Connected customer experiences are the goal for most marketing organizations, but that’s an unrealistic dream for brands without marketing orchestration.
In this article, we’ll outline what marketing orchestration is, why it’s important for brands and strategies for coordinating and optimizing your marketing campaigns.
What is marketing orchestration?
Marketing orchestration, sometimes called journey or media orchestration, refers to the strategic coordination of activities, programs and campaigns across all marketing and sales channels. The goal is to create connected and personalized experiences. This requires the integration of data from multiple sources to provide a unified and individualized customer experience, across all phases of the buyer’s journey.
The orchestrated marketing approach enables organizations to execute higher-quality campaigns by coordinating marketing technologies, channels, data and teams to engage with customers at all touch-points. By aligning all marketing efforts, you can ensure consistent messaging that resonates with your target audience. This not only enhances brand visibility and recognition but also increases the likelihood of converting potential customers and retaining existing customers.
Marketing orchestration is a more personalized, integrated and customer-focused approach compared to traditional marketing methods.
How marketing orchestration can transform your business
Customers expect brands to personalize their interactions and provide a smooth and effective shopping experience. This type of experience isn’t optional; brands must figure out how to integrate their disparate tools to create the types of experiences consumers demand.
Marketing orchestration makes that possible. Here are a few ways that orchestrating your marketing, sales and customer success tools and tactics impact your business:
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Sending relevant communications and campaigns: There’s nothing worse than continuing to see the ad after purchasing an item. Or getting emails that don’t apply to the current situation. Orchestration ensures customers get the right messages—at the appropriate times—which creates great experiences, and ultimately, customer loyalty.
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Saving time and money: When you’re only sending the right message, in the right channel, you can cut down on excess spend and effort--allowing you (and your team) to work smarter, not harder. Orchestration also reduces the risk of human error or the need for manual data entry.
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Improving campaign performance: With integrated tools, you can be more confident in your segments, types of marketing campaigns and outcomes. This means better reach and improved campaign accuracy.
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Enhancing team alignment: Orchestration ensures team alignment across the organization, which cuts down on errors, miscommunications and duplicative efforts. Teams can instead focus on more meaningful work.
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Understanding customers: With integrated tools and technologies, you have better data about your customers. This means improved insight into their preferences and behaviors, which leads to more targeted content and better results.
Simply put, marketing orchestration allows you to effectively reach and engage with your customers. It optimizes your team, technology and strategy to deliver more unified, personalized and seamless interactions. It also acts as a single source of truth across your organization, improving alignment and efficiency.
This isn’t just important for the customer’s experience, it has a direct impact on your bottom line. It’s more important now than ever before to approach your marketing holistically.
How does campaign orchestration work?
Now that you understand what campaign orchestration is and why it’s important, let’s outline how it works within organizations.
Connect your data across platforms
Campaign orchestration starts with data. The purpose is to organize all your data and make it accessible and usable for your marketing and sales teams. Collecting and managing this data from disparate sources across your organization—including your CRM, e-commerce platforms, social media and more—can be challenging, but it’s crucial.
Without unifying your data flow across platforms, you won’t have the ability to create connected customer experiences. Automated, personalized and relevant campaigns require organized and high-quality data.
Most marketers rely on a customer data platform (CDPs) or all-in-one marketing platforms, like Epsilon PeopleCloud, to seamlessly and securely handle data from across their tech stack. With a comprehensive view of your data, you can make more data-driven decisions and uncover insights that aren’t noticeable when viewing data sources in isolation.
Get a unified view of each customer
To create personalized and meaningful experiences for consumers, you need to know who they are. With data orchestration, you have real-time, high-quality, centralized and consistent data, pulled from a variety of sources. This means everyone is working with the best information about your customers at all times.
Data orchestration provides a holistic view, rather than being required to pull actionable insights from one system or platform. According to a recent whitepaper from IDC, sponsored by Epsilon, titled "Customer experience suffers without omnichannel alignment," 55% of surveyed CMOs reported that the biggest issue preventing them from achieving their full potential was "too many functional silos." These silos refer to siloed teams, siloed technology and, of course, siloed data. To quote the whitepaper, "With multiple sources of truth, and a lack of centralized identity resolution, adtech and martech applications execute in a suboptimal manner."
Merging all your data means you can break down the silos and create a unified customer profile, based on individuals’ real preferences, behaviors and pain points. This is especially true if your tech stack has integrated identity resolution. With a unified view of each customer, you can send more targeted and relevant messaging and offers, which increases engagement, loyalty and revenue.
Strategize your marketing for specific channels
Once you have integrated data and a unified and persistent 360-degree view of your customers, you can build marketing strategies across channels.
With data orchestration, you have more reliable information, which leads to more effective campaigns. When properly orchestrated, your tools work together better, resulting in more delightful customer experiences and improved business performance. According to IDC's Roger Beharry Lall, “Marketers need to embrace a more unified approach that connects advertising and marketing silos. Whether through a single tool, a deeply integrated stack, or the use of bridging data constructs, aligning these two areas is essential.”
But your marketing orchestration tools must also help activate your marketing campaigns to your direct audience. With Epsilon Customer, a customer data platform, you can find customers who are normally hidden and then activate digital media campaigns directly from the customer data that informs them, so you know you're accurately reaching the right people. This allows you to maximize your media orchestration and investment across all channels, and reduce wasted spend.
Direct your shoppers down the funnel
Once you have a clear understanding of your customers, it’s important to identify their buyer’s journey. This means mapping out the key interactions or touch-points of a typical path to purchase, both online and offline. The goal is understanding what guides users through marketing campaigns, and how to ensure optimal integration and ease.
To effectively use your data and move people down the funnel, you have to know what that customer journey looks like, and how to optimize it with journey orchestration platforms. By understanding customer needs and expectations at every stage, you can find insights, refine segments and create marketing programs that convert.
Marketing orchestration gives you the foundation. By compiling your data and providing a way to put it into action, you can build cohesive messages and dynamic content. Combining ads with automated emails, for example, allows you to seamlessly satisfy and engage with shoppers, no matter where they are in their purchase process.
The key to successfully leading shoppers down the funnel is having a deep understanding of your customers, and the ability to speak to them as individuals.
Align marketing, sales and customer support
One of the key benefits of marketing orchestration is the ability to deeply align sales, marketing, customer support and every department that interacts with customers. While the marketing teams’ perspective is often central, organized and accessible data is also vital to sales teams and support staff.
Customers expect a consistent and reliable experience with your brand, across all touch-points. This means the ads they see online, and the support they get through your call center, must be similar. The only way to do this is to provide the same level of data and insight across your entire organization.
This not only helps create personalized and seamless experiences for your customers, but it also drives operational efficiencies for your brand. Automating data transfers eliminates the risk of human error, and ensures all teams reliably have access to the up-to-date information they need.
How you can start orchestrating marketing
Marketing orchestration brings alignment to your teams, organizes your data and creates meaningful and successful customer experiences. But having the right tools, people and technology is crucial.
Epsilon’s comprehensive suite of marketing solutions allows you to access, enhance and leverage valuable customer data to drive your marketing strategies.
With Epsilon, you can create cohesive and impactful marketing strategies across all channels, driving better engagement, conversion and ROI.
And right now, your data may have hundreds (or thousands) of sources—making truly connected customer experiences almost impossible. Epsilon’s customer data platform brings it into one place and enhances it with our pre-loaded, in-depth proprietary data—so you’ll know more about your customers than you ever thought possible. Learn more.
