A Business Guide to Marketing Campaign Orchestration

Collecting customer data and wrangling it into a usable form is easier planned than done. Companies struggle with centralizing and standardizing data from several sources, a process that can quickly become frustrating while slowing down operations. 

To solve for this, we’re going to dive into the nuts-and-bolts and benefits of marketing campaign orchestration. 

Table of contents

• What is marketing campaign orchestration?

• How campaign orchestration is transforming the way companies shape the customer journey

• 4 challenges of successful marketing campaign orchestration

• Segment: The ultimate marketing campaign orchestration tool

• FAQs on campaign orchestration

What is marketing campaign orchestration?

Marketing campaign orchestration is the process of sourcing, centralizing, and standardizing real-time customer data to create personalized experiences across different channels. It allows marketers to quickly run high-quality cross-channel campaigns using data from various sources – like their company website, app, social media, and more.

How campaign orchestration is transforming the way companies shape the customer journey

Marketing campaign orchestration is built on a foundation of centralized, standardized data. A single, unified data source enables you to pipe your customer data directly to the analytics tools and automation platforms, so you can refine and deliver personalization to customers at scale and across the entire buyer’s journey. 

But the more data you have, the harder it is to manage and make sense of it. Hence, customer relationship management (CRM) solutions are no longer sturdy enough to serve as the backbone of customer data. 

CRMs were built for an era when data sources were minimal and one person in each organization managed each customer. But in today’s multichannel world, CRMs can’t capture customer data holistically or connect it to the tools where employees can access and use it.

Effective marketing orchestration requires quick data centralization and team-wide access. To achieve this, more companies are adding customer data platforms (CDPs) to their tech stack. A CDP unifies and democratizes customer data, enabling brands to build consistent customer journeys and campaigns across all their relevant channels.

4 challenges of successful marketing campaign orchestration

The digital universe is growing exponentially, and more devices are creating loads of data every second: about 60% of the world’s population are internet and social media users.

Since your customers are always connected, your data needs to be too. Consider these common challenges most companies experience with campaign orchestration.

Challenge #1: How to break down data silos and unify your data

When you have data scattered across different channels and databases, centralizing it to analyze and properly target your customers with marketing campaigns becomes difficult or near impossible.

You’ll have to find a way to access and combine information from each team’s internal database. Say you ask each department to share their own data so you can collate it. Successful centralization requires every team to have a similar data collection and storage process so their data is easy to unify – but this isn’t always the case.

Ultimately, without incorporating and enforcing a standardized data governance policy across your company’s departments, fixing data silos, unlocking valuable insights, and running data-driven marketing initiatives will remain only a dream.

Challenge #2: How to make data from various tools & sources available to different departments

If your company’s departments only have access to data within their team-relevant tools, marketing campaign orchestration will be disjointed, generic, and ineffective.

Say your marketing team gets most of their relevant data from Google Analytics, your sales team focuses on Salesforce, and your customer support team prioritizes Zendesk. You have a lot of customer data stuck in different tools and sources only being used by the department that generates it. But you need a way for each department to see what others are seeing so they can engage with customers accordingly.

The best way to eliminate data blind spots and boost visibility is to collect first-party customer data – directly from channels where different departments interact with customers and in real time. This solution requires finding a tool that can seamlessly:

• Connect to all your company’s data sources

• Audit information from each of them immediately (for accuracy)

• Organize collected data into a single view that all departments can access

Challenge #3: How to get a single view for all customer interactions

A single view of all customer interactions is the foundation of successful marketing orchestration, but data centralization is difficult to achieve manually.

Imagine trying to export all your customer data from your team’s different databases into a spreadsheet for standardization and analysis. Depending on your internal processes and tool stack, your customer data is probably scattered in a million and one locations – from Salesforce, to Zendesk, HubSpot, Stripe, Facebook, and more. 

Getting a consolidated view of all your customer data from multiple sources won’t be easy. And if you can’t unify your team’s data, you’ll have minimal information to feed into your marketing tools, limiting your ability to run personalized campaigns.

Challenge #4: How to orchestrate customer journeys across channels at scale

Once you are able to centralize all your customer data and make it accessible across departments, the next challenge is being able to orchestrate customer journeys across multiple touchpoints at scale. 

Omnichannel customer experiences are great, but running several campaigns at once and en masse is difficult if you’re using different marketing software for each channel. So, now you have to find a tool that lets you connect your different marketing channels and push campaigns – email, SMS, push notifications, and more – all from one place.

Segment: The ultimate marketing campaign orchestration tool

Segment helps businesses understand who their customers are, how they behave, what channels they prefer and engage with you on. Here’s how. 

Centralize your data ingestion

Segment connects to all your customer data sources and standardizes the data collected from them, ensuring its accuracy.  You can choose to use the data for journey orchestration within Segment or export and use it on your team’s existing marketing technologies.

Create a single customer view that combines data from all channels

To orchestrate and personalize effective marketing campaigns, you need to have enough data on each customer. Segment’s identity resolution feature unifies all the data you’ve collected on individual customers across various channels into a single customer profile.

Enable cross-team access to all data on a customer

With the role-based permissions feature, you can add different team members to your Segment workspace to view and use customer data according to their specific needs.

Align marketing, sales, and support

Customer data from sales and support is also useful for campaign orchestration, just as marketing data contributes to better lead nurturing and customer service.

A single customer view and the team-wide visibility into customer data (that Segment provides) lets everyone access the right information whenever and wherever they need it.

Integrate campaigns across all channels to create a consistent customer journey

Segment lets you build consistent cross-platform customer experiences via our Journeys tool, preventing customers from receiving disjointed or random marketing messages across different channels. 

So, whether you want to win back customers who abandon their carts or encourage trial users to switch to paid plains, Segment is your perfect sidekick. Download our guide to omnichannel journeys to learn more.

Use automation to reach customers when, where, and how you want

Now that you have granular visibility into your customer needs, behavior, and preferences, you can reach them at any time on your preferred channels. But messaging customers manually is just as inefficient and time-consuming as manual data management. 

Segment automates the campaign management process, so you can easily send data-driven marketing messages – anytime, anywhere, and on any channel.