Modernize Your Martech Stack For Moments Evolve Your Marketing Strategy And Technology To Serve Customers In Their Defining Moments by Joe Stanhope and Julie A. Ask April 5, 2018 NOT LICENSED FOR DISTRIBUTION FORRESTER.COM Key Takeaways Marketers Must Win In Customers’ Moments Marketers must embrace a new mindset to proactively serve customers right-sized services in their most contextually relevant moments. Executing In Moments Demands Automation The necessary scale and velocity to serve customers in moments demand broad use of automation that AI fuels. Marketers Must Build A Common Engine Marketers must orchestrate delivery in customers’ moments across touchpoints. Technology silos will fail. Winning in customers’ moments depends on shared data. Why Read This Report The world is changing, along with consumers’ expectations of experiences and communication from brands. The paradigm for customer engagement is shifting from large, monolithic experiences that serve everyone to smaller, more contextual experiences that companies serve to consumers in just the moment they need them. B2C marketers must adopt the right strategy, operational best practices, and technology to win, serve, and retain customers in this new environment.
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Modernize Your Martech Stack For MomentsEvolve Your Marketing Strategy And Technology To Serve Customers In Their Defining Moments
by Joe Stanhope and Julie A. AskApril 5, 2018
NOT LICENSED FOR DISTRIBUTION
FORRESTER.COM
Key TakeawaysMarketers Must Win In Customers’ MomentsMarketers must embrace a new mindset to proactively serve customers right-sized services in their most contextually relevant moments.
Executing In Moments Demands AutomationThe necessary scale and velocity to serve customers in moments demand broad use of automation that AI fuels.
Marketers Must Build A Common EngineMarketers must orchestrate delivery in customers’ moments across touchpoints. Technology silos will fail. Winning in customers’ moments depends on shared data.
Why Read This ReportThe world is changing, along with consumers’ expectations of experiences and communication from brands. The paradigm for customer engagement is shifting from large, monolithic experiences that serve everyone to smaller, more contextual experiences that companies serve to consumers in just the moment they need them. B2C marketers must adopt the right strategy, operational best practices, and technology to win, serve, and retain customers in this new environment.
Evolve Your Marketing Strategy And Technology To Serve Customers In Their Defining Moments
Brands Aren’t Equipped To Meet Customers’ Expectations
Emerging technologies and shifting cultural norms fuel consumers’ escalating expectations of experiences and interactions with brands (see Figure 1). On one hand, the number of devices or touchpoints brands have for consumers is proliferating. On the other, the notion of channels is increasingly irrelevant because consumers expect seamless and intuitive access to content, communications, and services across these touchpoints.1 At the same time, a handful of large companies like Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google are tightening their chokehold on consumers’ moments as measured by both time and data, which limits brands’ access to their own customers.2
FIGURE 1 The Consumers’ Experience Ecosystem Is Transforming At An Unprecedented Pace
Cognitive load onconsumers is heavy
The bar set by customers’expectations continues
to grow
Control of customers’moments continues
to consolidate
Devices andtouchpoints continue
to proliferate
Increasingcustomer contextis now available
Context Context
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Evolve Your Marketing Strategy And Technology To Serve Customers In Their Defining Moments
An Evolving World Presents Brands With New Engagement Opportunities
Leading companies are evolving the customer experiences they deliver to meet and exceed consumers’ expectations in this dynamic landscape. Panera and Starbucks let consumers order ahead and pick up in stores. Transportation services such as Delta Airlines, Lyft, Postmates, and United Airlines relay departure and arrival times down to the minute. Preparing to deliver the next generation of customer engagement requires three strategic shifts:
› Brands will right-size experiences and deliver them proactively to consumers. Consumers will increasingly expect brands to anticipate their needs and proactively serve them the exact content, answers, or services they need just when they need them. Experiences are shifting in that direction and will evolve in four distinct phases and along three core dimensions: channel, context, and construction (see Figure 2).3 Experiences will migrate from standalone monolithic experiences that demand a lot from consumers to trusted assistants that act on behalf of consumers and proactively assemble and deliver services.
