Consumer Engagement And Campaign Management In The Digital Marketplace

The evolution of digital channels has spurred new innovations and disruption in the CPG marketplace. As a result, CPG companies now face the unprecedented challenge of acquiring, converting and retaining today’s digital consumer. Regardless of the digital channel, CPG companies must develop enduring relationships with consumers throughout the digital journey — from awareness to evaluation, through to purchase or conversion.

This poses three distinct challenges. First, to increase engagement and conversion, CPG companies must determine how to provide more relevant customer experiences. Second, they must find ways to do this at scale and at a speed that is faster than the competition, but in sync with the pace of change in the digital marketplace. Third, they must accomplish all of this at the lowest total cost of ownership, whether that be acquisition, retention or loyalty.

Added to this, CPG companies must confront a new problem that arises from the nature of the digital ecosystem — how to personalize the customer experience and the digital journey for both the “unknown” and “known” consumers.

Personalizing the experience for anonymous, or “unknown” consumers requires the ability to leverage a combination of existing and new technologies to identify and interact in relevant ways when and how the consumer desires.

To engage “known” consumers — such as those with online accounts, for example — may seem easier. But it is vital to enhance campaign management capabilities that increase engagement and foster connections, or risk losing such consumers to rival brands.

To define the experience and turn prospects into consumers, CPG companies need to shift from “calendar-driven marketing” to “always-on marketing.” In this, they continuously listen to their consumers — through banner ads, paid search, and increasingly the Internet of Things — in order to trigger opportunities for engagement when and where possible.

Know, align and manage

In practice, successful CPG companies build their core consumer engagement and campaign management capabilities in three areas:

1. Knowing the consumer. This entails building a comprehensive view, or genome, of each digital customer profile. It requires CPG companies to leverage traditional and non-traditional, online and offline data, from both internal and external sources. Data management platforms (DMPs) can help collect, process and action data on customers and prospects to drive more analytical campaign management strategies.

2. Align the experience. Here, CPG companies need to build a context-aware, individualized journey map for customers and offer real-time interactions at the customers’ point of decision. Technologies like DMPs can help along this entire journey, building knowledge about consumers and offering more meaningful experiences.

3. Manage the conversation.This requires CPG companies to develop and integrate three distinct types of communications. The first, inbound communication, happens through “always-on marketing,” which is about attracting prospects 24/7. Here, companies bolster their online digital presence and search rankings with SEO, banner ads, pulling consumers in. Outbound communication is about proactively pushing communication out to consumers in the form of personalized campaigns. This may be a combination of awareness, informational and offer-based campaigns. Finally, two-way real-time communication occurs when a customer comes to a website — the company knows it has their attention, and can offer up the next best action in a two-way real-time conversation.

The prize at stake

The rewards on offer to companies that master these new capabilities for consumer engagement and campaign management include significant impact on both top-line growth and bottom-line performance. There is a significant growth, speed and cost savings potential that can be unlocked by developing the right set of capabilities for consumer engagement.
The critical thing to remember here is that technology will not, on its own, deliver these benefits. High-performing marketers recognize that the evolving digital marketplace also requires them to rethink their established processes — to reorganize their governance structures and to reconsider traditional roles, responsibilities, measurements and reward systems.

By Ryan Krenn, Anurag Thakor
About the author: Ryan Krenn, managing director, Accenture Interactive
Courtesy of mediapost