There has probably never been a more exciting time to be an online consumer. We can do more things online then we ever imagined: watch the latest episodes of our favorite TV shows, listen to virtually any album ever released for free, buy a car, plan a trip, pay taxes, get financial advice, or plan a wedding. And we can do it all in real time, on multiple mobile devices at once, while walking to work or flying 30,000 feet in the air.

But all of the things that make this a great time to be a digital consumer, makes it an incredibly challenging time to be a digital marketer. Mobile raises the stakes for everyone involved in the business of communicating with consumers and measuring the results.

In the old days of online marketing, messages were mostly static and one-dimensional. A single website on a single platform could serve your broader marketing needs, while email was sufficient for more targeted messaging. Marketers were in control of the speed, the timing, and the platform.

But the shift from PCs to smart phones, tablets, and wearable devices has turned everything on its head. Now we, the consumer, get to decide how, where and when we want to communicate with brands. We expect thing to happen in real time and we expect the experience to be personalised. We demand that it be consistent across platforms and devices. We assume that we’ll be able to start a transaction in one place on one device and finish somewhere else. Sometimes we’re using more than one device at the same time – while sitting in our living room or browsing in a physical shop.

All of this mobility and self-direction makes it incredible hard for marketers to keep up. We expect to see new, increasingly relevant content on almost every visit. It needs to be published to an ever-growing range of devices. And it needs to be up-to-the-minute – perhaps even up-to-the-second – fresh.

This results in a range of creativity and staffing challenges for marketers. How many marketing departments have the resources required to create this much content – while maintaining quality, relevance and timeliness?

But the problems are bigger than this. Just as our new mobile behaviour is pushing marketers to be more creative and productive, it’s also pushing them to be more technical and innovative. Every time we use our networked devices, we are generating and sharing (sometimes involuntarily) an unprecedented amount of personal data. All of the needs to be collected and analysed - often in real time - so that marketers can deliver the right experience to the right person on the right device, at precisely the right moment.

This requires sophisticated software systems, scalable data architectures, and advanced real-time processing hardware. But most marketers are not themselves proficient in the dark arts of informational technology. They rely on other experts to pull the technical strings, and that relationship is often not as tight or responsive as it needs to be to keep up with the accelerated pace of digital innovation.

As a result, digital marketers are being pulled in two opposite directions. On the one hand they are expected to be more creative and more productive – creating more targeted content for more people on a growing number of platforms. On the other hand, they are expected to be more technical and data-driven – parsing information in real time and adapting it on the fly for different technical requirements.

Finally, they are under increased pressure to make sense of it all and to justify their budgets. This makes accurate attribution and measurement more critical than ever.

How can marketers be simultaneously more creative, more productive, more technical, and more accountable?

There are at least 4 ways to tackle to this challenge:

1) Organisational Evolution: The primary way to resolve this dilemma is to redefine the structure and role of the marketing organisation. Marketers can no longer operate in isolation from other teams – particularly IT. How your marketing team accomplishes this will depend on the structure of your organisation. Some marketers will choose to bring their own IT resources in-house, while others will form tighter alliances with existing IT teams.

2) Integrated Systems: But the change must be more than organisational. It must also extend to the IT systems that marketing relies on. They can no longer be isolated from other systems. They need to be integrated. Marketing needs to be able to access IT resources and data as a service. It isn’t their job to collect and parse the data – they need to be able to access it in a useable manner.

3) Real-Time Content Creation and Publishing: Business users must be able to use intuitive tools to access content from multiple sources and combine it in real time to creative engaging experiences that can be simultaneously published across multiple global channels – in multiple languages. And they must also have access to real time data to define and optimise those experiences.

4) Outsource When Possible, But Keep Your Differentiators In-House: On the creative side, marketers are being forced to rely more on external resources. Tasks that can be outsourced will be outsourced. Unfortunately, as content becomes more targeted, it becomes harder to produce it outside of the core team. Marketers will need to form creative partnerships with content producers, allowing them to focus on the things that require the deepest levels of customer understanding.

The main point of all of this however, is that it has become too easy for marketers to get distracted from their primary mission – to understand the customer at any point in their journey and help deliver the best most relevant experiences possible.

To stay focused, marketers must have the right team structure, the right tools, and the most appropriate content and technology partners. Throwing people and money at the problem will not solve it. They need to use automation where it makes sense and they need to consolidate as much as possible. The only way that marketers are going to be able to survive and thrive in this environment is by eliminating unnecessary tasks, integrating and consolidating their supporting technology, accessing technology and data as a service, and by focusing on their core audience – the consumer.

 

By Doug Heise, CoreMedia. 

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