Perspectives on the value of Marketing are fundamentally changing. Beyond a focus on building prospect databases, the business imperative for Marketing now instead centres on capturing customer knowledge that builds engagement and translating that knowledge into actionable insights that drive competitive advantage. 

More than ever before, companies need our skills in targeting the right prospects and tailoring content and communications to help Sales close deals. However, marketers must also see themselves as custodians of turning customer information into profitable relationships and new market opportunities. This means we must also be owners of the processes and technologies that capture, distil, and make sense of customer information (in partnership with IT). For today’s marketers, it’s no longer a case of which customers you know, but what you know about them.

In the emerging Customer Engagement Economy, market dynamics are shifting dramatically, so how we market must adapt accordingly. I sense some deep sighs in response to this statement, but stay with me. The changes we marketers need to make are significant, but there are some very actionable steps that you can start taking today to differentiate your company - and to differentiate yourself as a marketing professional. 

In the coming weeks, I’ll share some practical - and easy - tips to help you fulfill the three key pillars of modern digital marketing:

1. Complete the Customer Profile
2. Convert from Broadcast to Personal
3. Create Customer Intimacy

Complete the Customer Profile 

Companies typically lack a unified data strategy, which is why information obtained through social listening is rarely integrated with marketing automation insights. 

The trick we marketers must master is how to integrate core social insight into a database of record. In fairness, there’s some way to go before any single technology platform is able to deliver a seamless toolset to support this. However, you can begin adopting processes that capture social information in a way that enables employees to know customers as people, not transactions. 

Here are a some simple actions to help you start to integrate your customer information across social and marketing automation platforms:

• Include a field in your forms that asks for customer Twitter handles
• Aggregate data from social media and marketing automation tools to a single dashboard 
• Set up automated alerts to be triggered by keywords or actions on social feeds and notify sales reps when opportunities present themselves  
• Consider how a social signal of intent could trigger a tweet response or an email with a corporate blog post or related white paper
• Identify the people in your industry who generate the most awareness when they  share your content and send them targeted messages and offers from within your marketing automation tool
• Send drip campaigns from your marketing automation platform based on a prospect’s socially sourced communication preferences and interest data

Interested in some real-world examples of companies employing modern digital marketing practices? Download Bluewolf’s new guide to Modern Digital Marketing. 

Got some interesting insights on modern digital marketing to share? Tweet me @csklar!