When you’re considering the buyer journey, you can’t expect all customers to follow the same path. This is especially true in 2024. There are more channels than ever through which customers interact with a brand.
Take a second and think about all of the platforms that your customers can come into contact with your business. From social media platforms to email messaging, marketing and sales teams have a huge variety of options at their disposal—and each of these represents a unique opportunity.
But it also presents a significant challenge for marketing teams. Monitoring and responding to customer journeys across all of these different channels requires significant resources.
That’s where marketing orchestration comes in.
Keep reading to find out what this approach entails, why it’s useful for PR, and how you can use it effectively.
What is marketing orchestration?
Big data and complex algorithms are becoming more widespread in the world of marketing. It’s understandable to feel overwhelmed by all the jargon like Bayesian Neural Network, data architecture, and machine learning regression models.
Fortunately, marketing orchestration is much easier to understand.
Marketing orchestration is an approach that coordinates all cross-channel activities and interactions to create a unified customer experience. At its core, it relies on centralized, standardized data that’s fed into analytical and automated tools that help you fine tune personalization across the customer journey.
Think about your marketing efforts as an orchestra. There are lots of different instruments and band members involved. You need them all if you want to produce a beautiful show, but you also need to lead and organize them for this to be successful. In much the same way, modern marketing requires orchestrating all marketing channels and strategies so everything is in tune.
When you use this approach, you’ll be collecting and centralizing customer data from across all of your marketing data sources. This allows you to conduct the various parts of your marketing orchestra to produce the perfect harmony for your customer journeys.
Suddenly, you’ll be able to ensure that customers receive a high-quality, personalized experience that draws from as much information as possible. This personalized experience will be consistent across multiple marketing channels, meaning that potential customers have a coordinated and synchronized buyer journey.
This all makes sense in theory, but what does it look like in practice?
You will no longer have isolated marketing campaigns that are distinct from each other, with social media campaigns completely disconnected from email campaigns.
Instead, you’ll take a holistic approach to marketing that draws from a range of different data sources, utilizing social media management tools to ensure seamless integration and coordination across platforms.
Why marketing orchestration is useful
You might be wondering what the point is in making this change in your organization. After all, it could require a significant shift in how you collect and use customer data.
Here are the biggest benefits of marketing orchestration.
Reduces bottlenecks
When marketing teams design new strategies and campaigns, all too often there are bottlenecks or other administrative hurdles. This is particularly an issue when your marketing activities take place across different channels that are approached in silo.
Marketers are forced to spend time accessing different data sources to retrieve valuable insights into their customers, without which an individualized customer experience would be impossible.
Orchestrating your marketing efforts reduces these bottlenecks. It centralizes all of your campaigns and customer data in one location, allowing marketing leaders to access as much data as is relevant for their marketing materials.
Improves personalization
Creating personalized sales and marketing campaigns is one of the crucial building blocks of effective customer relationships. This is especially important in today’s data-driven world where customers increasingly expect personalization from every brand interaction.
However, maintaining an impactful approach to personalization is challenging to deliver across the whole sales cycle. Marketing orchestration enables you to draw on as much customer information as possible across the customer journey, meaning that customers will receive more meaningful and personalized experiences.
By integrating the Agile Process, which emphasizes flexibility and rapid iteration, marketing orchestration can be continuously adjusted to respond to real-time data and market changes, enhancing the effectiveness of these personalized marketing strategies.
Boosts customer experience
Ultimately, reducing bottlenecks and improving personalization efforts has a positive knock-on effect. Users will have a consistent customer experience, regardless of the channel they interact with your brand on, allowing you to maintain a high standard across the board.
What’s more, you’ll be able to respond more quickly to customer pain points by working from a wider range of data. This means that you can deal with issues swiftly, boosting customer retention rates as a result.
How to use marketing orchestration: 5 tips and strategies
In a digital marketing world that is becoming more reliant on data—and operating across more and more channels—being able to synchronize your marketing efforts is crucial. Especially if you have big growth goals.
So, how can you leverage this marketing tool in your organization? Here are our top tips and strategies.
