For marketers with a lengthy, complex sales cycle, it is still imperative to engage a potential buyer as quickly as possible with relevant information. In an online world, tools like “click to chat” help with those willing to engage  with vendors. In handling the volume of interactions of those who are not yet ready to engage - potential customers at multiple stages in various buying cycles - you’ll need a solution that can manage your strategic communications. A post on Marketing Profs, titled The Funnel is Dead, Long Live the Measurable Customer Narrative, highlighted a couple of key challenges for marketers as they develop this narrative:

1. Marketing is structured around campaigns, not customers.
2. Marketers don't measure a linked sequence of customer actions across all touch points yet; they still think in terms of pre-sale and post-sale, not a relationship that can last a lifetime.
3. Marketers have been determined to control the narrative rather than create digital touch points of content and experience; and then measure how people interact with those touch points.

This new reality poses a significant opportunity for marketers that are close to their data and understand their customer’s digital experience. SAS is doing a number of things here from a customer analytics, social media analytics and web analytics standpoint to help harness these vast data sources for marketers. Fortunately for SAS marketers, we are able to utilize these cutting edge solutions to help us take the best marketing action.  Our Customer Experience Analytics solution offers our marketing organization a whole realm of capabilities when it comes to matching online behavior to content and experience. We already do lead scoring to determine what sort of marketing interaction should take place (Matt Fulk talks about it in his post: Lead Management Automation: 5 Steps to Implementation). Our goal is to deliver personalized content and offers based on what we learn from online behavior – origin, depth, recency, frequency, social and more.

How to match online behavior with real time offers:

1. Develop business rules for one-to-one marketing Process and technology are the cornerstones for handling large volumes of interactions.
2. Lock down your content strategy I talked about tips for aligning your content strategy with your digital strategy in a recent post. Don't pay lip service to content. It is a critical component. No matter how fancy you get with your marketing and technology capabilities - if your content is no good - you aren't going anywhere.
3. Implement a solution that tracks and scores data across multiple touch points, utilizes marketing automation and optimization, and surfaces appropriate content and offers. A serviceable web content management system is critical here - either as a component or standalone.
4. Operationalize your web analytics Making behavioral data the engine behind real time offers gives you next generation marketing capabilities. As we continue to refine our digital strategy and focus on customer behavior to determine our marketing, it has become clear that the predictive capabilities of web analytics and optimization models are the marketing language of the future. Marketers using or developing them now have a succinct advantage over those who are not.

Portions of this post sourced from the white paper: Solving the Challenges of Lead Management Automation