This article was originally written by Avanade alum Pierre Rieunier.

Expectations for what comprises an effective and successful marketing campaign have changed significantly over the last few years for both consumers and marketers.

As they look to build more direct relationships with end consumers, marketers in the Consumer-Packaged Goods (CPG) industry are entirely rethinking how they orchestrate and optimize customer experiences to grow the lifetime value of customers.

Today, top-of-funnel ad and purchase path personalization are not enough on their own. CPG marketers need to deliver hyper-personalization across all touchpoints – from those moment-to-moment experiences at the top of the funnel to long-term engagement – to create loyal customers.

A moment-to-moment experience might be sending a customer an app notification for a relevant discount when they enter the store – which creates the ‘Amazon-like’ experience that customers have come to both enjoy and expect. A long-term personalization strategy stitches together many moment-to-moment experiences across multiple touchpoints.

To deliver better experiences across all touchpoints at scale, you must pull together all your customer data across your full funnel. This will put you in good standing to adopt advanced personalization and apply growth marketing techniques that drive customer engagement, retention and lifetime value.

Define your marketing position
Before introducing new technology for hyper-personalization and related growth marketing tactics, you need to make sure everyone responsible for your brand integrity is on the same page and that your internal business processes are clearly defined.

To get your marketing team thinking as one, consider and agree on your brand’s 14Ps – an evolution of the 4Ps of marketing for the growth marketing age:

• Purpose (and perceptions) – your brand purpose, mission and value, and how people respond to it
• Product (and prototype) – growth hacking using different product variations across your portfolio
• Proposition (and packaging and pricing) – extending CPG packaging with SaaS packaging; identifying your value-metrics and how they should be combined to enable cross-selling and up-selling
• Promotion (and performance) – your data-driven advertising strategy and approach to real-time optimization
• Plays (and personalization) – how you take customers from interest to activation with relevant messages and offers that show recognition and empathy
• Pathways (and prioritization and profit) – the next steps you will take to identify the customers you can nurture from one-time purchasers to lifetime customers and high-value brand advocates

Introducing the right technology
Once you’ve addressed the 14Ps, you’ll be in a stronger position to introduce technology for hyper-personalization. To personalize your full funnel, you will need to consider a portfolio of connected technologies for both moment-to-moment optimization and long-term orchestration.

Adobe has technologies that can support both aspects and can also integrate with Microsoft technologies to enable human interactions to be part of your orchestrated customer experience journeys.

It starts with a Customer Data Platform (CDP) – a space to pull together 360-degree customer information. Adobe’s Experience Platform (AEP) provides the standard unification, enrichment and activation you would expect in a CDP, as well as a number of real-time enhancements.

These real-time enhancements power Adobe Journey Optimizer for second-to-second, minute-to-minute personalization.

Journey Optimizer is designed for consumer moments like point-of-sale experiences and events. It brings people through these experiences via notifications. For example, if a customer were to abandon a cart before checking out, they could be sent email or text reminders either encouraging them to purchase or feedback with why they chose not to.

This tool can also be used to send real-time, behavior-based communications, such as sending in-app notifications to customers who may be passing close by a store’s physical location.

Adobe also has a marketing automation tool that can orchestrate longer term customer loyalty journeys: Marketo Engage. Using lead scoring and multi-channel nurture tracks, Marketo Engage has the power to orchestrate both individual and account-based customer interactions in digital, hybrid, and in-person channels, over the course of weeks and months.

However, these hybrid and in-person channels may need additional support for full journey orchestration – and that’s where Microsoft technologies come in. For example, Marketo Engage has long had a bi-directional integration with Dynamics 365 Sales.

Microsoft enables extension into other parts of its Business Applications vision – including Customer Support and Field Service. Microsoft’s own CDP, Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, can be used to connect offline and in-person interactions, and many others from a broader business application ecosystem, back into the Adobe arena.

Bringing your teams together
For effective customer journey optimization and orchestration, you need to connect two crucial parts of the CPG marketer’s world – the systems of insight and the systems of engagement. Often these systems are disconnected. One team may know all the details of the customer, while the other is marketing to them.

Avanade can help you bring these two sides of the business together, leveraging Adobe technologies as an instant connection point. With Adobe and Microsoft technologies, you create a closed loop so that you can collect data and learn about your customers, then immediately provide a personalized recommendation to them, precisely targeted to where they are on the customer journey.

Get in touch
If you’d like to introduce hyper-personalization and growth marketing techniques to your CPG company, Avanade can help. Contact us today to get started.

What’s your experience of personalization and growth marketing in the CPG industry? Share your thoughts with us on our socials.