› The next battleground to serve and win customers is in their moments. Moments occur throughout a consumer’s journey. A digital or mobile moment contains communication, content, or services specific to a consumer’s need in that moment. Mass adoption of smartphones made moments the core mode of consumer engagement.4 Subsequent consumer adoption of connected devices such as smartwatches, cars, and virtual assistants extended this paradigm beyond phones. Brands will deliver these moments via touch, text, and voice across a number of channels. While a broad variety of moments are opportunities to affect customer experience, brands win by treating peak and end moments as defining instances that highly correlate to customers’ satisfaction and joy.5
› Communication, content, and services depend on unified contextual understanding. Experiences must be contextual regardless of whether it is through communication, content consumption, or a more complex service or transaction. Consumers expect unprecedented relevancy. They are losing their patience both to wade through heavy apps, byzantine websites, and generic emails designed to serve everyone as well as to translate their needs into clunky inputs or machine speak that code structures demand. And remember, they expect relevancy to follow them across touchpoints to give them those seamless experiences. Delivering on this expectation requires that all customer engagement uses a common profile for customers including real-time context.
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Modernize Your Martech Stack For MomentsApril 5, 2018
Evolve Your Marketing Strategy And Technology To Serve Customers In Their Defining Moments
FIGURE 2 Experiences Will Evolve In Four Distinct Phases
Ext.1
Ext.2
Phase 1Single-device app andweb experiences
Phase 3Static assembly
Phase 4Dynamic assembly
Phase 2Mobile platformexperiences
FoodCal
1,320
141 lb.
2 2 3
1 2 1
1 3 3
• Consumers create personalized experiences across a set of standalone apps and websites.
• Brands own experiences.
• Consumers consolidate experiences within a handful of properties like Amazon, Facebook, Google, and WeChat.
• Brands borrow moments.
• Consumers choose third-party assistants like Alexa or Siri to simplify task completion.
• Brands deliver experiences through natural language interfaces.
• Consumers use a smartphone as the choreographer of their local ecosystem.
• Brands hand over control to third-party assistants to assemble components of experiences dynamically.
Fitness example
Marketers Are Stuck Doing Old Things In New Ways
Engagement paradigms are shifting faster than marketers can adapt. Nobody can accuse marketers of standing still because investments in technology, services, and data continue to grow aggressively.6 But disjointed customer engagement remains the norm as customers’ evolving expectations confound marketers’ efforts to cope with a highly dynamic environment. Marketers still lack the strategies, best practices, and technology to succeed because they:
› Become inhibited by structural limitations. Marketers manage customer engagement overwhelmingly at the channel level not by choice but due to structural factors. Single-channel campaign strategies limit marketers’ ability to orchestrate customer journeys or design engagement across channels and devices. Organizationally, siloed marketing teams and budget structures incentivize channel-specific focus. And highly fragmented, complex marketing technology resists integration, perpetuating specialization and single-channel campaign orchestration.7
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Evolve Your Marketing Strategy And Technology To Serve Customers In Their Defining Moments
› Relegate mobile to the fringe of customer engagement. Marketers and vendors alike trumpet the importance of mobile but still treat it like a curiosity, which is disintermediated from mainstream marketing. Many brands organize mobile efforts into a separate team apart from marketing, often treating the efforts as products with independent development and product management resources. As a result, brands view mobile as simply another messaging medium. So it languishes as an add-on to existing channels such as email or assets, and tactics designed for the desktop are simply shrunk onto smaller screens. Additionally, the tendency to allocate budgets in proportion to direct revenue results in general underspending on mobile.
› Rely on lowest-common-denominator customer targeting. Struggles to identify customers across channels, devices, and places reduces the granularity of B2C marketers’ engagement efforts. Without a complete view of the customer, marketers must abstract their resolution of the customer away from individuals to segments and audiences. This impedes the construction of customer journeys, moment recognition, and deep personalization.8
› Fail to leverage data assets fully. Marketers have no shortage of raw data. But most firms struggle to separate signal from noise in the sheer volume of their data or lack quality and scale in their data assets. Brands also fail to exploit the value of new types of data; entire categories of data lie nearly fallow today such as location, device, biometric, emotional, and behavioral data.9 Additionally, brands fail to keep pace with evolved data architectures that support real-time, streaming, and triggered data usage.
