The 7 pillars of the modern marketeer

This is your starting point. Do not even think about any other marketing activity unless you have mapped out your customer journey. Understand your customer personas and develop strategies for each of the primary segments this involves.

Essentially, you need to identify the marketing tactics for each of the 5 stages of a customer’s journey: Awareness, Interest, Commitment, Conversion and Advocate/Referral.

Depending on your customers, this journey can range from 3 months to 5 years. For example, the customer journey map for major car brands like Lexus extend to 5 years.

As you will see in the diagram, the Customer Journey contains all of the marketing pillars. It helps you develop the recipe for your company’s sales success.

It used to be that for your digital presence you only needed a website. Well, not any more, there’s so much more; but you do still need to have a website and it must be able to work on desktop and mobile – no exceptions.

You should consider your website as no different from your company’s office or stores. Let me say that again, No Different.

The experience visitors have at your website, the way they interact, the services that they can undertake or purchase, the information they can find should not be any less than what they can do when communicating with you in your office, store or by phone. In many ways it needs to be better.

Treat your website as the major public interface of your company and brand.

If you still think Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) are all you need to promote your company’s products and services, you’re most probably an advertising agency. If, on the other hand, you sell goods and services to consumers or business, then you know SEO and SEM just doesn’t cut it anymore – you need to expand your horizons to also include display and retargeting and you do this through the use of Advertising Technology, or adtech.

With adtech you combine all of the advertising options available on the internet – at its most basic SEO, SEM, display, retargeting and mobile – and combine these into a powerful combination of actions that step in at every point of your customer’s journey. It involves some technical processes such as programmatic buying and the utilisation of Demand Side Platforms (DSP) and Supply Side Platforms (SSP). In fact, Ad Age has kindly put together a glossary of terms to help here.

It is more than just creating advertising campaigns; you can create sophisticated strategies, such as CRM Onboarding where you use your existing email lists to serve display ads across an inventory of web, mobile and social channels.

Another cute titling, Martech stands for marketing technology and is now getting very sophisticated. In its simplest form it helps establish your email marketing, or eDM campaign strategy and to automate it.

That, however, is just the tip of the iceberg. When you explore the capabilities of the major players in this field, such as Marketo, or the various marketing clouds from Oracle, Adobe or Salesforce, you begin to understand just how complex and mature marketing technology can be.

The relative new kid on the block is Social Relationship Management (SRM). This is big. The reason is that it has little to do with the notion of social that we’ve know for a few years (i.e. joining the conversation) and more to do with having your finger on the pulse – because SRM is your brand, products and services living pulse.

You listen, monitor, engage, profile and analyse the activity that’s happening in the digital space related to everything you do as an organisation – in real-time!

Then you develop sophisticated strategies, such as Social Interception, where you intelligently position yourself in a competitor’s social engagement activity. Sweet.

An emerging area (and totally fun) is the evolution of billboards and advertising that is now defined as Out of House (OoH). This area is becoming very sophisticated with the new electronic display networks being built by billboard companies such as oOh!, APN Outdoor and Adshel.

With their electronic signage networks, we’re beginning to see some amazing innovation. Like the billboard recognising Porsche cars as they drove by at Tullamarine airport or the use of emergency messages on boards by Suncorp Insurance earlier this year during the Queensland storms.

We’re also seeing these campaigns utilised in a combination of locations such as cafés, bus shelters, pubs, shopping centres, universities and elevators to do localised marketing campaigns to highly targeted audiences. When you combine this with the adtech and martech activity, it becomes a powerful combination for delivering results.

Underpinning all of these initiatives are the numbers, the large volumes of data that drives decisions and activities. As you can see, there are separate, discrete disciplines involved and each of these has different data collection methodologies and metrics.

To gain true insight and develop actionable outcomes this information needs to be pulled together, processed and analysed. From the analysis, patterns and behavioural markers are identified to help refine and improve the marketing processes and spend. Within this comes the A/B testing, improved mapping and overall functional planning.

Business intelligence, or the analytics of your systems, is the glue that binds your marketing activity together.

So, this very brief tale on the marketeer’s kit bag shows you just how complex and involved the whole process of marketing today is. And let me tell you, no one company does this alone and no marketing department does this alone. This is a team effort involving marketing, IT, sales and your agencies. It’s the latter of these, agencies like McCorkell, who’s job it is to keep abreast of this rapidly evolving landscape so you can focus on what you need to do now for your brand and business, while we work with you to introduce these technologies at a pace which is intelligently managed for the maximum result.