"Social media is a channel that the CMO has to navigate"

Dr. Jörg Reinnarth is Managing Director and founding partner of the Cintellic Consulting Group. He has over ten years of experience in analytical CRM and business intelligence. He heads the Customer Insights division at Cintellic.Dr. Reinnarth, how would you describe integrated marketing management to someone?Nowadays, marketing can be divided into three areas. The first is classic marketing as the area that deals with brand management and classic advertising management (television advertising, print advertising, radio advertising, etc.). The main aim here is to acquire new customers and build a brand. The second area is direct marketing. Here, existing customers are addressed directly, e.g. by letter, email, text message, telephone or branch staff. This communication is usually used for cross-selling or upselling, i.e. the aim is to offer either better products (e.g. mobile phone tariffs) or additional products to customers who have already been acquired as existing customers. Recently, another area has been added to marketing, namely social media, which is very different to manage than the previous areas due to its possibilities and characteristics. A letter to the customer is presumably more likely to be read and answered by the customer if a matching TV advertisement is running at the same time and the customer has a strong brand image anyway. This means that the channels do not work individually, but interfere with each other, creating more opportunities for the CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) as the communication channels become increasingly diverse (with SMS, email, social media channels), but at the same time increasing complexity. The question: "Where and how do I invest my marketing budget most sensibly?" is therefore becoming increasingly difficult to answer. As product cycles are also becoming shorter and people are adapting to new circumstances ever more quickly, it is therefore important for the CMO to have optimum control of the marketing processes for all three types, to be able to control them easily and to know at all times which marketing activities will lead to the greatest possible success.But this doesn't sound like a topic that is really new?In fact, the CMO's task has always been to adapt marketing to the respective conditions in the best possible way. However, the speed of communication has increased significantly in recent years. Don't even get me started on the classic stagecoach, which took weeks to get the message back. But with email, SMS, smartphones, stores and social media, new communication channels are now established that are used by customers every day and have also influenced customer behavior accordingly. at the same time, the possibilities for marketing have increased because there is also new software for the newer processes in order to adapt cross-channel control to market conditions. many companies still have a marketing plan that is poured into excel at the beginning of the year. Of course it is revised again and again. But it is generally fixed and those involved know what to expect in the year. During the year, employees then have to adapt other Excel lists to show how budgets are developing, how campaigns are running and how marketing performance has been so far.new software solutions on the market offer significantly leaner and faster processes that not only give you daily transparency, but also analytical aids so that you can make adjustments at any time.Does this mean that integrated marketing management is a software topic?Yes and no. Integrated marketing management is a strategic, organizational and process-related topic. However, aspects such as budget overviews, forecasting or workflows are ultimately software topics that only work if the requirements are also covered by the solutions. And this is where the software solutions have developed significantly in recent years by optimally covering many practical requirements, so that the CMO and his employees can focus on the actual issues, i.e. optimally addressing customers.Can you describe some example scenarios that show what the advantage of integrated marketing management is?With pleasure. Let's go through the typical roles in a marketing organization and look at how they currently work and the benefits of an integrated marketing management approach, starting with the CMO. He or she develops the strategic marketing plan and releases it for implementation. Currently, as mentioned above, this is usually an Excel document that has gone through various review processes and is laboriously adapted during the year. These campaigns are then carried out properly. In order for the CMO to know the status of the respective measures, many employees are busy pulling the respective figures from different systems for certain reports and making them available to the CMO. This is a major organizational effort for the employees and the CMO only receives his reports at certain times; in integrated marketing management, a marketing operations solution would provide support at this point, with the help of which the overall marketing plan would have been created. The advantage of this is that all changes and decisions can be tracked immediately and there is no need to look at an Excel history. There is a connection to the ERP system and campaign controlling for each campaign, so that it is clear how much of the planned budget has already been used and how much budget the measures have generated - and this is updated on a daily basis. The CMO can easily go from the overall marketing view to the individual areas, look at how the budgets are performing in the individual areas, display the budgets in the individual measures view and, if necessary, reallocate the budget if he deems it necessary. They have much more transparent views of the measures and easier control options, and the respective area managers naturally have the same views for their area. They are also interested in where the respective campaigns stand, whether there are shifts and what the reason for this is. The marketing operations solutions also have a good workflow system with approval mechanisms and a shared filing platform, so that you can immediately see where a process is stuck in order to escalate and speed it up. The division manager can significantly speed up his department because the processes are more clearly defined on the one hand and the release and notification options ensure that the current status of the process is always transparent, while the work of the campaign manager himself is also made much easier. In traditional marketing (television, print), collaboration is made much easier by the shared storage platform for all creative documents. The connection to the success measurements makes the return on investment directly transparent, making it even easier for the campaign manager to control the campaign, and the campaign manager is also able to use rules to map and centrally control the entire customer journey. They