Campaigns have long been the rock stars of a business and now the Next Generation is here.

The Campaign Supernova

It’s no secret, it is more challenging today to create a cracking campaign that wins and retains customers. There’s more noise, spam and marketing pollution on every online and physical customer-facing channel. But if you do it right, your Next Generation campaigns can outshine everything that came before.

What your customers crave

• To be treated as the individual they are
• Choices in their journey based on their individual context and preferences
• To be understood, and for brands to respond quickly and appropriately

Customers are not a ‘target’. They don’t have to put up with spam and poorly thought-out offers. Customers are interested in useful, relevant and timely information which makes sense to them, and they’ll part with their personal information if you can convince them you can make this dream a reality.

Your campaigns can be the culmination of everything brilliant about your brand. They can harness insight from across the business and get your technology working to create spectacular results.

Why?

Understanding the customer journey is critical to running smarter and more successful campaigns. The type of campaigns that transform your relationships with customers. The type of campaigns that think beyond the initial interaction and entice customers into conversations that provide value to you both.

Personalisation in retailing can boost sales by 20% and 77% of banking and insurance consumers say that personalised promotions encourage them to buy products and services they have never purchased before.

How?

The campaigns of the new era are real-time, based on customer context and omni-channel. They are built on insight and trust. They are designed for the long-term. But ultimately, they’re about getting closer to your customer and connecting with them in new, always relevant ways to achieve sustainable and better results.
Getting your campaigns right is the first step to true customer engagement. So how can you supercharge them?

Five tips to supercharge your marketing campaigns

1. Ask the right questions
Look at your organisation. Think about what systems you have, how they work together and how you’re structured. Who needs to be involved in creating an omnichannel campaign? Then think like a customer. How do they interact with you? Is every campaign focused on building long-term relationships? Are you using the right metrics?

2. Stop and Listen
You can’t learn if you don’t listen. You’ll need to start listening to omni-channel customer behaviour and campaign events across all existing and new touchpoints. Understand your campaigns as they are today and where they could be better.

3. Take a look at the real journey
Watch real-time journeys across the customer lifecycle stages, identify issues and understand campaign performance by channel and device to measure KPIs. Manage budget spend and get the most out of the time and money you put in. You might spot opportunities you didn’t know were there.

4. Identify & Connect
Once you know your audience, get personal. Make things truly individual and one-to-one: bring your customers’ online and offline interactions together to create a comprehensive customer profile, including linking known and anonymous behaviours. Go beyond email and build optimised audiences based on real-time insights, dynamic activity and intent.

5. Journey Based Personalisation
With adaptive engagement and real-time decision-making, you’re able to hyper-personalise campaigns with the next-best conversation, based on the customer’s in-the-moment interactions and journey stage context. You’ll deliver better campaign experiences across all channels.

Your tools:

Thunderhead’s ONE Engagement Hub is an intelligent, AI-powered customer engagement hub that helps you understand each customer’s true intent and orchestrate individualized journeys for every customer across every touchpoint, seamlessly and in real-time. It can be deployed on its own, or integrated in the Salesforce Marketing Cloud as Interaction Studio. Feel free to contact us for more information or a free demo of its powers!

This article was originally published on Thunderhead’s blog. Adapted and used with permission from the copyrightholder.