Marketing Automation: A Cross-Media Locomotive Fueled by Big Data

According to a study conducted last year by Scandinavian research organization SINTEF, 90% of the world’s existing data has only been generated in the previous two years. Social media has become a vast trove of voluntarily provided data about individuals’ daily habits, activities, and behaviors as well as their interaction with brands.

Marketers seek to harness and tame all this data, and the challenge of today’s chief marketing officer (CMO) is to leverage all this information to foster relationships with potential customers. The integration of “big data” with marketing campaigns is not a new phenomenon, but with today’s highly fragmented audiences all needing to be reached by different combinations of media channels, the emphasis is on streamlining and automating the process, as well as collecting back-end data on what parts of a campaign are effective and which aren’t, as well as using data to lead prospects deeper into the sales process.

One solution has been cross-media campaign development. The nebulous term “cross media” can refer to anything from the development of content for more than one medium—print, Internet—more or less simultaneously, to the ability to make print interactive via QR codes or Augmented Reality.

Cross Media 2.0

Today, the conversation in marketing circles is all about “marketing automation,” perhaps best thought of as “Cross Media 2.0.” Marketing automation refers to technology platforms that allow marketers to more effectively deliver content to multiple media channels (email, social media, websites, etc.) and automate as many tasks as possible. A decade ago, the cross-media conversation was content-focused. Today, it is action-focused, less about “How do I get the text and images from my catalog on the Web?” and more “How do I strategically and automatically deploy a campaign comprising print, email, a website and perhaps social media, and track prospects through the sales funnel?”

Marketing automation is a cross-media locomotive fueled by big data, and in fact many of the leading marketing automation companies started out in data analytics. As a result, the emphasis has tended to be on electronic media, with print often left out of the equation, largely been due to the perception that print is not measurable in the way that today’s marketers need media to be.

However, technologies like QR codes, personalized URLs, and more can in fact make print as measurable as electronic media. If someone scans a QR code and goes to a website, the marketer can determine exactly where that user came from—and thus how effective a particular print campaign was. And once users are in the sales funnel, they can be tracked exactly as if they came from an email campaign.

It’s all about the metrics.

Service With a Smile

There are many marketing automation players today and while many of them came from data analytics, one came from graphic design and production. DirectSmile was founded in 1997 and the company’s primary claim to fame was image personalization—custom fonts that spelled out people’s names using snowflakes or other images, and other examples from the early days of variable-data printing. The success of DirectSmile’s image personalization overshadowed its other initiatives. “We’ve been doing cross media for a long time, but the challenge has been to communicate that because the image personalization was so strong, and the whole world knows us for that,” says Christoph Clermont, Founder and CTO of DirectSmile. “So it’s been a hard struggle to convince them that we do much more.”

DirectSmile was acquired by EFI earlier this year, and while EFI will maintain standalone DirectSmile software, EFI is integrating DirectSmile technology into EFI’s Digital StoreFront web-to-print and e-commerce system.

“We are turning data into communication,” says Clermont. “As we all know, when it comes to print, especially when it is combined with email, SMS, mobile marketing, it gets fairly complex. We need to make it easier. We need a more streamlined tool where even someone who is not a techie can set up a multichannel campaign.”

Enter EFI DirectSmile, in which users can build a complete end-to-end cross-media campaign and, at the end, retrieve all the marketing analytics data that today’s CMOs require. EFI DirectSmile marketing automation tools are being targeted primarily toward print service providers. “They [printers] are looking to optimize production processes to, in the end, earn more money and offer new services,” says Clermont. All the functionality is done online via a drag-and-drop interface. It was also designed to be simple enough that end users—printers’ customers—can make small changes, like fix a typo or other errors, themselves. “It’s pretty quick to maintain a complex campaign,” says Clermont. “You actually build a complex campaign like you build a postcard. It’s putting multichannel marketing back into the hands of the prepress and the graphic arts people.”

The objective of introducing the concept of marketing automation and Cross Media 2.0 is to help printers recapture the non-print aspects of a campaign that they are losing when customers take print out of the equation. It’s about helping printers transform their businesses to better serve a marketplace that has changed—and will continue to change.

“It’s a system that supports what most printers are doing today,” says Dave Minnick, Director of EFI’s Web2Print Solutions Group. “If they’re doing a postcard, one-to-one marketing, brochures, whatever the case may be, they can scale up easily into these other areas of cross-media marketing. They’re already doing a direct mail piece, why not put a QR code on it that they can scan and go to a personalized URL or do a simple email campaign?”

“For some printers, it’s a huge task to transform their business, to keep and maintain their clients, and transition to provide a range of products,” said Clermont. “There are so many opportunities out there for printers. There are many many different ways they are doing this. There are some awesome printers out there today.”

Flaming Pie

XMPie also made a big splash back in the nascent days of variable-data printing. The company was acquired by Xerox in 2006, and since then cross-media campaign functionality has been added to XMPie’s suite of offerings.

“There is a large demand for cross-media solutions and Xerox and XMPie are providing advanced, scalable offerings that allow print service providers to seamlessly produce high-quality applications,” says Kevin Horey, VP and General Manager of Workflow & Solutions at Xerox.

For companies on the agency side, XMPie has the entry level PersonalEffect eMedia Cloud that can be used to produce a limited volume of one-to-one multichannel communications. Moving up the chain, XMPie also offers its Enterprise Cross Media, XMPie TransMedia, and TransMedia Pro. XMPie Circle is a cloud-based solution that enables multiple users in distributed locations to plan, visualize, collaborate, and run automated multichannel campaigns.

For print service providers, XMPie’s next generation of FreeFlow Core 4.0 offers new and easy ways to produce complex applications through software solutions that deliver highly effective, personalized cross-media communications and web-to-print portals. uStore8.1 offers customers a true out-of-the-box, web-to-print solution, and users can directly monitor customized “multi-touch” campaigns through XMPie analytics and administrators can now define multi-level approval hierarchies affording maximum flexibility.

“Advanced automated workflows from Xerox and XMPie unlock new opportunities for print service providers—a necessity to combat time, efficiency and costs challenges facing print service providers,” says Horey.

Precision Marketing

For Ricoh, marketing is about delivering an “omni-channel customer experience,” which is the goal of a service it refers to as Precision Marketing. According to a new white paper from Ricoh, Precision Marketing: Print + Data = Results, published earlier this month, Precision Marketing is defined as “a process that gives marketers the insights into customer behaviors that let them talk with customers in a relevant manner, relying upon the collection and analysis of data.”

We often hear the phrase “Big Data,” which implies something large and daunting, but it doesn’t need to be. Just like marketing automation can be thought of as cross media on steroids, Ricoh’s Precision Marketing is along the lines of “transactional printing on steroids.” Kicking off in Europe before coming stateside, Precision Marketing is enabled thanks to a partnership with SAS, the world’s largest data analytics software company. This gives Ricoh, and Ricoh customers, access to the latest technology as well as highly experienced data analysts.

Speaking the Right Language

Whether you’re smiling directly, having a slice of pie, or marketing precisely, being able to talk to CMOs and other marketing executives using the language of marketing automation and data analytics is becoming the way that printers—and print—can gain credibility in today’s Cross Media 2.0 marketing landscape.