Marketing should be driving the X in CX

Users are a gaming company’s biggest asset and, in the age of the customer, the quality of experience has become perhaps the most significant area of competitive advantage and differentiation. Marketers need to take responsibility for delivering a great customer experience, as they have access to the data that shows true insight into the user’s preferences and buying journey.

But until now, a marketer’s job hasn’t been easy. New digital tools promising benefits to solve every problem that marketers in the gaming sector face are incredibly tempting to invest in. In fact, there are 3,874 Martech vendors, operating across 43 categories, and providing over 20 solutions across multiple silos. But without being able to connect these disparate parts of the marketing puzzle, marketers simply cannot deliver a great customer experience. And with mobile gambling expected to take the lion share of the online gambling market by 2018, marketers need to keep up with how users are engaging with their message across many devices.

The answer? Marketing automation. The ability to leverage open cloud platforms to link these technology investments is the key to an efficient marketing ecosystem that consolidates the customer’s digital footprint to gain true insight into the customer experience, enabling marketers to target the right users with the right experience.

Martech overload?
Web analytics. Predictive analytics. Email marketing. Tag management. Optimisation. With so many solutions, it’s a challenge for marketers to prioritise. More time is spent managing technology and making decisions about technology investment — usually at the expense of realising goals and good customer experience. This challenge is exacerbated by the apparently conflicting objectives facing marketing teams: CMOs want to invest in providing a great customer experience while the CEO and CFO are looking for tangible Return on Investment (ROI).

With so many tools added to the digital marketing mix, outcome can mean a complex technological mess, instead of the sophisticated, streamlined ecosystem that should be driving great customer experience. If marketers are to truly be responsible for delivering a great customer experience, marketers need to step back and determine how best to make their existing solutions work harder and deliver more value. And that means making them work together – not just in the name of efficiency, but also customer experience.

Integration is essential
It is tempting to invest in the latest innovative marketing tool — from eradicating manual tasks to providing another sliver of customer information; every tool offers a potential benefit. However, these tools will continue to fail to support the efficient, responsive marketing model until they are brought together in one harmonious ecosystem. Marketers no longer need to undertake multiple custom integration projects – the latest generation of cloud-based marketing apps changes the game and provides marketers with the integrated tools they need to deliver on customer experience.

Existing technology investments can be linked in open cloud platforms with little, if any, expenditure. Integrating these tools within a single ecosystem will provide marketers with a unified view of the customer’s digital body language, which in turn, helps inform a user’s online experience.

For example, soſtware can monitor the use of multiple applications during a customer’s journey. Different tools capture slivers of information of the customer’s interaction with a gaming site. It’s only when you can capture all the interactions, or digital body language, in one place that you are able to create a single, actionable, view of the customer and prompt action accordingly.

Taking control
It goes without saying that any reduction in manual processes will free up marketers’ time to concentrate on more strategic and creative activity. This activity is now inherently measurable; digital marketing can be tested at every stage, with real time feedback on messaging and content to enable continual refinement. The speed of information flow is radically improved and information silos are eliminated, enabling marketers to respond to customer behaviour and actions, creating a more responsive and relevant customer experience that drives loyalty.

In addition, linking up to a cloud based marketing ecosystem provides access to valuable third party data sources, information that a marketer is now in a position to effectively use having joined up the customer digital fingerprint to gain deep insight into the customer base. Combining data modelling to define the ‘best customer’ attributes with these anonymised third-party data sources supports very effective targeting, extending the company’s reach towards the ‘right’ customer type.

While tech overload is clearly a concern, marketing departments cannot afford to stop investing, discovering or innovating. But marketers must stop adding tools for the sake of it. By looking inside the existing ecosystem and joining the tools accordingly, a company will extend its reach while delivering on customer experience.

Differentiation through experience
Although a registration page might be the primary customer touch point, marketing has a truer understanding of the end-to-end customer journey. Marketing’s insight into the user’s digital body language should be not just informing individual departments or parts of the customer journey, but underpinning every aspect of customer experience strategy.

Marketers possess some of the most valuable data within an organisation. The technology that provides insight into the expectations, hopes and desires of each individual customer puts the marketer in a unique position to lead the total customer experience.

So it is marketers who have an important leadership role to play if the business is to effectively leverage that customer asset. The marketing functions become more than to simply support the top of the funnel or provide metrics to the rest of the business. The data-led insights should proactively influence strategic decisions.

Social media is a prime example. While marketing typically initiates the use of social media within an organisation, there are other departments that use it to inform themselves on what customers are thinking, like customer service, or as a way to engage with prospects that are otherwise hard to pin down, like sales.

As organisations look to drive differentiation through the quality of the customer experience, it is marketing’s insight into the company’s biggest asset — its customers — that should be defining the strategy. The challenge for marketers is to grasp their insight, expertise and expanding sphere of influence to drive user experience and business change.

Marketing automation is arguably yet to have its moment within the gaming industry — it is one of the last crucial parts of the business to be automated. CRM and enterprise resource planning (ERP) are already toolsets, but few organisations have yet to achieve the true value of the ERP or CRM model and complete an end-to-end integration.

By streamlining the digital marketing toolset, creating a single process and eradicating technology redundancy before investing in anything new, marketers can start to focus on their true role — to drive the experience of the customer.

Sylvia Jensen is currently director of marketing for the Oracle Marketing Cloud in Europe. Jensen has held various marketing roles for technology companies such as Eloqua, WebEx, Palm, and Coremetrics.