Building a customer-centric marketing organization(CCMO) – Marketing needs to lead this change

At Cequity, in many of the client engagements with CMOs across organizations, we always highlight the changing marketing environment, where the world of “monologue marketing” has shifted to “conversational marketing”. This necessitates in marketing departments an understanding of data, closed-loop marketing competency – leads to conversion to relationship integrated messaging and marketing measurement. Here’s an interesting article on this topic:

Many of today’s marketing organizations were built and optimized for a scenario in which they had nearly complete control over the consumption of messaging. Changes in technology and society however have dramatically altered this picture. Due to shrinking reachability, and greater addressability the control has shifted to the customer. To remain relevant, therefore, marketing organizations need to re-optimize around the reality of this changed environment.

To truly optimize, marketing organizations need to reinvent themselves from the ground-up.

Strategic Platform

The core foundation of the marketing organization needs to be remodeled around the customer. Organization structure, segment valuations, KPI’s, everything needs to be defined in terms of the customer.

Tactical Planning

Where the strategy piece was about establishing where you wanted to go, the tactics is about steering things on course. The hard part, of course, is figuring out what and where you need to measure to generate useful information critical for making the right adjustments. While analytics is clearly the center piece, user experience and insights also plays an important role in this stage. Together, these groups need to work together as a team to map out a course for continuous interaction improvements.

Execution

From an operational structure perspective the execution piece remains the most unchanged. It’s not so much the how, but rather the what that has changed. Messages will still be delivered multi-channel, but the content and plan behind the message will be radically altered.

A couple of generalized thoughts on this topic; First, content is going to explode. In the age of conversations, each interaction is going to need a much more refined, personalized piece of content. Not only is more content going to be created, but will need to be managed.

Why are you still waiting to automate your marketing programs?

Companies spends millions and millions of dollars running marketing programs to both acquire and retain customers. But, we do believe that in an increasingly multi-channel environment, companies will be able to realize multi-fold returns on their spends, only if they automate the marketing process. Erick Slack writes:

Perhaps the biggest stumbling block for companies debating whether to purchase a marketing-automation solution is the fear it will be a wasted investment. But if you’re a business leader, you should really be concerned with how marketing automation can increase sales. Whether you want to capture more leads, qualify the strength of leads or determine the value of leads after a marketing campaign, marketing automation can help, which inevitably results in higher sales numbers.

Integrated Marketing

Marketing-automation solutions integrate marketing and lead-management programs to improve their effectiveness. Criteria for determining the strength of leads can be combined with tools for permission-based emails, direct mail, customer surveys and market-research solutions to ensure that you’re targeting the right customers.

Improved Sales Opportunities

Marketing automation also helps ensure that sales and marketing departments are in harmony about how to achieve the desired increase in sales. The software can provide tools, research prospective leads and conduct personalized marketing campaigns. According to strategist and business adviser Jill Konrath, “The only way to capture the attention of corporate decision makers is to create a very personalized message based on in-depth research of their firm.”

Analyze Effectiveness

Marketing-automation software additionally helps you determine if your last marketing campaign was a boom or a bust. Whether a campaign is designed for short-term results or is part of a long-term strategy, you’ll have access to real-time information about all of your company’s marketing and lead-management efforts. Analytical tools give you the ability to track campaign success or failure, and can help companies create metrics and protocols for crafting consistently effective marketing campaigns. This results in more leads, which naturally boost sales.

Given these benefits, many companies have realized the value of automating their marketing campaigns and have proceeded to take action to show quick wins and expand, once a business case is built with the right ROI metrics.

How Harrah’s Entertainment translates customer data points into the big picture.

At Cequity, we have always believed that “earning points” in a loyalty program is a means to an end and not the end itself. Many companies fail to see the data from such programs holistically and tend to treat it too tactically leading to managing the points rather than an effective customer management strategy intent with which they started these programs. One of the few companies that have made this transition happen is Harrah’s Entertainment. Here’s what David Norton, CMO of Harrah’s Entertainment had to say:

Pointillism is a painting style in which the artist dabs small dots of primary colors on the canvas. Viewing the artwork at nose-distance, you see nothing but adjacent points. But step back, and suddenly you see Georges-Pierre Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.

Analysis of customer behavioral and transactional data can similarly suffer from such granular myopia. Individual data points viewed without an overall perspective not only masks the larger view, it also blinds you to opportunity.

When I joined the company in 1998, we designated customers who played $400 in a given visit to one of our casinos as VIPs who received preferential treatment. But a customer who played $402 during one visit, triggering VIP treatment, might play only $398 on a subsequent visit and receive no such treatment. More importantly, customers who played only $50 a day but visited 50 times a year received no differentiated service at all.

As our goal is to see the total picture of a customer’s play with Harrah’s casinos, members earn credits across any one of our 12 casino brands. This feature not only benefits our members; it also allows us to measure their cross-market play. A third of our revenue comes from members playing in a property other than their home property—whether home is Las Vegas, Atlantic City, Reno, New Orleans or Tunica.

Our Total Rewards database also gives us unique insight into our customers’ total relationship with Harrah’s—including their non-gaming spend. Historically, Harrah’s Entertainment earned 80 percent of its revenue from gaming; our initial data analysis revealed that we received less than a third of our customers’ non-gaming budget. Once we acquired the Caesars Entertainment family of properties, however, non-gaming revenue—from hotel stays to fine dining to entertainment to shopping—became a significant portion of our business. Caesars Palace provides a strong gaming revenue stream from a relatively small number of VIP players, but many Caesars customers come to Vegas for non-gaming entertainment. We can now encourage non-gamers to use their Total Rewards card, for stays at Caesars Palace, trips to the spa and on our shows and still receive all the benefits of our loyalty program. Today, $2.1 billion of our revenue comes from non-gaming activity—and we want the total picture of those customer relationships too so we can customize their marketing and service interactions.