Marketers Need A Moments Mindset
Marketers must shift their engagement paradigms from campaigns to moments.10 Customer journeys consist of a series of moments, and not all have equal importance. Marketers must rise to the occasion of serving customers in the most defining moments. In the abstract, this may seem daunting because even mapping out customer journeys requires significant effort. Broken down into familiar language and elements, marketers can envision this transition as a series of tactical steps along five dimensions: channel, context, construction, content, and consumers (see Figure 3). This shift will happen as:
› Channel distinctions become amorphous. In consumer markets, channels that technology defines have outstayed their welcome in organizations, P&Ls, technology stacks, and more. Too many marketers approach customer engagement with tunnel vision in individual channels and expect consumers to tolerate the load of navigating across websites, apps, and messaging. Marketers must seamlessly serve their customers wherever they are in their ecosystem. Brands must build smaller modules of content and services that are channel-agnostic. Notifications, for example, could be a text message or an audio recording sent to smartphones, TVs, or in-home virtual assistants.
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Modernize Your Martech Stack For MomentsApril 5, 2018
Evolve Your Marketing Strategy And Technology To Serve Customers In Their Defining Moments
› Context expands from static data points to dynamic insights. Context plays a role in defining the consumer or audience, content, and channel in a moment. If the context is static, it defines an audience. If the context is dynamic, it serves as a trigger (see Figure 4). All interactions must share one source of truth for context. Marketers will evolve customer context from single data attributes into genuine insights derived from multiple data attributes. As sources of data expand to include more connected devices and more services depend on context, consumers will play a more active role in managing access.
› Construction migrates from manual to automated assembly of components. Marketers hard-code rule-based logic for experiences today whether it is an email, mobile app, or mobile message. The future is one of automation or dynamic assembly of experience components. Marketers still do the heavy lifting to assemble audiences, create content, build campaigns, and optimize experiences based on a limited set of rules and insights. And they do so with limited context. Limited automation is in place today, but marketing technologies and processes will eventually automate the construction of many customer engagement components in the future.
› Content evolves to attract customers wherever they are. As consumers assert control over their own digital experiences over myriad devices and access points, content marketing is more critical than ever to entice engagement and build relationships.11 Content has traditionally been channel-oriented and pushed to consumers at marketers’ will. Brands will invest in content at all stages of the customer journey to deliver value to customers and pull them into brand experiences. Most importantly, content will become customer-led, offering rich, personalized, and device-agnostic interaction. And static content will become a thing of the past as virtual and augmented reality innovations render even video passé.
› Moments — not audiences — define consumers. Consumers do not want companies to target them at all, let alone when an enterprise has a need as part of a preplanned campaign. Consumers want brands to deliver utility, entertainment, and education when they need it — and proactively push meaningful engagement out when they need it (see Figure 5). Consumers don’t want to go find it. Technology to serve an audience of one is not in place today or practical without automation technologies and identity resolution capabilities, but marketers are on a journey to get there, incrementally defining target segments and enabling personalization in increasingly granular forms.
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Modernize Your Martech Stack For MomentsApril 5, 2018
Evolve Your Marketing Strategy And Technology To Serve Customers In Their Defining Moments
Marketers Need An AI-Powered Machine To Manage Moments
Momentary opportunities to engage with customers surround marketers. For example, conservative math puts the number of micromoments on connected devices in the US each day alone at 30 billion.12 At this level of scale and velocity, marketers can’t effectively write rules to engage individual consumers in each moment. In short, marketers need serious automation. As marketers attempt to engage customers proactively with just the right information or service in their moment of need, they realize the task is impossible without tools to automate. Those don’t exist yet — entirely (see Figure 6). But as a host of AI technologies mature, marketing technology (martech) vendors will begin to fill today’s gaps in speed, data management, insights generation, and journey optimization.13 Marketers must start building a martech road map that incorporates AI technologies to:
› Deeply personalize interactions. Personalization will fundamentally shift from basic customer recognition such as calling out a first name or recent purchase, observing communications preferences, and filtering at the segment level to tuning engagement for each customer. New techniques based on machine learning enable adaptation of offers, content, and timing at the individual level based on a full view of contextual and behavioral insights.14 By accelerating the test-and-learn process, AI-powered personalization provides the scale and efficiency to move beyond static rule-based and collaborative filtering approaches to one-to-moment interactions.
