Maximizing Multiple Marketing Platforms for Success
After 35 years in the industry, Chinese Laundry, a privately held women’s footwear company, continues to expand its influence season after season.
During Internet Retailer Conference Exhibition (IRCE) 2015, MarketingSherpa’s Courtney Eckerle spoke at the MarketingSherpa Media Center with Scott Cohn, Vice President of Ecommerce, Chinese Laundry.
Scott spoke about how marketers tend to establish processes or utilize platforms that work for specific projects or campaigns, but don’t always think about how it affects our customers.
“The biggest challenge we had is that they [platforms] were perpetually out of sync. So our inventory, pricing and a whole variety of other things that a customer expects to be consistent across channels, just weren’t consistent,” he said.
Whether you are looking to condense your blog platforms to update your content strategy or want to build product awareness, Cohn shared two key takeaways on maximizing multiple marketing platforms:
Be on the lookout
When undertaking a technology innovation, how do you begin to think about where you pain points lie?
Scott’s advice is to look for aspects that work, and for those that don’t, determine how they can be improved. Create a list of what you are able to do in the short term. You may not want to consolidate every aspect of the customer experience into one platform, but section out areas where you can test your challenges.
Although your CMS works for the team on the back end, how does it affect customers on the front end?
Chinese Laundry knew its platforms weren’t working in harmony, and were causing inconsistency for customers. That could interfere with lead generation, repeat business and the value that customers experience with the brand.
After creating a request for proposal (RFP), gathering resources for the project and establishing the timeline, Scott and his team were determined to leverage parts of the systems that were already in place.
Now, that may not be the route for you, but after dissecting the plan, your challenges will present themselves. Understand that trade-offs that will present themselves between your pain points and the customer experience — test to find the balance that is right for you.
Uncover solutions
Abandoning your current outlets isn’t always the answer. To discover how to best maximize your platforms , get ready to test and tweak extensively. To do this, think about what you can add, remove or change. Adding features or systems will require training among your teams and resources, and research is key to progressing by reviewing multiple platforms.
How can you ensure that the platform is a part of the larger brand story? Show the team and leadership how your campaigns or revenue directly contribute to achieving overall business goals.
It’s a tried and true quote: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”
When updating your platform, marketing strategies or even content, don’t feel the need to revamp everything at once. Start with what will affect your front-facing customer experience.
When it comes to back-end issues, decide if there are any aspects that can be leveraged “as-is.” Technology is a significant marketing investment, so the moves can’t be premature.
We’ll be heading to Chicago in a few weeks to bring you more stories of marketing, ecommerce and fun from the MarketingSherpa Media Center at IRCE 2016.
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Categories: B2C Marketing, Customer-Centric Marketing, Marketing B2C, customer-centric, data, research, technology
