Got the R Factor? Digital Marketing in the Era of Consumer Relevance

In today’s digital world, 50 to 500 milliseconds may be all the time there is to say something interesting to consumers and secure their intent to purchase before they click away. It is the Era of Relevance. Consumers are in control—they want relevant offers online, on the go and at the store. They reward relevance but punish irrelevance by clicking away, disengaging and—worse—broadcasting their dissatisfaction through social media. With seemingly unlimited consumer choices and intense competition for limited consumer attention, only relevance rises above it all. Relevance impacts the entire enterprise and is increasingly required to drive breakthrough business performance. Marketers must evolve to orchestrate it across all consumer touchpoints with the R Factor.

Infographic: Got the R Factor? Amazon, Apple and Facebook have built their reputations and business models with a singular focus on consumer relevance. Interact with this Infographic to uncover the keys to mastering the R Factor.

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The R Factor is consumer relevance AT SCALE. It is the ability to consistently unleash relevant experiences across all channels, consumer intent segments and geographies. Doing this means cost-effectively scaling every essential function—channels, actionable data insights, segmented content, enabling technologies and more—while continually monitoring performance in real time and rapidly responding to new consumer insights. Discover how the R Factor is transforming marketing and business and learn the essential building blocks to achieve it.

Consider companies such as Google, Amazon, Apple and Facebook. They have built their reputations and business models with a laser focus on the R Factor. Masters of intent marketing, they get the right content to the right people at the right time consistently across all channels.

For example, Google’s Quality Score algorithm measures relevance and is directly related to how much advertisers pay for an ad. Amazon built its business model on consumer relevance, offering consumers never-before-seen automated recommendations for individual purchase intents. With this model, Amazon morphed from an online bookseller to a global retail marketplace. Apple’s iTunes has changed the way that people listen to music and interact with digital content.

Trading successfully in this new currency of relevance, companies like these and others are getting ahead in the Era of Relevance and transforming daily life. What’s more, they are blurring the traditional lines between marketing and business functions so much so that the status quo in marketing no longer applies.

Having the R Factor does not mean creating more campaigns, websites and costs to appeal to each consumer segment. It is about using the economy and flexibility of scale to make relevance affordable and effective at every moment of truth, every time.

It means that less is often more—smartly putting data and technology to work to ensure that each campaign precisely targets the right visitors and each experience is directly relevant to each target’s intent. Simply put, in today’s consumer-driven environment where digital is ubiquitous but not monolithic, the R Factor appears to be a must-have, do-or-die imperative for every consumer-facing company. It touches and enables all aspects of consumer interactions and enterprise activities—and marketing organizations must evolve to lead the charge to change.

Companies with the R Factor approach marketing with the precision, intensity and business savvy of seasoned Wall Street traders. They know that the Era of Relevance has changed the face of marketing, and they have freed themselves from crippling and dated views of “traditional” marketing.

More and more, marketing is about improving and sustaining business performance while controlling costs. It is about remaining present and relevant to prospects at multiple moments of truth while justifying budgets and demonstrating quantifiable return on spend.

While the benefits of the R Factor are clear, most companies are not yet positioned to realize them in full. Whether a company takes a transformational or phased approach to reinventing performance, the pursuit of the R Factor begins with several essential building blocks:

1. Mend the seams
   Create integrated consumer experiences across every channel based around consumer intent.

2. Decipher big data
   Gather and act on target consumer context and intent in precise and nuanced ways.

3. Connect fragmented data
   Integrate isolated data from independent functional silos and multiple disconnected services providers.

4. Balance butterflies and bytes
   Combine cutting-edge creativity and cutting-edge analytics to make adjustments based around consumer intent.

5. Encourage continuous optimization
   Leverage component-based content structures that are optimized to drive flexible consumer experiences at scale.

6. Drive agility and innovation
   Rapidly adapt, integrate and deploy the latest technology and data innovations and measure performance along the way.