› Dynamically tag and generate content. There are no moments without content. However, content frequently becomes the bottleneck for executing advanced optimization and personalization strategies.15 AI tools for image and video analysis will play three key roles in content. First, it will automate tagging, cataloging, and storage of creative and content elements. Second, it will create more nuanced tags at scale such as identifying emotions. Finally, AI-based systems are increasingly capable of generating net new content via natural language generation. For example, companies can now use AI for writing email subject lines. In the future, AI will generate copy, images, and videos based on context and customers’ needs, experiment with promotions, and build messaging templates and designs.
› Continuously discover and suggest audiences. Targeting is the heart and soul of marketing. But manual processes limit humans, and they can only create and maintain so many audiences. Even a few-hundred segments would challenge marketers, but they have thousands or millions of customers. AI-powered technologies extend machine learning to erase these limitations by automatically maintaining and monitoring segment performance, creating larger numbers of more granular segments, discovering new segments predicted to perform well, and tracking segments to surface opportunities to marketers.
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Evolve Your Marketing Strategy And Technology To Serve Customers In Their Defining Moments
FIGURE 6 Automation Is More Aspiration Than Reality Today
Manual
Automated
Drivers of automation
Inhibitors to automation
• Availability of context
• Data streaming/speed
• Improvements in identity resolution
• Elimination of technology channel stacks
• AI
• Lack of a uni�ed, complete view of the customer
• Lack of a moments strategy
• Limitations of AI to choose audience segments
Evolution Begins With A Strategy
Achieving engagement in customers’ moments is a multidisciplinary effort. Brands must give equal consideration to strategy and technology, and they must be willing to address them in tandem. Strategy is a meaningless platitude without a technology backbone to support it, and technology likewise exists in a vacuum without a business problem to solve. The process of planning is more important than the plan itself. As Dwight D. Eisenhower once said, “In preparing for battle, I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.”16 This strategy won’t be a road map or a final plan. This exercise is about changing the way you work or think about strategy and ideating how your company will win, serve, and retain customers in their moments when they have a need — not when the business does. Start by:
› Mapping out your customer journeys. Marketing technology allows you to digitize customer journeys, but it won’t build the journeys for you. Map out your customer journeys, identify pain points, and then determine if engaging consumers proactively in those moments will improve their experience, especially in their defining moments.
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Evolve Your Marketing Strategy And Technology To Serve Customers In Their Defining Moments
› Identifying, cataloging, and prioritizing customers’ most important moments. Moments are a service or information module wrapped in context identifiers or tags. Journey mapping will generate tens if not hundreds or more moment ideas. The most important moments are peak and end moments that typically are high or low points or transitions.17 Start by prioritizing those that are important to the consumer and then those that are important to the consumer and the business. You will also need policies for traffic control and prioritization in real time as notifications compete for a place on customers’ home screens.
› Designing engagement based on real-time context. Designing engagement entails knowing who you want to serve based on context or user profiles and what content or services to push out based on contextual triggers. Simplified, this means, “What information or service do you want to offer?” For example, an airline may want to alert all passengers who live more than 1 hour away from the airport of a canceled flight at least 2 hours ahead of time.
› Using Forrester’s POST methodology to make smart engagement choices. Don’t relegate channel or technology choices to the path of least resistance. Determine the requirements for each moment, and pursue technology or channel decisions by knowing who you serve and how they use technology, articulating clear objectives, and knowing what features or services you want to offer.18 It’s tempting to follow up on an SMS message with another SMS message or to continue sending emails because it’s the most reliable messaging technology in your martech stack. Just because you have a hammer doesn’t mean every engagement opportunity is a nail.
