Jessie Chong, Trend Micro, says the modern marketer of today should be able to balance the art and science of marketing. Read the full interview for her views on how martech is changing the way we approach marketing.
With innovative disruption changing the digital economy, customer expectations are on the rise. How have you changed your digital marketing strategies to deal with rising customer expectations?
- It is an exciting time, we know that the customers are behaving radically different than in the pre-digital era, and our approach to business must change to match. Firstly, we rethink our image of customers, from individual to communities. Then we think of grouping them according to the core behaviors, then their roles, pain points, and then we create an experience that fits. The important part is: we should focus on the customer’s experience, and the experience should include online, mobile, and offline.
- Grouping, linking, aligning for execution are keys, and of course, the measurement to counter check if we really are making an impact are important. The modern digital tool has provided us a key to unlock the potential of tracking and measure.
- We leverage digital tools like social media, marketing automation tool, programmatic display, webinar, mobile app to integrate and compliment the traditional marketing engine like event, telemarketing, direct engagement etc.
How much impact does your social media strategy, and mobile app marketing have on your ROI? What are the online platforms that work well for your organization?
Social media is an important component and communication tool for us. When it comes to ROI measurement, we focus on the business goals, the key objectives and customer experience improvement. There’s no universal solution or way to measure across all channels or create some kind of generic ways to measure social media or mobile apps the way we measure television advertisements. Every component, be it social media/event/mobile app has their role to play in engaging customers or improving customer’s experience, therefore, it is not about whether that particular online platform works well for our organization. It is about whether the program works well as a whole, and how the customers react differently from channel to channel vs the content.
We do measure and explore to see how customers react on different channels and in what context by looking at the audience metrics, and engagement metrics.
Influencer marketing, AR/VR, chatbots, hyper-personalized marketing are the growing trends of today. As a modern marketer, what is your view on the use of martech in your marketing strategy?
Martech, in my view, is really making things faster, easier, and has reduced the marketing cost tremendously for marketers. It has changed the way marketing functions. Example: Running marketing like a media house has been made possible, as martech has helped to reduce the cost of creating content, time to market and publish it. Creating the unique experience for each customer has been made possible through martech.
In what ways do you think AI, data and machine learning are transforming the way we are approaching marketing today?
To a certain extent, it does transform the way we approach marketing. In particular, big data analytics has allowed marketers to reveal the insights that one might never have been able to achieve that few years ago. The use of machine learning or AI in chatbot have been adopted by many companies/organizations, the customer’s experience may be questionable, as human touch has been removed. It might work for some businesses at entry level engagement, but certainly not for all.
How do you describe a modern marketer of today?
Data-driven, open-minded, always focuses on the customers and observes their behavior. Last but not least, able to balance the art and science of marketing.
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