Digital is no longer a channel.

It is the modus operandi for consumers, marketers and successful corporations.

Consider these comparisons: There are 1 billion cars and trucks and 3 billion credit cards in the world. But there are 6 billion mobile phones, of which 1 billion are smartphones. And while the world population is roughly 7 billion, there are more than 9 billion connected devices in use globally.

[source: Anatoly Roytman, Accenture Interactive] In today’s digital world, as customers make their way from anonymous browsers to engaged buyers, they may interact with a company multiple times in different ways. At any one touch point, 30 to 300 milliseconds may be all the time there is to make a connection and secure customers’ intent to purchase before they click away. Presenting the right content at the right time and right place is critical to driving relevancy and delivering the most personalized experience possible.

Efficient production, personalized delivery, and reuse of content across platforms, countries, languages, and agencies are required to drive superior marketing performance. Many companies are finding that cloud-based digital marketing platforms provide the foundation to deliver the most relevant customer experiences at scale and optimize marketing performance.

Digital Platform Building Blocks

Contemporary digital marketing platforms are highly flexible and facilitate a seamless, relevant, end-to-end customer experience across continually evolving digital channels. At their core, integrated digital platforms consist of four building blocks: data, content, analytics, and optimization (see chart, above). Each of these components plays a significant role in helping companies create greater relevance and a superior customer experience.

1. Data: The Foundation Of The Integrated Platform
Enterprises have an abundance of data on prospects and customers, but it is often locked in a variety of function-specific applications and channel-specific databases, or stored in third-party systems. To drive a seamless and relevant customer experience, the data needs to be brought together in a way compliant with relevant laws and regulations to form actionable insights that will drive desired outcomes. Integrated platforms should be able to collect, manage, and execute on the data that is captured through the dialogue with the customer. This includes Web clickstream data, social media, mobile, video, customer relationship management, call centers, point of sale, and third-party marketing systems, such as email or ad serving. By bringing all of this data onto one common platform, marketers can analyze their entire digital marketing investment and drive optimization.

2. Content: The Substance of The Conversation
Content is what drives meaningful, relevant connections with customers and, as such, is a mission-critical asset. Think of the different features and options to consider when buying a TV, or how each new release of a smartphone brings new features and uses customers need to understand. Or think of a car with its sophisticated entertainment platform and intelligent dashboard that transmits details about care maintenance, driver needs, and location services. All of these complex products require detailed description, promotion, and terms of services, driving the need for extensive content management capabilities.

To support this complex environment and deliver the experiences demanded by today’s consumers, the digital platform should provide the capability and flexibility to manage content in a multitude of ways. Slate, a daily online magazine, is considered one of Web publishing’s pioneers and remains one of the most popular online news and commentary sites. However, Slate.com had never been managed or published using a modern Web content management system. This made administering the site cumbersome and put constraints on what could be achieved with the Web site.

The company chose to implement comprehensive, enterprise-class Web content management capabilities delivered as a cloud-based implementation. This enabled Slate to easily add capacity and improve stability and performance, and keep the site consistently available to the public without administrative overhead. The solution reduced the time to publish content by as much as 50 percent and streamlined content syndication and mobile publishing across platforms. Perhaps most important, Slate can now respond quickly to emerging content and monetization opportunities, and count on a stable, flexible foundation to meet new Web content publishing needs moving forward.

3. Analytics And Reporting: Insight To Deliver Relevant Experiences
Within integrated digital platforms, analytics builds on the data and content foundation. Interactive channels generate an enormous amount of statistical information. Being able to interpret this information and direct content to satisfy consumer intent is essential for companies wanting to compete in today’s digital marketplace. An integrated analytics infrastructure provides the insight critical to deliver relevant experiences, monetizing content value and maximizing return on marketing investment.

