Cross Channel Marketing from a Mobile Point of View
Social media is all the rage among B-to-C (business-to-customer) and B-to-B (business-to-business) marketers alike. Every company senses the need to possess a Facebook page and Twitter account, and drive as many customers to participate in these social communities as possible. Consumers are increasingly updating their Facebook statuses via mobile. Twitter, of course, is rooted in SMS text messaging. Smartphones capable of rich web experiences and portable email will become standard fare among all consumers – it’s only a matter of time. If they are not already, marketers will be chasing moving targets – or, consumers constantly “on the go.”
Such is the state of marketing that a new category of software has entered the lexicon — Cross Channel Marketing, or as Forrester Research calls it, Cross-Channel Campaign Management, or CCCM. Another technology analyst firm, Aberdeen Group, calls it by the same name, and Gartner Group refers to it as CRM Multi-Channel Campaign Management. It’s the real deal.
While B-to-B marketers have long been targets of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) vendor messages of 360-degree customer visibility and multi-channel marketing, such concepts are a lot newer to B-to-C marketers more typically focused on brand-based activities or traditional mass media.
Not only are the concepts newer, but the challenge is a good deal more difficult to address successfully. Consumers engage with channels such as mobile, social media and email often in real time and simultaneously – and on a large scale. Marketers who target these channels in isolation without consideration of the others risk that marketing sin all too familiar to the B-to-B marketer – an irrelevant or inconsistent experience that turns off customers or worse, makes them defect to a competitor. CCCM hopes to address this problem by abstracting the concept of a marketing campaign from channels of interaction.
The Cross Channel Gold Rush
For that reason, those CRM vendors I mentioned plus others with backgrounds in email, are rushing to help their B-to-C customers orchestrate digital marketing efforts across channels. With a foundation in channels other than social media or mobile, these providers are attempting to “tack on” digital channels as a way of tapping into demand for cross channel solutions.
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