Adapt Your Martech To Strategy And Operations
Any meaningful progression of customer engagement strategy has technology implications. Moments will require more functional capability, higher degrees of coordination, and a steady supply of data.19 Martech must evolve from a confederation of parallel applications implemented to serve a specific touchpoint channel, or portion of the customer journey, to automated journey support (see Figure 7 and see Figure 8). B2C marketers can’t buy this today, but they should begin transforming their architecture in tandem with firms’ strategic and operational maturity in four phases married to the development of moments (see Figure 9):
› Contextual data foundation. The first phase of martech stack evolution focuses on binding together disparate insights and engagement applications through shared customer identification and profile data. Rather than allowing each application to have its own view of the customer, assemble a consolidated customer profile from relationship history, behavioral data, and situational context that all systems use. Subsequently, all applications work from consistent customer profiles for decisioning and personalization to create seamless experiences across moments.
› Unified orchestration. The second phase of martech stack evolution reduces siloed approaches that execute single channel-specific interactions in favor of orchestrating engagement across channels within the context of customer journeys. Marketers will define moments within multitouch
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Evolve Your Marketing Strategy And Technology To Serve Customers In Their Defining Moments
cross-channel workflows that drive customer engagement endpoints. Orchestration may also bridge acquisition and retention efforts by incorporating marketing elements into customer service and transactional interactions with customers.
› Marketing within every customer interaction. The third phase of martech stack evolution extends customer journey orchestration to recognize moments and engage beyond traditional marketing channels through any connected device, such as wearables and virtual assistants via voice. Explicitly orchestrated journeys that define every individual interaction shift to a flexible range of triggered events to cover the many possible permutations of customer engagement.
› Atomized contextual marketing. The final phase of stack evolution fully integrates systems of insights and engagement into a single data-driven orchestration and execution engine. Journeys are fully dynamic and channel- and device-agnostic, with real-time decisioning as moments occur to make content and channel determinations based on individual customer context. And the content, creative, and offer aspects of interactions are no longer prebuilt but assembled from components as personalization and targeting rules dictate.
FIGURE 7 The Customer Journey Is Siloed In Distinct Ecosystems Today
Mobile Offline
Journeys
Digital
Orchestration
Systems ofinsight
Systems ofengagement
Identitymanagement
@
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Evolve Your Marketing Strategy And Technology To Serve Customers In Their Defining Moments
Recommendations
Start Mastering Your Customers’ Defining Moments
Marketers must consider a broad approach to positioning their firms for next-generation communication and experience with consumers. This approach must encompass strategy, operations, and technology to truly excel in customers’ moments. Efforts that ignore or separate these core aspects will at best be greatly delayed and at worst will fail entirely to meet internal and customers’ expectations. Here’s how B2C marketers should get started:
› Let messaging lead your transformation to moments. The myriad forms of messaging — and its close cousin, notifications — are too often dismissed as isolated channels or associated with specific devices. That view is myopic and severely curtails their utility. Executing well with messaging is one of the first steps toward winning in customers’ moments. The sophistication you need to build to deliver the right content in the right channel to the right consumer based on dynamic context will set you on a path to do the same with omnichannel experience components that could be voice, text, apps, and more in years to come.20
› Identify the most important micromoments. Start by identifying the micromoments that are the tipping points in effective customer journeys. Defining these will support the prioritization of your technology needs. Keep in mind you are looking for opportunities where immediacy matters and interactions are simple. Use journey maps to identify pain points and where immediacy will help. Also analyze call center logs with the same filter, “Do customers call in to retrieve simple information like the status of a claim?” And finally for peace of mind, benchmark your competitors and leaders in other industries.
› Extend the time horizon of your strategy to stretch your technology aspirations. Technology is difficult to rip out and replace. Technology capabilities lead most enterprise needs. Forecast your strategy several years into the future even if it is at a high level to assess your long-term technology requirements. Forrester doesn’t often recommend letting technology lead, but don’t be afraid to do so here. Many firms we interviewed felt their existing solution providers stymied them but couldn’t bear the cost or pain of replacement.
