Three Ways to Determine Whether Your Organization Is Ready to Support Cross-Channel Marketing

Not all organizations are created equally, and the same is true for their customers. However, the ability to usher your organization into the cross-channel realm of marketing is becoming increasingly more crucial nowadays — this is largely what all unequal customers have even come to expect.

It’s not always easy to determine what most of your customers demand; however, this is one demand that we can practically bank on at this point. We want to reach customers across all available channels — and, for convenience, they want us to. Cross-channel marketing is integral both to the customer journey and your company’s ability to learn from the invaluable data that those sources can produce.

But, of course, if it were so easy, everyone would be doing it — and here’s why not everyone is.

Cross-Channel Marketing Can Be Challenging.
If we had to name one particular obstacle that prevents companies from adopting cross-channel marketing, the award would have to go to — you guessed it — disorganization within the organization itself.

In most organizations, you have different systems aligned with different channels, and neither of them communicate with the other to share pertinent data that’s needed for tracking and reaching customers. Even worse, an organization will often define a customer differently from channel to channel. For instance, the group that handles email marketing will measure a customer through completely different data points than, for instance, the group that runs the organization’s app.

The great news is that this issue can be remedied. However, organizations must be ready for the task of adopting a cross-channel marketing platform by taking a more holistic approach.

Everyone Must Agree on Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).
First and foremost, to implement a complete cross-channel marketing solution throughout an organization, everyone must be on the same page and speak the same language.

For this reason, the organization’s KPIs need to be standardized. In other words, the group in charge of the organization’s app should understand the KPI of the email group and so on. Once everyone understands how to define what “customer” means to the organization’s big picture — that’s called progress!

Centralize Content Assets and Decision Makers.
The next crucial variable in this equation is that a cross-channel-ready organization needs to centralize its content assets and decisioning.

Once the KPI has been standardized, it’s now time to lay the groundwork for a center of excellence, which acts like a central lab. No longer will the website group have problems accessing customer data from the app group — it should all be accessible from the same digital metrics and content-management system (CMS). In which case, this makes it much easier for decision makers to not only measure the customer journey, but also have a bird’s-eye view for implementing far more efficient changes that account for customer KPIs from all groups.

Be Ready to Accommodate Always-On Customers.
The biggest factor in enabling cross-channel marketing for your organization is to understand and respect the value of the always-on customer. The always-on customer is always interacting with the brand — whether via the app, through email, or by visiting the organization’s website.

This is why organizations cannot afford to miss out on opportunities to track customer journeys, understand their behaviors, and react appropriately. The data is available, but the problem is that we have to ask ourselves, “Are we ready to meet customers when they come to us, and are we ready to learn about our customers when we’re presented with opportunities to do so?”

What Do Your Customers Really Want?
Ultimately, the implementation of cross-channel marketing is a rather slow, step-by-step process; however, it’s a process that’s absolutely worth the investment. It’s no secret that all marketers could benefit from centralized, standardized, streamlined ways to collaborate within the organization — but the real question is simple. What does the customer want?

Customers want to know whether we’re listening — whether we know how they’ve been interacting with us as well as whether we know how to consistently follow through on our services. They often want instant access to information, sales, and services — and, with the correct implementation of cross-channel marketing, we can give that to them!

Because, an always-ready organization can accommodate an always-on customer.

The post Three Ways to Determine Whether Your Organization Is Ready to Support Cross-Channel Marketing appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

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