Interview: Digital Marketing Services
Samsung SDS has a wide array of solutions for businesses and institutions. One of our many specialties is endpoint and security solutions: with the rise of IoT and high use of technology in keeping track of business data in the modern workplace, the need has also arisen for companies to make sure said data is secure from leaking, loss, or misuse.
Today we have invited James to talk to us about our Digital Marketing Services, our solution to empower your business growth with data-driven, personalised marketing experiences across all channels.
1. Could you introduce yourself and tell us about your role?
Hi, I am James Horsfield and I head up Business Development here at Samsung SDS Europe for our Digital Marketing Services.
Over the last 20+ years I’ve helped companies leverage the power of data and technology to deliver business outcomes to meet their goals. For most of the last 10 years I’ve been working with Adobe across a host of client companies and industries, to help them maximise the effectiveness of their digital marketing and customer experiences using leading technology solutions.
2. Please, tell us more about the Digital Marketing Services and what benefits they offer
Our Digital Marketing Services specialise in supporting enterprises in consistently delivering contextually relevant and rewarding digital experiences and communications across a plethora of engagement channels to their prospects and customers.
Ultimately this improves customer engagement and conversion so that our clients can over achieve on their revenue, retention and customer lifetime business objectives.
This is often referred to as Personalisation at Scale. And we really do mean ‘at immense scale’ to support growth goals.
The experience of working some of the largest technology companies across Europe, is no small undertaking and has provided us with a proven track record and wealth of knowledge / domain expertise to help companies accelerate growth through data driven marketing –our services include:
• Digital Marketing Consultation – to assess each client’s unique business objectives and their current ‘As-is’ approach to identify opportunities to enhance performance and make clear costed ‘To Be’ recommendations including technology, data architecture, use case or operational considerations and options as a roadmap for success.
• Implement & Enable – we also support the design and implementation of Enterprise Digital Experience /Marketing and E-Commerce platforms and train/enable the users to leverage these platforms to the full to execute on their marketing strategy
• Run and optimise operations – in turn we also provide managed services not only for the ongoing support and maintenance of the marketing platforms but also in the campaign execution to consistently deliver on goals and realise the full value of the underpinning technologies.
A data driven approach has always been at the heart of everything Samsung SDS has done from its inception back in 1985 and helped it grow to become a global ICT leader and a circa $10bn business.
The Digital Marketing Services we now offer beyond the Samsung group, are no different.
Being data driven is therefore not a new concept: We were, after all, building propensity models for direct mail campaigns back in the 90’s – (I’m showing my age there!) but the amount of customer data available in an accessible and usable format to power customer intelligence is now unprecedented.
How you securely govern, harness or activate this data and insight in a truly customer centric way becomes the opportunity to differentiate and deliver improved results by ensuring a consistent personalised customer experience across all touchpoints whether they are consumers or businesses, new customers or long-term advocates – their needs and intent need to be understood, respected and rewarded throughout their journey with your brand.
This is at the core of our Samsung SDS Digital Marketing Services and it all starts with delivering a rock-solid Customer Data Platform CDP - a highly robust, well governed and structured centralised 360-degree view of the customer taking feeds of data from a multitude of sources to enrich each customer’s profile.
Once you have this in place you then have the power to activate personalised experiences and communications across channels/ touchpoints, whether this is to social, digital ad channels, email, mobile, or web as well as off line channels such as retail store and customer service agents.
Through CDP integration with Campaign and Journey management solutions we are then able to automate these communications to reach the right audiences, with the right content, at the right time to maximise engagement.
Furthermore, we offer services to ensure the E-Commerce / online experience is streamlined, resilient and optimised to maximise revenue opportunities generated by these personalised experiences.
3. What kind of pain points can our services help resolve?
Ultimately most organisations face the ongoing headwind of increased competition, the challenges of the attention economy, heightened customer digital expectations, a cookieless future and the ongoing pressures on budgets while revenue objectives increase.
Brands are therefore needing to find ways to more efficiently attract the ‘right’ new customers and to then grow and retain them before they are easily distracted by alternatives, who then take a share of their customer spend. They also need to ensure that the experience was smooth, efficient and pain free, as we all recognise the impact a poor experience has on our propensity to try/ buy again, regardless of how good the product is.
This is where data driven personalisation really comes into its own, to tailor experiences and communications at the right point in the customer journey with a customer profile that continues to be enriched, from the anonymous first-time visitor to your website/ store / sales team to the multi-product, repeat-purchase loyal brand advocate.
