What are the best practices for aligning your marketing mix with your customer journey?

What is critical here is to not assume what your customer's journey was yesterday, is their journey today. How, where, when and why your customer interacts with your product or service is ever-changing. You'll need to refresh your discovery process to ensure you identify these changes before you commit to your marketing mix and tactics - or your ad spend will not be efficient and your results not effective.

An example of integrated marketing could be a company that uses a combination of social media, email marketing, and in-store promotions to promote a new product launch. The company may create a social media campaign to generate buzz and excitement around the product, send targeted email newsletters to their customer database to provide more information and exclusive deals, and use in-store displays and signage to draw attention to the product and encourage purchases. By using multiple channels and platforms, the company is able to reach a wider audience and create a cohesive message that reinforces the product launch. This integrated approach can help to increase brand awareness, drive sales, and build stronger relationships with customers.

Leveraging your customer journey data when developing a mix model is potent. The data to support this is being collected all the time across your channels and is ripe for analysis. For example, combining your CRM and Web analytics can provide an end-2-end view. Add segmentation to the mix, and now you can be immensely calculating in how you spend your marketing dollars on paid advertising. It allows you to target the parts of your marketing mix that result in a more predictable and greater volume of sales. It affords you the ability to focus your spending on where your revenue is coming from. It can even help identify potential new opportunities currently unknown to you.

Aligning your roadmap tying marketing and customer journey will be not just in one part, it'll occur in several areas. It's a form of QA, being able to assess customer pain points and addressing their issues will be key for alignment. Having relevant OKRs and KPIs to track this alignment will be difference in a successful product.

An example of marketing mix models and analytics in action is a company that uses a combination of data analysis and experimentation to determine which marketing channels and tactics are driving the most sales and revenue. The company may use data from various sources, such as sales data, website analytics, and customer surveys, to build a model that can predict the impact of different marketing activities on sales. They can then use this model to make informed decisions about how to allocate their marketing budget and resources to maximize their return on investment. By using marketing mix models and analytics, companies can gain a deeper understanding of customers, improve their marketing strategies, and drive more revenue and profits.

A mix model is an example of multivariate regression. It will model how different predictor attributes affect the response attribute. The journey is one of the predictor attributes. But, you need to: 1) Segment your customers early. 2) Understand the journey of each segment. Leverage data in your CRM, Web Analytics, Support platform, and external data. Use statistics and AI to predict the probability of a type of customer completing a conversion goal based on their behavior and how it compares with those that came before them. 3) Build your marketing mix model. Now, if a customer clicks on paid ad X and they're in segment Y, you will have a great idea of how to engage and nurture them through to a sale.

Good examples of the key element: connecting to customers at a real moment of relevance. With our fractured media landscape and dwindling opportunities to tap into large audiences, the new target is "pinpointing the moment" a brand can become involved in a consumer's life. Be important, be invited into their personal journey. Creative on its own isn't captivating. But when it is based on key information or engages at the right moment, it sparks a relationship. It is the best way for a brand to humanize itself in the eyes of its audiences.