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With an eye toward the future, the IFA Marketing & Technology Committee continues to focus on integrating the best of both disciplines.
By Linda Shaub, CFE
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Over the years, technology has changed how marketing works. What is different today, is the velocity of change in the development of marketing tools, the use of new technologies and the increase in expectations for better experiences for our customers.
Virtually anyone involved in marketing today is also involved in technology. And, on top of that, we’re finding ourselves living in both an analog and digital world. What remains ultimately important is that a brand is no longer defined by how it describes itself to a relatively static audience. It’s defined by how it acts, what it feels like and how others engage with it. Connected consumers rely less on top-down messaging and more on increasingly diverse, brand touch points that involve the use of technology. They choose when and how to engage and formulate their own personal brand perceptions.
It is becoming increasingly clear that to be successful, marketing and technology have to embrace the fact that online, offline, mobile and social marketing all influence customers and they must work together to ensure success. This complexity makes it more challenging than ever before. But it also presents new opportunities. This collaboration facilitates the growth of the brand in a new direction that mutually benefits a consumer’s experience.
The brands that can effectively connect the dots and create alignment between not only marketing and technology, but also operations will be the winners going forward. Working in silos is simply not an option. The walls must be broken down in order to effectively collaborate on providing the best possible customer experience.
IFA recognizes the need for these two disciplines to sit down at the table together and discuss how they can best capitalize on the new marketing and technology landscapes. And so the IFA Marketing & Technology Committee was born with the intent of focusing on how franchise marketing and technology professionals can not only co-exist but push the limits of integrating the best of both disciplines.
One way the committee is doing that is through IFA’s FranTech Conference, a program that brings together marketing and technology professionals to address similar challenges, share solutions and discover the latest tools and strategies for optimizing and integrating these two critically important facets of any successful franchise brand.
At FranTech each year, the committee develops programming that focuses on how marketing, technology and the everyday operations of the franchise business must work in tandem to stay competitive, relevant and on the cutting edge to drive peak performance and growth. Topics featured at this year’s FranTech in October included customer data management, tracking online behavior, measuring the ROI of PR, social and content marketing, integrating marketing and technology efforts, developing digital initiatives that tie to your franchise’s long-term goals, and more. In its fourth year, FranTech continues to evolve and this year, the winners of awards for best B2B and B2C campaigns provided excellent examples of how brands are aligning all the disciplines, technologies and tools to effectively engage with their customers. Tropical Smoothie, the winner of the best B2B campaign, shared tactics and tools which led them to increased conversion rates with costs well-below industry averages. Sport Clips, the winner of the best B2C campaign, was also able to document excellent results from multi-channel touch points.
The IFA Marketing & Technology Committee also develops and hosts a three-hour summit at the association’s flagship event, the IFA Annual Convention. Widely popular and attended by more than 400 franchise professionals each year, the Digital Marketing & Technology Summit showcases future trends, case studies and roundtable discussions on specific hot topics bringing together these two disciplines and others under one roof. This year’s Summit is scheduled during the Convention on Monday, Jan. 30 from 9:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, so be sure to make your plans to attend.
Clearly marketing and technology trends are ever-changing and important — so much so that IFA has a committee of professionals devoted specifically to monitoring and addressing the needs of this growing group. So how should brands and their internal teams prepare themselves going into 2017?
- Seek out internal collaboration. This must come from the highest levels of the organization. Crossing departmental lines must be the rule and not the exception. Set a goal of eliminating functional silos to better engage with customers across all touch points.
- Embrace velocity. Everyone acknowledges that if you think change is coming fast right now, buckle up because it is going to go even faster. Move thoughtfully but quickly.
- Become inventive. We are living in the age of disruption. Look at what is happening and consider how you can disrupt your current way of thinking about both technology and marketing. Disruptive technology is defined as new ways of doing things that disrupt or overturn traditional business methods and practices. You may need to alter the way you approach your business, or risk losing market share or becoming irrelevant.
- Simplify. Look at ways to use technology to make it simple for your customer. Fill them up with small bites of information. Make it easy for customers to interact with you.
- Focus on the experience. What matters is the customer experience across all touch points. Think about the entire experience itself as a channel. Remember that digital customers interact differently around brands. What they expect and how they inform themselves is radically different from consumers before them. They’re socially connected, often technology-savvy and increasingly brand disloyal. Bad experiences travel fast, but great experiences travel even faster.
- Understand your customer. Dig deeper into problems they are trying to solve or jobs they are hiring you to do. Think about how you can acquire customers, engage with them and then delight them. Not just for the short term but over different channels at different times.
- Consider data and information a necessity. How you are able to gather, utilize and protect data will become even more critical. The goal is to route data from every channel to meet audiences on the decision journey with contextually relevant offers and experiences that can be measured to achieve the desired performance. Also, protecting that data must become a top priority. Cybersecurity is a business issue and not a marketing or technology problem.
- Keep creativity as a priority. It’s easy to put creative into the bottom half of challenges, because everyone is preoccupied with the plumbing of integrated marketing and digital marketing in general. What will be stored and where? How will we segment? Can we apply what we know about a customer in one channel to another? How do we tune our media mix as it becomes more complex? It’s easy to see why creative can quickly become an afterthought. But that’s a mistake.
In a world of changed expectations from always-connected consumers, every traditional and digital touch point has an impact on how brands are perceived and built. Whatever your role within your brand, you have the power to be a brand builder through internal collaboration and the understanding that working together is not only the best option, but the only option in today’s ever-changing environment. If you are interested in learning more about IFA’s Marketing & Technology Committee efforts and/or volunteering to get more involved, please contact IFA’s Scott Lehr at slehr@franchise.org.
Linda Shaub, CFE, is Senior Vice President of Marketing & Brand for Interim HealthCare. She is the Chairwoman of the IFA Marketing & Technology Committee.