A process of organization, segmentation, distribution of content and analysis, campaign management has become an essential pillar of marketing departments. With the proliferation of communication channels and an ever-increasing volume of data, traditional solutions (CRM, e-mail marketing, etc.) are being radically renewed to meet current constraints and new consumer habits. The oldest tools will gradually be supplanted by more efficient and more scalable solutions, which meet today’s challenges and foreshadow those of tomorrow.
The “corporate” market is reinventing itself to meet new challenges
All companies are pursuing their digitalization under time constraints, and the management of marketing campaigns has become a central subject. While the agile software of SMEs has evolved, those used by large companies were born twenty years ago and are aging. They therefore find themselves faced with the end of a first generation of tools that appeared in the 2000s, while the needs around customer knowledge and its use in marketing campaigns are constantly growing. A multitude of parameters are involved, and the consequences are potentially serious in the absence of an ad hoc response: technical constraints, omnichannel, volume and processing of customer data, real-time personalization of messages, connection with other information and automation.
Fortunately, new scalable platforms are emerging to compensate for the stagnation of old platforms. Presented in the form of applications, they capitalize on the old to meet new needs and are capable of aggregating a multitude of data. The interest is to be able to increase the sending channels, to individualize the contents, to respond to the new regulations (RGPD…) while coordinating the specialized applications to speak with a single voice to the customer. In particular, it will be possible to identify a customer’s preferred social network for interacting with him. Both migration costs and set-up time vary depending on the complexity of the existing installation and the desired uses (from around ten days to around a hundred in the most advanced cases).
This is therefore a real turning point for companies, which is further marked by a campaign management market that has evolved into two distinct markets: on the one hand, the management of customer data (including their aggregation and unification within Customer Data Platform or CDP) and on the other campaign management, with its problems of orchestration, personalization and automation and reporting. In fact, the marketing automation landscape will continue to change and make room for new players offering platforms based on recent and open architectures.
On the road to the ideal software: the constant evolution of campaign management
Companies will therefore have new choices, with the aim of a system that immediately covers all the needs of marketing automation while maintaining strong scalability. The ease of use and the power of these new tools give teams the ability to quickly learn all the features. They also offer more detailed management of customers and prospects, automation of multi-channel marketing, sharing of content, as well as features offering the possibility of measuring the impact of projects on different audiences. Thus, campaign management makes it possible to orchestrate all the actions carried out and to ensure consistency between the channels, including the most recent ones. Multi-brand and multilingual retailers are particularly affected due to the heterogeneity of their customers, their language and their centers of interest. Thanks to powerful segmentation and highly personalized content, they will improve the customer experience and, ultimately, their overall performance. The role of campaign management software is above all to respond to one of the fundamental aspirations of large companies: to create proximity and intimacy with each client. It is in a way the basis of commerce, mastered by small traders for centuries, but for which companies must implement a lot of energy and technology. This promise of proximity is the subject of the next few years, because in-depth knowledge of a customer is the key to successful sales and lasting loyalty.
To understand new technologies, human needs remain essential and will go crescendo. The data analysts and campaign managers who will set up these ecosystems will be increasingly sought-after professions, and they will be associated with more creative profiles, with a good knowledge of customer segments and their consumption habits.
The digital transformation continues, and campaign management is one of its cornerstones. With on-demand consumption taking hold in our lives, it will gradually affect other sectors, including the television universe, with advertisements adapted to each household. In this expanding market, new professions will emerge to further perfect the message that a company wants to deliver to its customers.
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