Why Omnichannel necessitates “Audience Management” as your next business capability

This post is a view of my own personal opinions and does not reflect the views and beliefs of my employer.

Having spent more than a decade in CRM (Sales/Service), Marketing Automation (CRM in Marketing) and interfacing towards the Advertising World (DMPs, DSPs, Walled Gardens etc.),... What is starting to dawn on me, is that a lot of the “buzz” is focused too much on a single term or a single technology.

Often the business implications or outcomes this technology needs to drive, are forgotten. Reflecting on my observations and what I see on the horizon from both Tech and AI, I’m led towards a new, fundamental belief:

In the extremely near future, companies will need to have a single, centralised place from where they orchestrate prospect and customer experiences

Let’s deconstruct this for a minute. What’s the implications of this belief? Well, let’s try to understand your use cases for a minute. Most companies, irrespective of whether it’s B2B, B2C, B2B2C or whatever combo you feel like, the below represents a?non-exhaustive list?of business activities:

• Sales Call Lists
• Newsletter Recipients
• Look-A-Like Audiences (Ads/Other)
• Churn Prevention Lists
• Seed Lists for X, Y, Z Drip Programs
• etc.

Beyond this list, we’re starting to see a rise in “Real Time” asks across the board, which bring a whole new paradigm with it. Not now, but tomorrow.?

Add to this, the expansion towards a true omnichannel approach, in pursuit of the platitude: “right time, right message, right channel”. Based on what I’ve seen, my extension to that age-old saying would be a single word: “Unless”.?

Let’s make this radically simple. A customer goes to visit the “Terms and Conditions” page, or whatever your primary “churn signal” is. That person is now, in real time, on the list for your churn prevention initiatives. You might only action these lists, if the churn score is greater than XXX.

What I’m seeing today, is that companies are maturing beyond the first version of their real time requirements - and this is where we meet: “Unless”

The story goes something like this:

Put this person on the “Churn Prevention Call List”, unless:

• it’s actually a bad customer and we’re happy to lose them, or
• it’s a person who prefers written communication (email etc.) over calls, or
• Our company is diverting away from the product line and don’t have a meaningful alternative, or
• etc.

Your company. Your context.

The same applies to the more positive elements, of the experiences a person qualifies for: “Put this person on the 3-months happiness journey”,?unless?he/she is a member of these other 3-4 experiences etc.

On top of needing to?master experiences, you also need to?master channels. You need to determine if it’s Sales Call or Service Call (i.e. a human interaction), if it’s a Chat Message (e.g. WhatsApp, Messenger, WeChat etc.) which could be marketing initiated with bot support and a human handoff, if it’s a message (Email, SMS, App etc.) or if you’re targeting a person within the advertising domain.

Enter: “Audience Management”, Your Business Capability

“Audience Manager“ is a common term in AdTech and MarTech. From a business capability perspective, the best definition I’ve come across is from?Spiceworks back in December, 2020,. I'm taking their process framing, and adding more nuance to it, to bring it into a future-oriented definition of Audience Management:

Audience Management is the process of sourcing, managing, analysing, defining, and?activating?customer data across all organisational departments, that are looking to target and communicate a message to the customer. Outcome is optimising for both operational efficiencies and experience outcomes.

To make it more visual, I’ve crafted a POV like the one below. While the view is “marketing oriented”, given “experience” is often owned by the Marketing department. That said, the discipline and capability needs to be anchored across the business. This applies especially for the Sales, Service and Marketing teams.

Unfortunately, making matters worse, you’ll have vendors that blur the lines between the different boxes drawn below. Hence, focus?less on the architecture,?but do indeed?focus on the orchestration?of experiences and data.

To bring the above to life in your reality, you will face the choice - as a company - to either Build or Buy. Whatever you choose is your prerogative, but my thesis for the future goes along these lines.?

The Data

Your Audience Management solution will first and foremost need to handle:

• 1st Party Data (info about the prospect or customer)
• Behavioural Data (info about the prospect or customer’s behaviour)
• Other Data (info about your products, business, shipping, logistics etc.)

Within each of the data categories there are multiple different attributes (e.g. data the person gives us, data we infer about the person and data that we calculate). To not deviate too far off, I’ll leave that for another time.

The Orchestration

Once you have the data, then it’s about generating value from it.

Value from data comes from two parts:?Activation?and?Visualisation. The latter will enable you to better understand your business. It will enable you to understand the story the data tells and enable you to tell it to others. Whatever it might be. The former, activation, is about doing stuff. This is the central tenant of what you need to be able to do within your audience management capability.

To enable your business to run at speed, you need to be able to activate out to:

• Systems you own (Marketing Automation, RTIM tools, CRM, Website, Portals, Apps etc.)
• Systems you use (Advertising Networks, Walled Gardens etc.)

Down the line, you might also have strategic partnerships that will need to be considered. Both for what it means from a data and orchestration perspective.

The Filtering

Great, you have the data and you have the ability to orchestrate. What more do you need?

Well... You need the capabilities that enables your business to actually run and operate. This is the landscape of compliance (who can see and/or access what across brands, countries etc.) and the concept of operational flexibility.

The latter,?operational flexibility, is really about how you’ll work with the data. Most people can write a SQL query themselves, or get one from chat GPT. This will allow you to get the list of people that matches your specifications.

However, to take this to the next level, you need to be able to exclude a person from the list, because that person is on another list (or multiple other lists). In addition, you need to be able to see the size of your audience groups, understand the make-up of what increases/decreases your population size etc.

... and the key question, in the end, becomes: Who needs to be able to do this??The Database Developer or a front line marketeer? and what’s the acceptable timeframe from when somebody in the business has an idea/a question, to when they get an answer??

If the business or marketing need to first submit a ticket, only for an engineer to pick up it up days or weeks later, the window of opportunity might be gone, the business might have moved on, and you might have left impact on the table. For most, this isn't acceptable for the day of tomorrow.

In summary

Above is a light-touch into the topic of Audience Management. This is, to me, the actual conversation that we need to have when we think about the future of our MarTech and Business Technology landscape.

In addition, with the constant evolution in data sources, activation targets and the sheer features within the tools that offer “audience management”, to me, this makes a strong case for?buying?instead of building.

This enables you to spend your time in using an application becoming stronger in the?audience management discipline.?This makes more sense to me, as this will be a critical piece in the execution of your omnichannel strategy.

If you do need to build the solution, then I would encourage you to select the feature list from your top 2-3 tech vendors. Then take time to deeply understand what each feature provides. Distill the ones that are the most critical to you. When done, take these to those who will build it for you (IT or external partners), and ask them: How long time will you need, in order to build something equivalent?

And then of course remember, if they say 18-24 months, neither the markets nor the vendors you selected from, will be in the same place 18-24 months from now - they’ll have delivered an array of innovation since then ;-)

If you made it this far, I’m curious - what’s your take on this topic of “Audience Management” as a business capability? What are you seeing in your daily life?