I was met at Heathrow this morning by a huge banner advertising Microsoft’s Cloud offering through their partnership with The Special Olympics (SAP have a similar piece of hero content that I wrote about previously).
Since Passle is a business that enables organisations’ employees to create authentic content I decided to look into why Microsoft would spend in excess of £500k (I estimate) on a banner and further online personalised content.
I found several reports however the article below grabbed my attention given the clear warning to businesses and marketers. If you are in doubt that online authentic and personalised experiences are necessary to drive business growth then I highly suggest reviewing the entire PwC report here.
94% of senior-level executives* believe delivering personalization is critical or important to reaching customers according to PwC.
So if this is such a critical business operation why is it underserved? Most interestingly ‘a lack of skilled staff’ ranks highly. Out of the 369 senior-level executives at large companies around the world surveyed which include quotes from AT&T, HSBC, SAP, Progress Software, Cisco and Bank of America I know for a fact, since I deal with these businesses, that it is not the lack of skills but the ability to extract knowledge from the staff.
The CSO of Digital Services at PwC summarises the report:
“The fundamental challenge facing the CMO as they attempt to deliver personalized experiences to their customers is that unless they put in place a content operating model that scales, the volume, cost, and complexity of content they need to support revenue growth will increase”.
*these were heavy weight industry leaders
At the end of the day, marketers will not be able to “write” or “spend” their way out of this problem. They will have to change. According to Brad McLane, Managing Director of RSR Partners “CMO’s that do not make the transition from marketing to publishing (content, curation and community) put their growth strategies - and careers- at risk” So how can CMO’s find more sustainable and cost effective ways to produce and manage highly personalized and relevant content at the scale needed to support growth? The PwC research suggests there are several things leading marketers can do to make it easier and more cost effective to fuel their personalization programs
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