simply don’t use it properly.

Marketing departments need the right Digital Asset Management and Product Information Management solutions in order to segment the data. That means identifying important traits and trends, and breaking it down into categories so that it’s easier to identify what’s useful and where it can be best used.

Maximize your analyses

Once your data is broken down according to your main customer segments and business priorities, you need to link it with the right teams. Your system needs to be able to flag data as useful to the right staff, give them access to it, and enable them to personalize and localize content.

These custom iterations must then be brought together into final versions for each channel, territory and target customer persona and published on the right platform, whether that might be a customized LinkedIn product page, your website homepage or a Google+ topic circle, for example. Finally, the content should be stored on your internal system for future use.

Link your teams

With different teams working on different parts of your marketing system, workflows and collaboration have never been more important. Project management systems must keep you informed about workflow progress, showing the relational links between data, assets and personnel. It also needs to deliver a transparent view of tasks, budgets, project work and resourcing.

Only by getting this overview, and understanding how your data is used and shared by your various teams, can you conduct a cohesive localization and personalization strategy.

Automate the simple things

As time consuming as data usage and analyzation is, it is possible to automate some of it and allow you to concentrate on what is important. By automating many of the low-level processes, you make the customization process faster and more efficient and give marketers time to focus on innovation and creativity.

That means locking down the easy tasks like ensuring your email marketing campaigns can draw customer names from your database, using marketing automation tools to ensure customers who access one piece of content are immediately entered into a lead nurturing campaign.

Integrate systems

Ultimately, if you’re using your data to create a content-first strategy you’ll want all parts of your department working together effectively. The most efficient way to automate processes and ensure each team is aware of useful data and assets, is to use a centralized, integrated marketing system that can meet all these requirements in full.

Clearly the challenges of customization are overwhelming for many marketers. The solutions are out there, it’s time to stop delaying and start implementing and start turning those horrid statistics above in the right direction.

To find out more about how to integrate your marketing processes in a streamlined system, read our whitepaper, The New Age of Communications.