1. Unify your data
Data unification forms the backbone of marketing orchestration, so set yourself up for success from the get-go. Collect all data in a central location—you’ll use this to lead personalization. Make sure that it’s also in a standardized format. Why? Gathering data is one thing, but you need to be able to read and understand it if you’re to use it correctly.
You can collect data from various sources, including your customer relationship management (CRM) system, social media platforms, and email service.
To make storing data easier, use a secure data warehouse, such as Apache Hive. What is Apache Hive used for? This open-source software is designed to read, write, and manage large datasets, so will make data processing and unification significantly easier.
2. Remove barriers to data
Once you’ve unified customer and marketing data, make sure that everyone in your marketing and sales teams can access that data. After all, there’s no point putting all the work into consolidating information if people can’t use it!
Make sure that your teams are trained to use customer data analytics and that data isn’t siloed between different departments, channels, and databases. As well as storing data in one location, make sure that everyone with access can easily view and interpret the information in a single view.
3. Use journey mapping
To transform this data into valuable content for your target audiences, you need to have a clear understanding of how customers interact with your company across the whole customer journey. Doing this means defining customer segments, such as by age or location, and creating customer journeys for each segment.
Image sourced from Nulivo.com
Journey mapping allows you to build campaigns and marketing messages for customers at the right time. This map can be used for multiple marketing channels, which is crucial for marketing orchestration. It’s a great way to consider the perspective of your customers throughout their buying cycle.
4. Monitor message frequency
When you start implementing marketing orchestration, you’ll soon realize that a holistic view of the customer experience is vital if you want to ensure a positive customer experience. A great way to benefit from this holistic view is by monitoring message frequency and using message capping.
Message capping limits the amount of marketing campaigns that individual customers can receive each day or each week. For example, you can limit the amount of email marketing and SMS messages customers receive to, say, two campaigns a day or five a week.
Monitoring message frequency like this would be impossible without marketing orchestration. It works across all of your different marketing channels and requires you to have an all-encompassing view of your marketing efforts.
5. Use marketing orchestration software
Implementing an effective marketing orchestration strategy isn’t easy, so don’t shy away from software solutions, AI tools, and automation platforms. All of these can significantly boost your efforts and support you in scaling up marketing.
Yes, integrating these into existing processes may require investment and training. But the benefits will be more than worth it as you’ll save significant resources.
As we mentioned earlier, dedicated software like data storage solutions can help to centralize data from various channels, as well as standardizing formats and ensuring the accuracy of this data.
Many of these solutions also include an intuitive single customer view. This collects and combines data from all of your channels, creating a holistic customer profile that is accessible to everyone in your marketing team.
This has a clear practical use: if you use go-to-market strategies like a virtual product launch, for example, these marketing tools will be a brilliant way to make sure that those strategies are built around the most relevant customer data, while also ensuring that you can access and use that data easily.
Automated tools can also support you in delivering multiple marketing campaigns across different channels. Automated tools can also support you in delivering multiple marketing campaigns across different channels, including utilizing ChatGPT prompts for social media to enhance content engagement and relevance.
This means you can reach the right people at the right time on the right channel. Finally, AI algorithms make it easier to monitor and report on those campaigns, helping you pinpoint the ROI of your campaigns.
Incorporating a robust review generation strategy into your marketing orchestration can further amplify customer engagement and credibility. By systematizing the collection and display of reviews across channels, you ensure that positive customer feedback is strategically leveraged, enhancing trust and influencing potential buyers at critical points in the customer journey.
Marketing orchestration: the future of personalized marketing
No one wants to be left behind, especially in the fast-moving world of marketing and PR. Chances are you’re juggling the delivery of multiple campaigns, trying to keep up with changing trends, and meet client and customer expectations.
With so many balls to juggle, marketing orchestration is what will bring all of these elements together. You already have access to incredible data from different channels. It’s about unifying that data to create a cohesive experience that sets your brand apart.
Follow this tactic and you’ll easily be able to monitor, combine, and synchronize marketing efforts across all channels.
In our guide, we’ve explored practical ways to implement this approach. And the best part is, you can seamlessly integrate it into existing processes to fine tune all of your efforts.
So, what are you waiting for? Get orchestrating today and become a marketing maestro!.
