Opportunities for Marketers, driven by change

Now is the perfect time for Marketers to increase their influence within organisations and shape the changing role that data plays in meaningfully engaging with customers. Here Trisca Scott Branagan discusses the different skills needed in this changing environment and how now more than ever, Marketers can bolster their relationship with distribution teams. However, with this comes a change in the skills we need for our teams.

It’s clear with the impending changes with the IOS platform, cookies and the regulatory environment, that marketers need to be on top of all the recent and future changes in our landscape. The most important capability that comes to mind is agility - the ability for all marketers to have an agile mindset, an agile approach to ways of working, and the coming together of different disciplines to deliver best practice customer experiences - most notably is the alignment of marketing, data, digital and distribution to deliver stronger commercial outcomes and personalised customer experiences.

The biggest opportunity for marketers right now is their ability to own the connectivity with the consumer. Marketers now need to concentrate on the customer journey, the ease (or lack thereof) of customer engagement throughout their lifecycle and being the voice of the customer. The opportunity here is for marketers to ensure that all parts of the business deliver on the customer value proposition - sales, onboarding, operations, service, retention - ensuring consistency in the customer’s experience and ensuring it lives up to the promise that marketers give to customers.

As an example, one of the biggest lessons I’ve learnt is the power of data - not just the ability to analyse historical data to inform marketing strategies; but to enable data modelling that predicts a customer’s next-best-action. This is where the power of optimisation between marketing and distribution (or sales channels) can have a huge impact. As marketing’s media spend is increasingly under pressure, getting the same return on investment can be gained through stringently looking at the customer’s lead generation journey and on boarding experiences. Historically the connectivity between marketing and distribution has been disjointed. Today, with the advent of data enablement, these two disciplines have the opportunity to work side-by-side to ensure sales has insights into those customers with the greatest propensity to purchase. Data also enables marketers to identify behaviour triggers and send nudge messages, increasing the velocity by which customers make a purchase decision through delivering the right message, at the right time, in the right channel.

What’s clear is that we have an ever-changing landscape and one that is fast moving. How do we identify the capabilities we need within our teams and how can we fill those gaps? As Chair of the Education Committee at ADMA, I’m excited to be a part of the development of the ADMA Marketing Skills Assessment, with which we can identify where we need to upskill and reskill our teams to ensure they are the best marketers of the future.