Marketing tools offered as standalone services, as well as marketing tools built into digital experience and CMS systems, present a wide variety of features. What is more, when you look at webpages, prospects and whitepapers of such platforms you may get the impression that marketing platforms are ready to use complete systems that will facilitate the growth of your business.
The specific tools promised miracles but in the reality often delivered nothing more than frustration. Why it is like that? The answer is simple but not obvious. Implementation matters!
1. Project planning
First of all, marketing features should be taken into consideration on the stage of planning you digital project. Managers responsible for conducting technological transformation frequently say that they need a new web page, a new e-commerce platform and new digital marketing tool and consider these features as independent points of their checklists — points that can be introduced independently one after another. Page, application, data platform, e-commerce and analytics should form a coherent and carefully planned ecosystem. That is why, implementation of digital marketing tools should be planned in context of every other building block of the project and each building block of the project should be planned in the context of digital marketing tools. This is the only way to achieve a fully functional digital marketing system. Careful project planning and experience of business analytics team are very important and crucial for successful introduction of marketing automation.
2. Implementation
Secondly, needs of digital marketing should be taken into consideration on the stage of project implementation. Features offered by marketing platforms and marketing tools integrated into digital experience or CMS platforms always require some kind of development and configuration in order to effectively support growth of your company. What is more, a vast majority of digital projects require marketing features that are specific for a particular industry and business. DXP and CMS platforms offer general marketing tools. Tools, which satisfy common business needs connected with marketing. Satisfaction of each and every marketing business need of your project may require developing a few additional marketing features or slightly extending functionalities of existing marketing features. In some cases these are small things making huge difference. Such development may introduce additional costs. If they are taken into consideration at the planning stage, they are not surprise — proper business analysis assures that they are part of the development process.
3. Experienced developers
Building new and extending existing marketing features can be challenging for unexperienced developers. Analytical and marketing ecosystems of leading digital experience platform form complicated structures, dealing with which requires thorough lecture of documentation and creation of agile, extendable and optimized code. This is the reason why you should consider the experience of developers and presence of digital marketer in the project-development team. Experienced developers are able to extend standard features of digital experience platforms in order to deliver specialized and perfectly-tailored custom features. Experience of our developers and their cooperation with data analysts and marketers enabled us to achieve a 360° customer view even in such complicated projects as canalplus.pl and multikino.pl, where we track interactions of users with multiple e-commerce services and aggregate data from numerous transaction sources.
What is more, in case of canalplus.pl we created a dedicated analytical solution measuring precisely the effectiveness of implemented personalization mechanisms, which in turn enables constant improvement and growth of personalization and other marketing features implemented in this ecosystem.
4. Trainings and workshops
Last but not least, your marketers should be properly trained. Digital experience platforms offer a wide toolset. Knowing how to use each tool doesn’t guarantee a success. It is important to know how to use each and every tool in context of other tools. Well thought strategical usage of full available toolset is the key to gain commitment of your customers. Digital marketing tools often require specific skills or unique procedures. That is why your team should be properly trained by experienced digital marketers. Infinity Group always delivers extensive documentation of every project feature and organizes workshops in order to train employees of our customers in fluent usage of all available tools. Some of our clients feel the competitive advantage in building teams handling other areas than digital marketing and outsource our qualified and certified digital marketers.
According to Digital 2021: Global Overview report (https://datareportal.com/reports/digital-2021-global-overview-report) 4.66 billion people use the internet (equating to 59.5 percent of global population). This number is constantly growing. What is more, thanks to mobile devices we spent more and more time being on-line. That is why investments in digital marketing are more important than ever before. Contemporary digital experience and marketing platforms offer a lot of features, but in order to fully utilise their potential your project has to be carefully planned, conscientiously developed and properly maintained. That is why implementation of a digital project is a task that should be entrusted only to a company employing competent, skilled and experience specialists.
