How Top Marketers Are Mastering the Art of Message Orchestration — Part One
There is an ancient proverb that says, “A man has joy in giving the right answer, and a word spoken in due season — how good it is!” (Proverbs 15:23). In modern times, we marketers refer to providing the right words at just the right time as message orchestration; but the end result remains — it produces joy for you and your customers. Of course, anyone charged with managing message orchestration for their company is by now thinking of another proverb from the fifteenth century book Vulgaria Terentii: “Easier said than done.” In today’s blog, we’ll cover the steps you can take now to better orchestrate your messages and restore the joy to your marketing ops team and your customers.
The Heart of Message Orchestration
Message orchestration is a complex marketing maneuver that requires you to strategically align all messages sent by your company (sales, marketing, customer service, accounting, etc.) while using a variety of channels (social, email, SMS/MMS, chat, push, etc.) and platforms (martech, sales tech, customer service tech, etc.). The ultimate purpose behind pulling every communication into alignment is the hope that you will deliver a cohesive brand experience, where your brand appears united in its mission and your communications are both relevant and timely. While this may sound like A LOT — and it is — what makes message orchestration doable for today’s marketers is the liberal use of AI-powered automated processes for integrations, data enrichment and management, and customer journeys.
Message Orchestration Tells Customer’s You Are United in Purpose
Message orchestration leaves nothing to chance. Every last single interaction a customer can possibly have with your company must look, sound and feel like everyone enterprise-wide is on the same page—from social posts and email newsletters, to lead gen campaigns, call center scripts, sales templates, and beyond. If there are words and pictures, it needs to reinforce your company’s values and your brand’s persona. Doing so allows you to send a subliminal message within your message that essentially tells customers they can confidently place their trust in your brand because everyone has their $hit together.
Message Orchestration Requires Thought and Strategy
In addition to leveraging AI-powered automations, orchestration requires careful planning, coordination, and above all extreme consistency. Sales and customer service folks and C-suite marketing wannabes going rogue and firing off missives with bastardized logos, wonky color schemes, and unchecked Chat GPT wording cannot be allowed, as mistakes like these instantly convey to customers it’s open mic night at your company and the amateurs are in control. This means, you may have to have some difficult and awkward conversations and meetings, but as a professional communicator, our money is on you to convey to your whole company the importance of appearances. It may be an uphill battle, but it’s one that’s worth fighting as our next point proves.
Great Message Orchestration Pays for Itself
When you orchestrate the messaging for your company well, you establish a cohesive narrative that guides customers on a smooth journey from perusing to purchasing your products and services. What’s more, message orchestration is a marketing strategy that is proven to pay for itself. For example, research shows that companies that use transactional communications (i.e. notices, emails, and printed bills) as marketing conduits enjoy a 25-30% higher conversion rate! This statistic becomes especially amazing when you factor in that its a result achieved leveraging just one piece of the messaging pie typically sent without fanfare by accounting. However, when this message is reimagined and orchestrated by marketing, it goes from being a generic money collector to a serious money-maker.
To recap, EVERYTHING your company is saying (and sending) needs to look and sound like it came from a single entity. Additionally that entity (your company) needs to appear polished, smart, alluring and singular in its approach. Brands that fail to implement a coordinated and cohesive messaging strategy are at great risk of missing powerful revenue generating opportunities. Even worse, they risk sending conflicting signals that confuse and alienate customers that were once reliable sources of ongoing revenue.
Simple Strategies for Effective Message Orchestration
As we noted earlier, marketing message orchestration has a lot of moving parts, but you can do it, and do it well, if you follow a systematic process and prioritize your to-do list. Here are our top recommendations for that to-do list:
#1: Prep Your Data for Messaging Success
All communications have one thing in common, the messages they contain are comprised of information you have and are sharing with an intended audience. This means the data you use to populate messages needs to embody the 8 Cs of Data Quality:
- Clean – Old and dirty data has been scrubbed and only fresh, clean data remains
- Complete – Data gaps have been identified and filled
- Current — Data is kept perpetually up-to-date
- Conformed — All data complies with the standards you have established
- Consistent — Redundant and inconsistent data have been normalized
- Comprehensive — Data has been enriched by high-quality, third-party sources
- Connected — All data sources are integrated well and able to share data and updates
- Controlled — Data is controlled from its point of entry and across all data-using sources
The art and science of implementing the 8 Cs of Data Quality is known as data orchestration and it is a process that relies heavily on AI-powered automations. Good data orchestration begins with connecting all the tools in your stack (the 7th C), automating data quality processes (Cs 1-6), and automating how data is shared, routed and stored throughout your enterprise (the 8th C).
Stay Tuned
Next week, we’ll cover more of our favorite message orchestration musts in Part Two of How Top Marketers Master the Art of Message Orchestration.
Get Professional Help
At Sureshot, we have a team of experts ready to implement data, messaging and customer experience solutions, as well as the automated processes needed to allow you to make marketing magic happen. If you’re ready to realize a greater ROI on your marketing initiatives, ask us how we can help you go from setting revenue goals to achieving them, or start by taking our FREE Martech Assessment.