The Truth About Marketing 2.0

Marketing 2.0. Is it a cliché, or a term that should be in every marketers vocabulary? And what’s it mean?

Those questions were hard to answer a few years ago. No more.

The term describes technology platforms that provide business intelligence, hyper segmentation and behavioral targeting. (Leading, in turn, to dynamic content and relevance.)

Most marketers have not yet used these offerings to generate better conversions rates and return on investment. They’re stuck in Marketing 1.0—that is, their customer data is distributed across multiple channels and they’re unable to measure definitive customer lifetime value.

The result? Their campaigns are conducted in silos, and they are sending redundant and conflicting messages to the same audience.

And don’t think that behavioral targeting and personalization solve everything. Failure to achieve channel integration can result in blind spots.

But there’s hope. Technology vendors are developing platforms that allow firms of any size to integrate customer interaction data from disassociated databases to build rich profiles.

Here’s an example: A Midwest retailer wanted to create an e-mail campaign targeted to past purchasers to boost repeat business. Doing this effectively meant knowing what they had previously purchased, and thus required integration between their loyalty and POS databases.

With that, the company deployed an on-demand, Marketing 2.0 platform to facilitate channel integration and segment past purchasers who had opted in to receive e-mail. It then executed a targeted campaign with pinpoint accuracy.

This campaign produced a 150% uplift in e-mail marketing ROI.

What’s more, the company was able to combine POS and Web data within the Marketing 2.0 platform to empower their marketing and sales teams to better understand customer behavior and deliver only the most relevant promotion campaigns to subscribers. Web traffic increased 40% within 60 days.

Rick Enrico is CEO of Juice Media Worldwide.