My first day working in the digital marketing space was Aug. 31, 2005. My CEO at the time told me, “People love to be marketed to. They love to receive information about products and services they care about. People even look forward to getting emails from brands they trust.”
I’ve never forgotten this. And neither should you.
At that time, the mantra that marketers chanted in their minds was The Right Message at the Right Time to the Right Person. That’s what marketers had to accomplish to ensure their communication would be positively received. Each person is unique and needs to be addressed according to their individual wants and needs.
For the past 10-plus years, this meant communicating by email. However, with the expansion of communication methods and platforms, including SMS, social media, chat, and native apps, marketing’s mantra has added The Right Channel. Now the mantra is The Right Message at the Right Time to the Right Person via the Right Channel.
Following the Platinum Rule
When communicating with customers and prospective customers, we need to follow the Platinum Rule. While the Golden Rule is to treat others as we would like to be treated, the Platinum Rule is to treat others as they would like to be treated.
Following the Platinum Rule, we need to communicate with customers using messaging they want, when they want it, via their preferred mode of communication — always keeping in mind that we, the messenger, are NOT the end-user or recipient of the message itself!
The Rise of SMS and Social Media Marketing
The use of Short Message Services (SMS) as a communication channel has exploded, with many claiming it hasn’t even begun to reach everyone it could. And, for the segment that prefers text messages over emails, SMS is fast becoming an increasingly relevant channel for marketing. For example, one company we work with here at Factoreal tells us that the SMS segment is only 15 percent of its total customer base, but they engage and close nearly 70 percent of those interactions.
Similarly, social media has become a leading way to maximize customer engagement. Brands have the opportunity to market not only to customers but to their friends and family members, where customers become participants in the brand’s success. They are given a voice and invited to interact with the brand by sharing their ideas, experiences, and concerns not only with the brand but with a larger audience of trusted peers.
Auditing Your SMS and Social Media Marketing Efforts
The marketing mantra is easy enough to remember and recite, but it’s challenging to execute effectively and consistently. It requires that every marketing message aligns with three other variables known as PTC:
- Person
- Time
- Channel
Given the variety of channels, customers, and stages in the sales funnel, how effective is your brand in hitting the sweet spot, which is delivering the right message at the right time to the right person through the right channel?
The first step to gauging your marketing’s effectiveness is to gain insight into how integrated it is across all channels. Here are some questions to consider:
- Does your marketing stack talk within all the products you use?
- Does your email channel know what your social media and SMS channels are performing?
- Can you connect anonymous web traffic to an SMS message?
- How does your native app provide data to all the other channels?
If you struggle to answer these questions or the answers you come up with revealing a lack of integration across your marketing stack, maybe you need to reexamine how your marketing stack . . . stacks up.
“Pro Tip: If you’re unfamiliar with the term ‘Marketing Stack’, read Here’s Where Marketing Automation Fits in the Marketing Stack.”
Stepping Up to Factoreal
If your marketing stack falls short of full integration across all channels, or if it lacks the transparency required to determine whether it is properly integrated, consider stepping up to Factoreal, which provides the highly coveted single source of truth (SSOT) required to integrate marketing across all channels. (By the way — SSOT is just a fancy way of expressing the data storage principle that you always source a particular piece of information from one source.)
Factoreal is built from the ground up, from scratch. Everything passes through our marketing automation platform and is centralized within it in order to provide seamless integration for analyzing data. For businesses with an already established SSOT, the Factoreal API (application programming interface) allows you to receive established and relied upon data — as well as push updated back data — in a number of scenarios.
Recently, we asked about 100 marketers and brands, “How can your life be easier?” and the most common answer was, “Give me a way to see how everything is working together.”
And that’s what we did.
All your data. In one place. To make effective decisions.
Now more than ever, The Right Message, at the Right Time, to the Right People, via the Right Channel will support you in defining and achieving the success you are looking for.
