The New Tenets of Digital Marketing #4: Restoring the Greater Function of Marketing

09/04/2019

The New Tenets of Digital Marketing #4: Restoring the Greater Function of Marketing

This post is the fourth and final tenet in our series The New Tenets of Digital Marketing.

We began this series with the goal of uncovering the key challenges marketers face in their quest to deliver the ultimate customer experience in the post-digital era. The divergence of digital channels, the fracturing of platforms and data, and the disruption of marketing processes caused by evolving technologies put new demands on marketing teams, exhausting bandwidth and sidelining marketers’ ability to focus on the function of marketing: building a powerful brand and audience connection. The marketer’s field has fundamentally changed, and yet, many are approaching these new challenges with an obsolete playbook. 

At Albert, we make it our mission to uncover what is driving change for our clients and to identify the path forward. We’ve found that while mass platforms are reaching saturation and audiences are moving to smaller, endemic platforms, brands are racing to keep up. As audiences fragment across channels and devices, we see a significant opportunity in the long-tail and, inevitably, an increasingly complex and diverse customer journey to conquer. 

In this new environment, marketers need to understand micro customer segments, develop targeted brand stories, and effectively execute cross-channel campaigns. They also need the ability to collect and analyze immense amounts of data in order to make informed decisions, and then take action faster than ever before. 

Taking a look at the overwhelming new demands on marketers, it was clear that the answer would be a new way of doing things – a transformation that would enable marketing teams to increase bandwidth and mind space without having to increase the number of hours worked or the size of the team. We found that opportunity in new autonomous technologies.

Autonomous technologies can take on the heavy lifting of rote, mechanical tasks in order to free-up marketers bandwidth for more strategic projects, such as developing compelling and creative brand ideas, or making small but mighty adjustments to the customer experience, and even pursuing game-changing innovation derived from micro insights. But, from our experience guiding brands, we know that the adoption and integration of new technologies into existing teams and processes is no easy task. It can mean disrupting current models – that were designed to meet current challenges – in order to reimagine the organization of the future and restore the function of marketing. Our roadmap – The New Tenets of Digital Marketing – was borne out of this desire to reimagine; a guide for marketers as they begin this transformation.

In our first tenet, Recruit for Human Intelligence, we address the impact of reallocating responsibilities across humans and machines as well as the greater value such AI collaboration allows. More specifically, we share the crucial skills that will be most impactful to hire for when partnering with autonomous AI platforms. In our second tenet, Winning at Every Stage of the Customer Journey, we outline how AI technologies are being leveraged to knock down data silos and collect, analyze and inform decisions in near real-time. We dive into how connected data enable marketers to better anticipate what customers want, where to reach them, and what message to deliver – for greater return. In our third and final tenet, Unlocking Cross-Platform Insights, we uncover how marketers are effectively leveraging AI technology in an increasingly crowded ecosystem, to tap into new segments, uncover opportunities for growth, and to deliver better end-to-end customer experiences than ever before – pushing the boundaries of creativity and innovation within their organizations. 

The New Tenets of Digital Marketing aims to deliver both a vision for change and the direction to achieve it. And ultimately, to better equip marketers in the face of an evolving digital ecosystem. Following these tenets, marketers can deploy the right teams to win the machine + human opportunity and will learn how to leverage autonomous AI to maximize data use and application, boosting the pursuit of customer obsession. Most importantly in our view, they will be able to reclaim the greater and original function of marketing: building a powerful brand and audience connection. 

by Ashna Shah
Sr. Director of Strategy