› Exploit contextual data to power unique and effective experiences. Technology provides the toolkit for insights generation and experience delivery, but data defines the art of the possible in customer engagement. To operate in moments, brands must establish a complete customer profile and harness contextual data. First, define the data requirements for compiling a complete customer profile that spans the entire customer journey; it is the key to identifying consumers across interactions and touchpoints and tracking engagement over time. Second, define the type and source of contextual data such as behavior, location, and intent to inform relevant and personalized experiences in each moment.
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Modernize Your Martech Stack For MomentsApril 5, 2018
Evolve Your Marketing Strategy And Technology To Serve Customers In Their Defining Moments
› Operate the machine. Moments aren’t something you build once and leave behind like a statue in a park. They are a moving target; you build, test, optimize and refine them. And managing them requires proactive coordination of multiple technologies, departments, and stakeholders. Solutions will provide templates for moments and journeys, AKA “starter kits,” but you need to build an operation around the strategic planning and technology to succeed. Operational best practices include: hiring smart talent who can learn fast, using agile processes to optimize engagement, centralizing administration and policy with a single product owner, using customer-centric metrics, and adopting a culture that supports failure.21
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Evolve Your Marketing Strategy And Technology To Serve Customers In Their Defining Moments
Supplemental Material
Companies Interviewed For This Report
We would like to thank the individuals from the following companies who generously gave their time during the research for this report.
3Cinteractive
Albert Technologies
Adobe
Aki Technologies
Appboy
Apsalar
Branch
Criteo
Dynatrace
Emarsys
Engage Hub
Hangar
HTK
IBM
Iterable
Leanplum
Localytics
MediaMath
Merkle
Mixpanel
Mobify
Mobiquity
OneSignal
Oracle
Packyge
Placed
PlaceIQ
Salesforce
SessionM
T3
Thinknear
Thunderhead
Ubimo
Urban Airship
Walkme
West
Endnotes1 Various key trends are shaping customers’ expectations. On one hand, channels are becoming more amorphous. See
the Forrester report “The Future Of Mobile Experience Development.”
On the other hand, today’s experiences put too much cognitive load on consumers. Today’s digital experiences tax consumers unduly. When consumers have a need, they must consider what apps or websites to use, sequence the steps, and then translate their need into a series of inputs to get the outputs, services, or actions they desire. Leading-edge digital experiences allow consumers to express their needs directly in a natural (human) language or through
Evolve Your Marketing Strategy And Technology To Serve Customers In Their Defining Moments
conversation. Digital business pros should realize that a host of current and evolving AI technologies will make digital experiences more conversational and deliver unprecedented convenience to consumers. See the Forrester report “AI Will Revolutionize Digital Experiences.”
2 The benefits of scale are driving an unprecedented consolidation of ownership of consumers’ time and data. Two mobile operating systems dominate global smartphone market share because scale attracts developers and services that make these devices so essential to consumers. As consumers expand their use of smartphones (and other products within the family) and core platforms (e.g., Amazon, Facebook), some companies are accumulating data that high-powered cognitive computing systems essentially crunch to generate the next set of essential services such as control of connected devices, virtual assistants, language, mapping, and more. For more information on the dynamics and the role these large entities play, see the Forrester report “Your Customers Will Not Download Your App,” see the Forrester report “Mobile Platforms, Partners, And Power,” and see the Forrester report “Adopt An App+ Strategy.”
3 Many examples cited throughout this report are based on research interviews conducted for the following report. See the Forrester report “The Future Of Digital Experiences.”
4 Source: Ted Schadler, Josh Bernoff, and Julie Ask, The Mobile Mind Shift, Groundswell Press, 2014.
5 Source: Chip Heath and Dan Heath, The Power of Moments, Simon & Schuster, 2017.
6 We asked global B2C marketing decision makers about their marketing budget plans for the next 12 months: 62% of marketers reported they will increase budgets for technology by 1% or more; 59% will increase budgets for market research/data services; and 56% will increase budgets for programs/media. Source: Forrester Data Global Business Technographics® Marketing Survey, 2017.
