Ensuring Digital Marketing Delivers Sustainable Results

An Acxiom White Paper
Ensuring Digital Marketing
Delivers Sustainable Results:
How Businesses are Managingthe Litany of Digital Media
By Mark Cross, Will Nipper, Mark Ogne and Ben Rothfeldwith assistance from Farrell WilsonAcxiom | White Paper
For many businesses, the digital world seems like an oasis
in the desert. As traditional marketing wells dry up, online
marketing directors are expected to save their businesses
during the economic drought. What once were boutique
groups focused on email or search marketing are now
teams managing the full gamut of online options, including
mobile marketing and social media.
As consumers interact online, online marketers need to track their moves. Unfortunately,different marketing systems and vendors make it difficult to truly understand how the range ofonline marketing efforts work together to influence customers. With limited resources, manymarketing directors are making critical decisions based on hunches and happenstance.
How can online marketers easily recognize consumer behavior across online media? Is there aneasy way to monitor the cumulative impact of all online marketing efforts?
To meet these challenges, many businesses are turning to managed digital marketing services.Designed to help online marketers control the chaos, these services help coordinate and trackthe full range of online efforts, improving the response of campaigns, while providing addedcustomer intelligence and improving customer brand experience. This white paper will examineonline marketing trends and reveal the many advantages of managed digital marketing services.
Online marketing trendsMany struggling businesses are turning to online marketing to save Online media is expected tothemselves. "With so many marketers chopping their budgets, traditional replace ailing traditionalmedia - such as print and TV - will see additional dollars flow online,"1 marketing channels.said Carol Krol, eMarketer senior analyst. For example, Century 21 RealEstate recently decided to stop all national television advertising andfocus its marketing efforts online. "Our own empirical results showed us that our onlineinvestments were performing substantially better at generating leads. We have a clear obligationto our franchises to stimulate clear and tangible leads, not just positive reference," said Beverly2Thorne, senior vice president of marketing at Century 21.
1Acxiom | White Paper
Social media is also hot. According to Forrester, "Marketers plan to shift next year's programdollars to social media at the expense of tried-and-true lead generation activities such as trade3shows, PR and direct mail." Social media marketing is a new and growing practice. A significant88 percent of marketers are using some form of social media to market their businesses, but4most are just getting started, found the Social Media Marketing Industry Report.
Data is blessing and curseThe online marketing group will need to prove its campaigns are Making sense of onlineworking or face cutbacks. A study by iMedia found that 59 percent of marketing data will becomemarketers would eliminate a marketing effort if they could not measure5 more important to prove onlineit and prove that it's working. efforts are working.Data is the key to measurement. However, the many online marketingoptions mean marketing is often inundated with information. "Many enterprises are overwhelmedwith data, and they spend a lot of money trying to integrate, organize, fact-check and otherwisemanage it. This leads to data redundancy and the lack of a single view, which damages an6enterprise's capability to make effective business decisions," stated a Gartner report.
According to a MarketingSherpa report, "Using the right mix of channels, content and timing7is essential to move prospects up the marketing pipeline." However, many businessescannot identify their best online media mix because they don't understand all the activitiesof their customers.
The benefits of a complete view of each customer are significant. A Forrester report stated thatbusinesses with "a true '360-degree view' of their customers - including all purchase history,support interactions, demographic profile information, propensity to buy assumptions, and8lifetime value scores - can in fact improve market share."
Analytics are another trend. "Using analytics to he... [download for more]