How Top Marketers Are Mastering the Art of Message Orchestration — Part Two

In last week’s blog, we covered four critical aspects of mastering the art of message orchestration, that answered the following questions:

• What is message orchestration? When messages are coordinated and perfectly timed, it creates a unified brand image across all touchpoints a customer has with your company.
• Who needs to be involved? Anyone in your company sending messages needs their content governed by good message orchestration practices, from sales and customer service, to accounting, the C-suite and beyond.
• What are the benefits of well-executed message orchestration? Marketers who have implemented messaging practices on previously underused channels, like notices and printed bills, have seen increases of 25-30% in their conversion rates
• What are some strategies for more effective message orchestration? Ensuring data embodies the 8 Cs of data quality is the essential first step every marketer must take in order for content to send the right message to customers.

This week, we’ll continue our how-to guide for mastering the art of message orchestration by covering three additional strategies. But first, we’ll reprint the number one strategy that should be on your message orchestration 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:

1. Clean – Old and dirty data has been scrubbed and only fresh, clean data remains
2. Complete – Data gaps have been identified and filled
3. Current — Data is kept perpetually up-to-date
4. Conformed — All data complies with the standards you have established
5. Consistent — Redundant and inconsistent data have been normalized
6. Comprehensive — Data has been enriched by high-quality, third-party sources
7. Connected — All data sources are integrated well and able to share data and updates
8. 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 7^th C), automating data quality processes (Cs 1-6), and automating how data is shared, routed and stored throughout your enterprise (the 8^th C).

#2: Engage in Highly Personalized Audience Segmentation

Upon ensuring your data is in peak performance condition, you are ready to engage in a micro (highly personalized) segmentation strategy. The goal of this strategy is to put customers into smaller and smaller categories based on a variety of common variables that include everything from firmographics and geography to purchase habits, past interactions and customer behaviors.

How does this practice impact messaging? It empowers you to send relevant messages to specific audience segments that resonate with their specific needs. Understanding the unique needs, preferences, and pain points of different demographic groups, allows you to craft messages that speak directly to them, make them feel like your brand gets them.

Additional Benefits of Segmentation

Segmenting your customer base, and tracking those segments over time, enables you to identify and target the customers and prospects that are producing the most value for your company. From segments who do the most business with your company, and those who buy more premium offerings, to those who influence purchases, or send a greater number of referrals your way; there is much to learn and gain from putting your eggs in a variety of baskets. As you determine which segments are doing the most to grow and sustain your business, you can prioritize your marketing spend toward these individual segments and develop unique and personalized offers that truly address their needs.

Segmentation Is a Long Game

Developing micro segments requires time, research and care. When developing micro segments, it’s not uncommon to distil a list of hundreds of prospects down to just a handful of people, who share the most in common with your best customers. This method also produces a number of actionable insights that are easier to glean since the numbers are relatively small to process and compare. Finally, micro segments are ideal for performing A/B tests on campaigns, including those being developed for a broader audience segment.

#3: Ensure Everyone Is On Board With Your Brand’s Persona

In marketing, appearance is everything. How your brand looks and sounds is vital to your ability to not only be recognized (awareness) but present (sell) your strong, unified and desirable products and services to customers. When potential customers encounter a brand that is consistent in its messaging (voice) and it’s look (image), it allows them to confidently place their trust in that brand and more importantly, it gives them permission to buy.

Who Is Your Brand Trying to Be?

Just like a customer persona, a brand persona is the perceived physical manifestation of the personality of your brand. It embodies how your brand sounds, looks, and acts. Cultivating a well-known and accepted brand persona requires careful planning and buy-in from leadership before it can be executed well company-wide. When developing campaigns and messages, it is good to have a document that outlines “who” your brand is, so that others involved in developing messaging have guidelines that keep them from going rogue and misrepresenting your brand to a public that knows your brand and has expectations of how it should act.

Maintaining a Strong Brand Is a Team Effort

Whether your brand is witty or serious, smart or approachable, aspirational or attainable, luxurious or economical, etc. —everyone in your company who is sending messages needs to be on board with maintaining a consistent look and tone across all communication channels. This is absolutely critical to your ability to provide a cohesive customer experience. That being said, marketing needs to become a trusted ally for all departments sending communications. In addition, being proactive with regard to sales enablement and developing and maintaining a library of templates for folks in other departments to use at their leisure will ensure your brand is able to put its best foot forward at every opportunity.

#4: Implement and Maintain Omni-Channel Integrations

Seventy-three percent of customers use multiple channels throughout their buying journey. What’s more, your customers expect to have a seamless experience across ALL touchpoints—no exceptions. This means all of the tech that is involved in developing, personalizing and sending messages and campaigns needs to be connected and coordinated in approach, so that customers get the friction-free experience they demand. Whether you take a DIY approach to integrations or you have a tech-spert take care of this for you, make sure that there are multiple people on your marketing ops team that are able to manage cross-channel campaigns.

Monitor Channel Performances and Experiment

Coordinating multiple channels has a measure of the anxiety one might expect of air traffic control tied to it, so be vigilant in automating as many of the messaging and campaign processes you can until its practically auto-pilot. Lastly, make it a priority to regularly review the performance of your channels and allocate campaign funds and time to those that are producing the best results. Consider adding new channels when sales plateau. However, be sure to give yourself time to test new channels out on tiny audience segments to ensure everything is prepped and ready for take-off and landing.

You’ve Got This

Great message orchestration is about consistently sending compelling communications that resonate with customers and drive long-term success. By leveraging high-quality data and the insights it provides, segmenting your audiences in fresher and smarter ways, and aligning your brand’s look and messaging across all channels, your organization can orchestrate messages on par with top marketers.

Orchestrate a Symphony of Communication That Captivates, Engages, and Inspires Action

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.