7 While crossovers exist along with a gaggle of basic integrations, marketers must routinely cobble together their own technology stacks or accept suboptimal interactions with customers. See the Forrester report “The Next Generation Of Enterprise Marketing Technology.”
8 Recognizing customers across the full customer journey reduces waste by eliminating duplicate contacts, enhances experiences by enabling interactions in the right channel at the right time, and makes basic customer tasks such as registration and logging in more efficient. See the Forrester report “The Strategic Role Of Identity Resolution.”
9 Historically, marketers described audiences based on a fixed set of data, like demographics and psychographics. But today, cell tower data, Bluetooth sensors, and Wi-Fi networks can paint a dynamic picture of individuals in any given space. See the Forrester report “Vendor Landscape: The Consumer Data Ecosystem’s Service Providers.”
10 But campaigns, even when scaling, optimizing offers, improving measurement, and carefully tuning the mix enhance them, don’t deliver competitive advantage anymore. Why? Because your competitors are just as skilled as you are at the campaign game. Change your focus from customer acquisition to interaction management and from media schedules to customers’ moments. For more information on moments in marketing, see the Forrester report “The Power Of Customer Context.”
11 US online adults use an average of 4.5 connected devices, and 85% of mobile phone owners use a smartphone — which means they can find the information and entertainment they want when they want it instead of waiting for it to come to them. See the Forrester report “Deliver Valuable Media And Customer Experiences With Valuable Content.”
12 Consumers in the US pick up or glance at their mobile phones 150 to 200 times each day. Forrester refers to this as a mobile moment. In the majority of these moments, consumers need only a glance to get the information they need to take action or even just have peace of mind. Forrester calls these moments “micromoments.” See the Forrester report “Adopt An App+ Strategy.”
13 AI’s scalability for large volumes of diverse data provides the opportunity to expand the overall depth and scope of customer interactions by operationalizing enterprise data and incorporating insights from all customer touchpoints. AI-powered martech is capable of leveraging business data to optimize offers, and it can personalize campaigns for customers based on their customer service interactions or in-store behavior. See the Forrester report “AI Must Learn The Basics Before It Can Transform Marketing.”
Evolve Your Marketing Strategy And Technology To Serve Customers In Their Defining Moments
14 Customer insights (CI) pros are increasingly leveraging platforms and tools for machine learning as enterprises become more and more insights-driven. Because machine learning algorithms adjust to patterns in data, CI pros favor them over hard-coded solutions that don’t adapt or scale easily. See the Forrester report “TechRadar™: Artificial Intelligence Technologies And Solutions, Q1 2017.”
15 It turns out that content — the text, images, video, and audio that marketers create to win over customers — can accomplish a lot, but it can’t easily organize and optimize itself. See the Forrester report “Content Intelligence: Algorithms Assign Meaning And Value To Content.”
16 Source: Richard M. Nixon, Six Crises, Doubleday, 1962.
17 Source: Chip Heath and Dan Heath, The Power of Moments, Simon & Schuster, 2017.
18 See the Forrester report “Getting Mobile Right With Mobility POST.”
19 Despite nearly ubiquitous acceptance, utilizing enterprise martech is a challenging endeavor that continues to defy marketers’ desire for simplicity and coverage. B2C marketers trying to satisfy unforgiving customers and meet the expectation to drive revenue face a paradox of choice in a chaotic landscape featuring new and merging vendors. See the Forrester report “The Next Generation Of Enterprise Marketing Technology.”
20 In many organizations, email marketing functions largely independently of other forms of marketing. But as Evan Reiser, former email product lead at TellApart, believes, a better approach is to “create an omnichannel experience that email is a key part of.” Innovative vendor offerings that emphasize personalization over message deployment enable marketers to transform email into multistage one-to-one customer experiences. See the Forrester report “Context Enriches Email Marketing.”
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