can define which messages the customer receives via the various channels (website, store, receipt printer, email, SMS) and according to defined activities. For example, he can define that a customer who searched for products in the online store yesterday and is in the store today is approached by the store employee about the product and receives a voucher when he buys another product. Or he can define that the customer receives a text message if he has sufficient affinity for certain products (which was previously calculated in an integrated manner) when he is in the vicinity of the store. Thanks to integrated marketing management, campaign managers can manage interactions with customers centrally, easily and based on rules. A great world!To be honest, it sounds a little dubious. What about the issue of the "transparent citizen"?Data protection is an important issue, because every citizen has the right to determine how their data can be used. But that is precisely the advantage. Customers can decide for themselves whether companies can enter into this communication with them or whether they are not allowed to use this information. That's a great degree of self-determination. As a user, I can decide for myself whether I want to accept the advantages and benefits that companies offer me.But advertising and contacting companies doesn't really sound like a benefit?No? I always find it fascinating that the Amazon classic "Other customers have also bought this product" is so appreciated by all users, but at the same time we are afraid of our data being used. Amazon does nothing else. The question is always: "How is it perceived by the customer? Is it a service for the customer that helps them, or is it a nuisance that only serves to sell?". And that's exactly what I mean. The customer can decide for himself whether he perceives it as a service or whether he feels harassed and then withdraws his consent to the use of the data, and the responsibility of the companies lies not only in using the information in accordance with the laws of data protection, but also in developing an advantage for the customer. No customer would switch off this option on Amazon. After all, they want to be inspired and gain new ideas.In other words, you assume that we will even voluntarily hand over our data if we perceive the whole thing as a service?Definitely. And that is the real added value of integrated marketing management. Marketing means that companies manage customer communication in such a way that they represent their brand and strengthen the brand image. Each brand core also represents the benefit for the customer. However, integrated marketing management makes it possible - in comparison to the past - to address customers consistently and uniformly along their entire journey. This was never really possible before, as it was not possible to consistently track the customer dialog across different areas, let alone control it centrally. The "integrated" aspect of integrated marketing management means that customer communication can be optimized across the entire customer journey via all channels. And, of course, always for the benefit of the customer. Otherwise you will frustrate them and lose them.Now you say that integrated marketing management is an important topic right now. However, everyone is talking about the cloud, social media and big data. Why not integrated marketing management?Integrated marketing management is of course affected by these three areas and is also being revolutionized by the aforementioned topics. However, integrated marketing management is only one use case for the topics mentioned, and the cloud plays a major role because the software solutions I mentioned earlier no longer have to come directly from the company, but can also be used in cloud form. Marketing can also go directly to the cloud for operations management or analytics, making it even more independent of IT. The CMO only needs daily updated figures and views and the ability to manage in real time. As already mentioned, social media is a channel that needs to be managed by the CMO. Different rules of communication apply here and social media will continue to develop because companies' communication in this channel will also continue to increase. Many companies are currently still cautious or reluctant. Through integrated marketing management, communication in these channels will also continue to increase, and big data is the favorite topic for integrated marketing management. This is because customer communication, which should take place promptly, is a key discipline for integrated marketing management. Whether you want to investigate conversations in the social media spheres and big data helps you to know within seconds what users are saying or where a shit storm is threatening. Or that you can use big data to analyze when a customer has disconnections on their smartphone and have the service hotline call them immediately. All these events and appropriate measures can be defined, but big data is what enables us to find these events in the huge flood of data in the first place so that we can react to them.Does this mean that big data and integrated marketing management are linked?Integrated marketing management will continue to evolve and change with new channels and technologies. As big data, or high performance analytics, is a hype topic, but we also see that it will become the standard, the possibilities with big data will also have an impact on marketing management.Where do you see integrated marketing management in 5 years' time?Integrated marketing management will slowly change marketing and change itself along with marketing. The trend is continuing towards mobile living, which means that our work will also become increasingly mobile. This means that we will not only work and live in the cloud, but also on smartphones and tablets. Marketing will therefore develop even more strongly in the mobile area and further fields of application and channels will emerge in the coming years. Be it location-based services, payment options via smartphone or dedicated company channels via app. As the smartphone becomes the central control instrument, it will also become the central channel that companies focus on, along with new gadgets such as Google Glasses, which again offer a new channel for prompt and location-based communication. The future therefore remains exciting and the opportunities for the marketing managers of the future will grow with the technologies. About the Cintellic Consulting GroupThe consultancy specializes in the areas of customer experience management, customer relationship management, marketing operations management, campaign management and business intelligence. Its employees have many years of experience in strategy development as well as in the areas of process optimization and customer insights. Cintellic combines strategic know-how with expertise in data analysis and business intelligence and offers concept development and implementation from a single source.