Blog and News > Marketing- How to Navigate the Complexity Trend
Marketing- How to Navigate the Complexity Trend
Marketing is growing ever more complex. How should marketers respond and change to the new conditions of data explosion, unstable consumer demographics, the growth of channel and device choices and the explosion of social media?
It’s no secret that marketing in the digital age is a complex business. There are more channels and touch-points available for customer and prospect engagement than ever before, as well as more data to manage. A lot more.
One 2011 survey by the IBM Institute for Business value interviewed 1700 CMOs to gain insights into what’s happening to make marketing more complex. 79% expect marketing complexity to increase but only 40% feel ready to meet this challenge. Surprisingly, the top performing firms in the survey felt just as uncertain about responding to the changing marketing environment as industry laggards.
So why is there such trepidation? How can modern marketers succeed in capturing complexity for added value?
According to the same survey, changes to the marketing environment which are both high impact and for which CMOs feel they are unprepared include:
- the data explosion
- changing consumer demographics
- the growth of channel and device choices
- and social media.
All of these elements represent different aspects of one over-arching trend: understanding the individual is the new key to successful marketing.
The so called complexity gap is not an inevitable consequence of marketing in a post-naughties age. Managing the volumes of data available on each individual is a challenge. But f volumes of data can be broken down to focus in on segmenting the individual’s journey through your offering, then the potential benefits are enormous. Understand precisely how customers interact with brands and make purchasing decisions will hail an opportunity for marketing executives to e-evaluate what successful marketing means for them, their company and their brand.
Break down the masses of data into individual narratives and you can start to tailor your approach for each prospect, dramatically increasing the chances of conversion.
In a nutshell: Marketers must individualise their strategy, their focus and their content in order to capture value and stay competitive in a global, cross touch-point, big data, digitised marketing space.
