Cross-channel Marketing: Building a Total Customer Experience

Katie Manty SVP of omnichannel marketing at Omnicom Health joined Twinning Strategy for our 7/19 livestream to dig into the cross-channel customer experience. For me, the non-marketer, omni-channel marketing is not exactly a day to day term that I use. Katie explains, it is the digital era's term for 'customer experience' bringing together the full-range of interactions that your consumer has with your company: the e-mail, the digital ad, the print ad, the retail store visit, the e-commerce site, and the social media presence to name a few. It's not easy, Katie points out, to get this right on a straightforward product. In the healthcare space, it gets even harder. Healthcare, rightfully, is focused on patient privacy and regulatory requirements. Certainly selling or leaking your private health data to an advertiser to enable companies to identify you as a diabetes patient that might by their product is about as clear of an ethical and legal violation as it gets. However, patients and doctors are still consumers who may truly benefit from you healthtech, your services or your medications. There is a right way to do this using tools from classic segmentation, understanding correlated behaviors, and adopting AI tools that can analyze hidden trends in your data. 

Katie's opening thought were focused on the heavy trends toward AI usage. The tools are powerful and improving everyday. But she brings up the key point that the data is the ultimate source of that power. Many companies are not ready because they are not capturing the key elements of their transactions that could elucidate the trends, or they are living in the world of siloed systems that don't or can't communicate the important information that would enable the product driving insights. Many companies sit at the beginning of the data analytics processes, struggling with descriptive analytics never mind advancing though diagnostic, predictive and prescriptive applications. As we have heard from many guests, AI is a tool in the toolkit, not magical panacea that cuts the Gordian knot of your company's broken data strategy.

While the new and hi-tech is always more exciting to talk and think about, Katie's analysis suggests that we need to look back a bit to marketing roots and think about context-based marketing and customer experience--i.e. why is the customer where they are on-line? are their alignments with your target group and other activities? Alzheimer's consumer profiles, she mentions, correlate with older and wealthier demographics--the marketer might work with wealth management groups. The golf-crowd might be a great focus for a product, but are the wine aficionados receptive. She also emphasizes that omnichannel marketing is a team sport. It is a classic problem of marketing teams  IT and tech infrastructure focused departments not communicating efficiently. In this age of digital marketing, data analytics, large-language models and AI in general, that the tech teams and the marketing, creative and strategy teams need to learn to work together.

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