Gaming and entertainment company Caesars Entertainment Corporation owns, operates, or manages 53 casino resorts in seven countries, as well as several golf courses. The company leveraged an integrated digital marketing platform to assist and automate analytics for 36 properties supported by more than 60 Websites under the Caesars umbrella. The platform collects anonymous visitor information about where visitors go on the Web properties and how they reached the Web pages. The data can also be segmented by property, market, or across the enterprise to give marketers a clearer view of who its customers are in aggregate and how they respond to site content. As a result of this analytics-based approach, the company is successfully optimizing the Web experience and increasing conversion rates by as much as 70 percent for dozens of online properties.

4. Optimization: Taking Action To Maximize Return
The final building block of the integrated platform, optimization, is about taking action on rich data and content to deliver the highest return on marketing spend and efforts. That action may be delivering personalized experiences in real time that engage and, ultimately, convert customers in ways not otherwise possible. Alternatively, it could be effectively executing multichannel campaigns—be it search, display, social media, mobile, video, or games—that optimize ad dollars to deliver the highest return possible.

For a global life sciences company, optimization meant digital production and content management services that enable low-cost content creation, and efficient reuse and approval of content across 12 major global markets and in seven different languages—English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Chinese, and Japanese. During the first two-and-a-half years of service, the company has realized tens of millions in cost savings, including more than a 30 percent reduction in content production costs and a significant increase in digital content availability as well as asset reuse.

Engineering Success

To truly give customers center stage in the organization of tomorrow, it is imperative that executives embrace a technology strategy driven by customer-centric digital platforms. This is a significant change of mindset from how enterprises have functioned for decades. Executives should challenge their current thinking that limits their world of possibilities and prevents them from taking a leap in new directions. A first step toward mindset change and organizational readiness is to educate the organization on the full capabilities and benefits integrated digital platforms can provide.

The customer life cycle spans a wide organizational berth, from the time the customer is first introduced to the business, to a sales transaction, to post-sales experience. This can pose both skills and governance challenges for using integrated platforms. In many organizations, there is no single entity responsible for the full customer experience because it spans marketing, sales, service, IT, and more.

While there is no one “right” organizational approach to govern the customer experience, many companies are finding that CMOs are naturally positioned to evolve into the chief customer experience officer, or “CXO,” because the data that is necessary to understand the customer is typically residing in the marketing organization. The integrated platform approach also demands a complex mix of skills across product groups, geographies, and functional areas that may be hard to come by. Some companies are using a Center of Excellence structure to leverage valuable skills most effectively and efficiently across their organizations and optimally engineer the customer experience.

Outsourcing the management of integrated digital platforms to an external provider is another organizational option, helping to work across functional silos, provide hard-to find skills, and manage the complexity of the rapidly evolving digital world. Choosing a cloud environment managed by a technology and services provider may be the most direct path to delivering results. But it is important to consider a technology solution that is integrated, flexible, and available in the cloud or on an as-a-service basis

Optimized Experiences, Optimized Investment

Companies are discovering that through integrated digital marketing platforms, they can increase the sign-up rate for a loyalty program by 10 percent, increase Web site lead conversion by more than 100 percent, improve conversion on a major brand campaign by 33 percent, or simply reduce the time it takes to generate reports by a factor of 20.

By outsourcing content creation and management technology and operations, companies can focus on content quality while their outsourcing partners focus on optimizing operations. For example, one large global consumer electronics enterprise outsourced its digital marketing platform, content creation, and content management function. Rather than focusing on operations, the global Web team was able to focus on the needs of the core business and monitor the actual quality of the content, particularly localized content for each region. As the outsourcer focused on managing the central content management, it was able to create consistency in operations, content, and branding. In addition to optimizing operations, this process resulted in a cost savings of as much as 30 percent in the first year.

Most important, the integrated digital marketing platform enables organizations to offer highly relevant experiences to customers who are constantly adapting, taking on new devices, and evolving their needs. When structured and managed effectively, these platforms provide a flexible, seamless foundation to present the most compelling content at each customer interaction, drive greater engagement and higher conversion rates, and to generate significant business results.