“One clothing brand turned Fashion Week into its own interactive shopping playground. Real-time video, data and rich user-generated content from celebs was combined with user-generated fashion selfies pointing at a curated catalog for real-time shoppable fashion. The result? The brand saw a 75 percent sales uplift on trends featured in the campaign”.

In a report that enlists the 2016 Watchlist “Key moves To Improve Your Digital Marketing Fitness”, published by Gartner, the three key moves that can set your Brand apart from the competition include getting a customer view, investing in Data abilities and being an agile organization. Gartner for Marketing Leaders looks at the Digital activities of brands that have created exceptional customer experiences across channels to help you achieve digital marketing success.

The view propagated by newer competitive environment requires organizations to move beyond a unified view of the customer, to understand how the customers view the organization. Gartner proposes to get a unified view of the customer the organizations need to develop tools such as  master audience profile including:

 • Demographic or firmographic information

• Website and app activity

• How the customer responds to marketing communications and advertising

 • Social behavior

• Data acquired from third parties

Gartner For Marketing Leaders has suggested eleven ways to create an organization that helps you view customers from outside-in. The orientation needs to change to include a unified view of the customer, with a view that helps the organization understand the way customers view the organization. Another important reason for the organization to succeed is to assign the customer’s complaints to the right team for faster and better response. Further to assigning the customer insight to the right team, Gartner for Marketing Leaders points out the need for closing the feedback loop.

 1. Close the loop with the customer when a customer incident occurs.

2. Close the loop internally to understand and address the root cause of common incidents

The other important factors are the long-term view of the customer, move commerce experiences beyond the storefront with curated shopping experiences across channels, creating seamless multi-channel experiences and personalizing mobile experiences.

“Retailers said 15.5% of their brick-and-mortar sales in Q1,2015 came from mobile channels, up from 3.7% during the same period in 2013.”

To get in the game of Analytics and Data management, Gartner has suggested Investing in Data Analytics skills,  making data measurement a team activity, sharing social insights, create real-time marketing moments and analyzing competition.

“Better customer engagement, conversation and outreach (the differentiators of social marketing) ranked behind reach, awareness, targeting, increasing audience size and driving sales (traditional advertising metrics) as successful focus points”.

Data Driven approach and the emerging role of real-time interactions requires organizations to redefine their KPIs and Metrics. the third key move that will determine your brand success in Digital is Investing in Agility. Brands that have set themselves apart with performance that has over-indexed consistently are known to be agile.

To achieve the level of agility required to respond to competition and succeed in achieving the required differentiation in the market, Gartner for Marketing Leaders recommends creating teams that can perform and disband in weeks with faster sign-offs, fluid responsibilities and flexible roles. The other suggestions from Gartner include creating a Virtual talent bench that lets you scale up operations, create a content supply chain that ups the marketing effort to deliver on key marketing requirement, collaborate with your agencies as strategic partners, Tailor marketing to environments to deliver on better customer experience. The Internet of Things, though relatively new creates newer opportunities for marketers to deliver on customer experiences in newer ways.

Source: Gartner and eMarketer