What Is Dynamic Marketing?

How and when brands interact with their customers has changed significantly in recent years. Frank Dudley, a lecturer at Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications at Northwestern University, explains how a dynamic marketing approach drives engagement at every touchpoint, using various channels, and at every stage in the consumer journey.

Transcript

During most of the first decade of the 21st century, we have seen the evolution of digital marketing in terms of channels, including social media, mobile apps, et cetera. However, up until about 2015, almost all digital marketing was still primarily direct marketing over the internet, and was added to marketing services, as it was perceived as one of the many ‘below the line’ marketing functions.

Since 2015, we have been in the era of dynamic marketing, in which digital is no longer a functional below the line area in marketing. In the era of dynamic marketing, all marketing is digital, or digitally enabled, and is driven by customer data and technology. Brands are no longer primarily built through TV advertising alone, but through ongoing customer engagement that can be viewed, shared, reviewed, tracked, and optimized in real time.

We have entered a new age of marketing, whereby customer engagement is driven across multiple channels and various stages of a customer journey for specific segments of customers. There are sometimes multiple customer touch points within several media channels for just one stage of the customer journey.

For example, when in the consideration stage of the journey, you might search on Google, read recommendations on Amazon, Yelp or the company’s website; and seek input from others through social media, such as Facebook or Instagram. Dynamic marketing is a truly new and exciting form of marketing that leverages customer data, both structured and unstructured, to respond to, or anticipate, customer needs within a particular circumstance and with the most relevant content and via the most preferred channel  to fulfill those needs. This enables real-time interaction with customers on a more personalized basis. Unlike the traditional static approaches to marketing that primarily rely upon stimuli to elicit a response from a prospect or customer, a dynamic approach to marketing is much more interactive and fluid. It’s always on.

It’s important for marketing customer experience leaders to understand where a customer is in their journey with the brand and how to trigger the next best action to drive the customer to the next stage in the journey. Today, companies such as Salesforce, Adobe and Microsoft are enabling dynamic interaction with customers and prospects in new and innovative ways.