Many organisations however lack the resource bandwidth or experience to thoroughly review, evolve or transform their digital marketing operations. In turn, enterprise customer experience platforms and digital marketing automation solutions can be complex to successfully implement and fully leverage the benefits. These are long term strategies and therefore need to be executed with the support of an experienced, steady hand to accelerate success.
By partnering with Samsung SDS we can help companies de-risk these initiatives to exceed their goals and also save time, money and nerves!
4. What are the uses and advantages of Samsung SDS Digital Marketing Services?
Our digital marketing services are critical to support an abundance of Digital Marketing and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and E-Commerce goals. They are just as valuable for B2B as they are for B2C business and use cases.
The uses and advantages are wide ranging from improving the return from your marketing investment with more targeted social / online advertising, enhancing your eCommerce execution to improve conversion and basket size or increasing customer lifetime value and retention by consistently personalising communications and experiences at all stages of the journey to keep customers engaged and loyal.
There are also number of key advantages of the enterprise systems we deploy and operate (such as Adobe Experience Platform) not only in the scale and security of the platform but in the integrations and activation points to support B2B and B2C use cases.
5. What gives Samsung SDS Digital Marketing Services an edge over our competition?
Having worked in the industry for many years, I have had some exposure to the many challenges of delivering these services successfully to time and to budget, day after day, month after month.
To see our Samsung SDS Digital Marketing operations, campaign and delivery teams in action is a real privilege. The team work diligently to meet our clients requirements across many countries with multitude stakeholders. These, in turn, all need different content and language variations, with diverse data integration and usage rules to maintain.
Samsung SDS Digital can offer advantages in 3 key areas.
• Time to value / Value realisation and Return on investment Achieving time to value and ROI is a critical consideration for companies whether this is adopting a new CDP or evolving / transforming their eCommerce or Omnichannel Marketing Automation platforms. Our team has been through the key challenges to support large scale transformation (think multi region, language and channel) and are fully aware of the pitfalls to avoid and the use cases to adopt to drive immediate impact. We can therefore help identify these opportunities and threats to rapidly drive success and help maximise return. This Personalisation at Scale experience has earned recent recognition, with our client Samsung Electronics Europe receiving an Adobe Experience Maker Award in the Catalyst (CDP) category at the Adobe Summit earlier this year and we were honoured to accept on their behalf at the event.
• Customer-Focused Partnership with tailor-made strategies for your business We know every company and industry have different objectives and requirements and therefore need a unique strategy. We are taking our enterprise experience and know-how to help organisations of all scales and sizes. We see this an advantage to clients looking for a new partner to support them in the delivery of their digital aspirations and enable them to capitalise on our team’s experience, expertise and delivery methodology to help them grow their business. Our approach is to become deeply aligned with our client’s goals by dedicating a highly focused team to each client / division - providing a higher level of attention in effectively and proactively achieving their specific objectives. We also recognise all projects have their commercial risks. We look to minimize this through different commercial and delivery models, from time and materials approach to fixed cost deployments leveraging on/ near and offshore teams to optimise investment and maximise return. We are also offering low or zero cost Digital Marketing Audits depending on scale as a first step, to assess and recommend approach, roadmap and business value before commencing investment around a larger scale initiative.
• Technology Expertise & Operational Excellence Realising the full potential and flexibility of these Digital Experience and Marketing solutions is a multi-faceted undertaking. It requires careful consideration not only of the data/ content strategy and technology deployment but also the people and process, which is where many transformations can fall down and fail to meet expectations. We therefore not only offer the technology expertise to implement and support the solution but importantly the operational approach designed for effective value realisation and growth.
6. How do you see the future of Digital Marketing Services?
Samsung SDS are always looking for ways to go further to support our clients by innovating and evolving our solutions and services to address new business challenges and help them exceed their goals.
This innovation will be achieved not only through our own combined portfolio of solutions, including Generative AI and IOT capabilities but also by collaborating with our technology partners and other innovative digital marketing agencies offering complimentary services.
Furthermore, our Digital Marketing Services are also an intrinsic part of our holistic Digital Transformation Services which take a complete assessment of a company’s digital maturity and needs.
Depending on industry this can be as far ranging as the design and implementation of Smart Factories for highly efficient and resilient manufacturing processes, to our Digital Logistics services and platform to streamline distribution of product to customer. In turn we seeing increasing opportunities for own Brity Automation (RPA) solution to enable organisations across a wide spectrum of industries to reduce manual processes throughout their operations.
We are seeing the great potential of combining these service and solution offerings with our Digital Marketing Services to drive even further value for our customers.
We are excited about the potential our combined generative AI, cloud and enterprise solutions and services will be able to offer our customers around to the world to revolutionise digital transformation initiatives to drive long term success.
Thank you, James!
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