Constant change: Wednesday’s Daily Brief
An omnichannel strategy is essential, as is digital transformation.
MarTech’s daily brief features daily insights, news, tips, and essential bits of wisdom for today’s digital marketing leader. If you would like to read this before the rest of the internet does, sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox daily.
Good morning, Marketers, and what’s your backup plan?
Monday’s unexpected outage across Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp was just one more example of how marketers are getting the rug pulled out from them with little notice.
It seems like a constant stream of change in the digital landscape: new regulations, system updates, emerging blockbuster platforms like TikTok and the temporary or long-term damage to legacy tech giants like Facebook.
Omnichannel strategies are no longer trendy talking points. They’re essential. And what’s more, it’s about maintaining a connection with the customer. If one platform shuts down, your customer is no longer there and that channel becomes useless, for an hour, or six hours, or longer.
Chris Wood,
Editor
Making the case for transformation
It’s up to marketers to make the case for the technology they want to use. More than they might think, marketers hold the future of their organization’s digital transformation in their own hands. This was the message from Michael McCune, Senior Director at Gartner, at our recent MarTech Conference.
“Every marketing leader wants to break free of the constraints to their transformation, and often these constraints are portrayed as obstacles that others put in marketing’s way,” said McCune. “But it’s actually marketing that presents the biggest obstacle to its own transformation ambitions.”
That’s because marketers fail to define a goal or “end state” for the technology they want to implement, according to McCune. They also need to enable continuous improvements towards that end state, and they need to obtain consistent funding to execute those changes, over time.
Mailchimp adds optimization feature
Mailchimp, a marketing platform that serves primarily small businesses, has announced new functionality to help optimize email campaigns. Content Optimizer will recommend specific improvements to email campaigns based on an AI-driven comparison of the content with best content practices gleaned from Mailchimp’s billions of marketing data-sets.
The launch represents the first leveraging of Mailchimp’s acquisition of AI platform Inspector 6 in July of this year. Inspector 6’s offering analyzes brand content and makes optimization recommendations. It provides text and visual analytics and can now draw insights from Mailchimp’s extensive data.
Content Optimizer will make recommendations relating to readability, typography, CTA placements and compliance with brand standards.
Why we care. Content is king, as the saying goes, and no less so for SMBs competing in the digital experience economy where email remains an important channel. The difficulty SMBs face, of course, is being able to make a sufficient investment in content creation and optimization. They are either lacking in-house know-how and tools or reluctant to spend on agency support.
Invoca ramps up R&D
Conversation intelligence platform Invoca will announce new capabilities at its annual Summit conference today and tomorrow. The impetus of the updates is to boost the ability of revenue teams to take swift action based on conversation intelligence data.
The news follows the high-profile acquisition of DialogTech in May this year and the consequent doubling in size of Invoca’s R&D capabilities and acceleration of its development roadmap.
In June, Invoca launched Invoca for Sales to promote call-handling quality at the individual agent level and to automate the call scoring process.
Why we care. Invoca’s acquisition of DialogTech marked a very significant consolidation in the conversation intelligence space, and it’s reasonable to expect the organization to take the lead in innovation. What’s more, customers still talk to brands; they still pick up a phone and expect a relevant response. Conversation intelligence aims to wring as much actionable data from such interactions as can be gathered from online and social engagement. That’s where these updates are headed.
Website analytics that marketers should consider
Choosing the best marketing analytics tools for your organization’s website takes a certain level of discernment. Not every business depends on pageview tracking; product teams rely on valuable data that some tools aren’t designed to track.
“Over the years I’ve seen teams build up troves of unusable data,” said Lex Roman, Growth Designer at website optimization and design company Super Easy Digital, in her recent MarTech presentation. “If you want to be able to act on your data, your team has to be able to easily access and understand it.”
She added, “You want to use a tool that lets you decide what information matters to your team.”
No marketer wants to add more work to their plate, especially when it comes to tracking customer data. That’s why it’s so important to choose the analytics tool best suited for your business from the get-go.
Quote of the day
“People making jokes about the Facebook services going down make me sick. Anyone who was using an Oculus headset at the time is currently trapped in VR, and if they die there then they die in real life.” Gavin Young, Programming Project Lead, Ubisoft Montreal
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