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Three Characteristics of Multichannel Marketing Leaders

Gartner’s survey reveals what defines a multichannel marketing leader.

How did leading organizations get to be leaders and how can those lagging behind catch up? For starters, leaders adapt their campaigns to the market, matching their approaches to the ways customers and prospects want to engage, noted Adam Sarner, research vice president, Gartner for Marketing Leaders.

Gartner conducted a cluster analysis on data from the Gartner Multichannel Marketing Survey conducted in 2015 to derive a segmentation of multichannel marketing organizations broken down into leaders, learners and laggards.

Here are three characteristics of multichannel marketing leaders and actionable ideas for those looking to catch up.

Leaders focus on real-time moments

Multichannel marketing leaders have a handle on how to map multichannel strategy to audience behavior and have evolved to focus on how to reach audiences at their moment of need, not the companies’ timeline. A goal such as this is a sign of maturity for multichannel marketing organizations. This is in stark contrast to many aspiring leaders who still rely heavily on one-way blast campaigns.

Action Plan: Those embarking on the path to leadership should strengthen all five event-triggered marketing capabilities (identifying, prioritizing, categorizing, monitoring, optimizing and executing) and consider event-triggered marketing as a baseline methodology on the road to real-time personalization for multichannel marketing.

Leaders insource audience understanding

Multichannel marketing leaders are far more likely to use internal analysis and resources to decide which channels to invest in than those who are still learning multichannel and likely to lean heavily on agency partners. Leaders have developed internal skills, processes and capabilities to source data about their customers for use in determining channel selection over their less mature counterparts.

Action Plan: Organizations that are still learning multichannel marketing should start with a customer data and analytic skills audit. Both customer data (first party and third party, known and anonymous) and advanced analytics are critical for a leading multichannel marketing team.

Leaders recognize the power of event-triggered capabilities

Multichannel marketing leaders have a humble and rational assessment of their investment priorities when it comes to multichannel, real-time marketing both today and in the future: This type of marketing is hard and they know it. They also know they have a long way to go.

They know that techniques such as event-triggered marketing will accelerate their ability to execute on real-time, in-the-moment capabilities. Therefore, they plan to invest accordingly to close the gap over the next two years’ time because it will have disproportionate impact down the road.

Action Plan: Those developing multichannel capabilities should develop advanced techniques such as audience persona management development, predictive analytics, and real-time decision making.

Gartner for Marketing Leaders clients can read more in ”Survey Analysis: How Leaders Manage Their Multichannel Marketing Activities.” by Adam Sarner.

For more article on Marketing visit Smarter With Gartner website.

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