Chris Marriott, Vice President, Global Digital Agency Services for Acxiom discusses how to win elections in the new Marketing Democracy.

If you need remember one single fact in regards to your marketing, it is this:  In general, consumers trust each other more than they trust you.  They even trust someone they have never met more than they trust you.   Now combine that unsettling thought with the idea that these very same consumer often choose to remain “unaware” of anything you might want to say to them until they decide to inform themselves.   In other words your marketing is a faucet and they have their hands on the spigot.  OK, now you can begin to understand the challenges facing marketers these days.  I call this “The Marketing Democracy”.  And you better say “hello” to it!  Because it isn’t going away.  And you don’t want to fight it, you need to join it.  In doing so you stand a better chance of winning elections in this new world.

 I can’t go through everything you need to do to succeed in this new world in one blog post, but I can give you the three most important components of election success.  I call this, the “Groundhog Day” approach to marketing (named after the Bill Murray movie).  The first is to recognize your customers across channels and to remember those interactions in the future.   While a lack of memory and recognition can be very funny in a movie, it isn’t funny to the people who are your customers, and it can be very unprofitable to you. 

 The second key to election success is to learn from every interaction you have, and to fuse that learning into the medium of your next interaction.  In doing so, you can increase the probability of a positive outcome.   You can use this learning to understand & predict things like:

• Explicit & inferred preferences
• Wants & needs
• Motivations & attitudes
• Social influence circle
• Cross-channel behavior

The third key to success is the ability to fuse this insight (and your ability to recognize the consumer) into the medium itself.  You want to personalize every interaction with the consumer, in the channel they prefer, and with an offer based on past behavior, future interests, and other people “like me”.

 In closing, let’s take a look at it from the voters’ perspective:  You want my attention?  My loyalty?  Then know me & be relevant!  I expect you to:

1. Build strategies around me
2. Find more people like me
3. Know where I’ll be seeing you
4. Whenever & wherever I see you, recognize me & treat me like an old friend
5. Know what I might – & might not – be interested in at that moment

 Sounds like a tall order, right?  Well the good news is that my company, Acxiom, specializes in providing clients with the tools, insight, advice, people and campaign platform to win elections in the new Marketing Democracy.   We can help you win your elections, have happier customers, and much great ROI.

 Christopher S. MarriottVP, Global Managing Director 
Acxiom Digital Agency Services
www.acxiom.com

Tags: Acxiom Digital Agency Services, Christopher Marriott, Online Marketing with RSS Ray