Creating a Single View of Customers to Sharpen Marketing Impact

[brian_conner]

Journey to Optimizing Marketing Automation Tools

As companies continue to embrace digital transformation, an important part of the process is upgrading systems and adopting new ones to save time, increase efficiencies, and improve productivity, all with the end goal of accelerating business growth.

Konica Minolta Business Solutions U.S.A. Inc. (Konica Minolta) prides itself on helping its customers navigate the digital transformation journey. Committed to reshaping and revolutionizing the workplace, it offers an expansive portfolio of smart office solutions, including advanced document management technologies, application solutions, and IT services from the desktop to the print shop. With its strong culture of innovation that is constantly evolving, the company stays ahead by continually upgrading its products and technologies to deliver complete solutions. This includes the manufacturing, servicing, and sales of office systems, digital presses, production print systems, printers, vertical application solutions, and related services and supplies.

For most companies, implementing new systems and solutions often yields an influx of data that is likely more than they had access to in the past. Management of that data becomes paramount to business growth and profitability. One example of how that data is used is for lead generation. Good marketers thrive on data and the clarity and guidance it can provide to execute campaigns that deliver qualified leads to its sales force and enable an optimal customer experience.

Enabling true insights into customer behavior

In the spirit of digital transformation and providing the most meaningful customer experience through relevant and contextual content and messaging, when Konica Minolta’s license for its legacy marketing automation solution was about to expire, the company took the opportunity to replace it.

Every modern marketing team knows the value of marketing automation. These software platforms are used by organizations to streamline, automate, and measure marketing tasks and workflows to deliver the most qualified leads to their sales teams. Marketing automation allows marketing teams to be more efficient, increase revenue, and help grow the business.

On its own ongoing path of digital transformation, Konica Minolta was also facing the challenge of data management. The company was looking to acquire and deliver more qualified leads from its marketing programs to its sales organization. But with data siloed in multiple, disparate databases, it lacked a single view of its customers. This meant the marketing team had to download and segment the data manually before uploading it to the legacy solution, slowing campaign planning and execution and hindering customer loyalty management.

To get a better view of its customers, the company had to remove these data silos. Only by integrating data from multiple sources could its contact records be enriched with data from various sources in real time, allowing the opportunity to create an enhanced customer experience.

Intent on addressing individual customer needs and capturing profiling data from multiple customer interactions, Konica Minolta joined forces with ECENTA America Inc. to implement the SAP Marketing Cloud solution. Offering native integration with SAP CRM powered by SAP HANA, the technology enabled that critical single view of customers by unifying various data sources.

With a fast-approaching deadline to transition to the new marketing tool, ECENTA offered proven knowledge and experience implementing SAP Marketing Cloud. It also proposed smoothing the go-live by delivering the project in two phases to meet the critical timeline.

Completing the first phase in a little over two months empowered Konica Minolta to transition to the new marketing solution and start executing marketing campaigns before its legacy solution was retired. In the second phase, ECENTA integrated SAP Marketing Cloud and SAP CRM powered by SAP HANA with other data sources from inContact, Zoom, Facebook, Dun & Bradstreet, and more.

Now, with integrated data and end-to-end marketing campaign management, the Konica Minolta team manages customer segmentation, campaign planning, and execution activities all within SAP Marketing Cloud. This gives the marketing team more control over campaign management and a 360-degree view of the customer journey.

Strengthening collaboration between marketing and sales teams

Taking advantage of intelligent customer segmentation and facilitating omnichannel campaign management and targeting, Konica Minolta can deliver more contextual customer experiences. By optimizing the customer nurturing process, the marketing team is accelerating demand generation and delivering more qualified leads to the sales team, ultimately boosting conversions.

Creating strong and mutually beneficial customer partnerships, Konica Minolta can tailor its solutions and services to meet specific needs. This helps the business deliver flexible solutions that not only meet its customer expectations but exceed them, time after time.

To learn more about how SAP Marketing Cloud helps Konica Minolta deliver more qualified leads to its sales team, read the business transformation study, “Konica Minolta: Integrating Multiple Data Sources for a More Meaningful Customer Experience.”