Digital marketers know that driving innovation doesn’t happen overnight. It takes time, strategy, and focus. That’s why Movable Ink’s Strategy Team has developed the Accelerate program, to help a hand-selected group of clients use its marketing technologies in more innovative ways to achieve their business goals.
Read our interview with Movable Ink CEO Vivek Sharma to understand why Movable Ink is investing in strategic services.
Why did Movable Ink create the Accelerate program?
Many of our leading clients felt that they were not capturing the full opportunity of digital transformation. We decided we should build a team of marketers who have a deep domain expertise within the key verticals we serve: retail, financial services, travel & hospitality, and media & entertainment. These marketers aren’t just industry experts; they know how to leverage marketing technology to its fullest to achieve key business goals.
To lead this program, I knew I needed a leader who cares deeply about customer success and wanted to help our clients tackle bigger challenges. We just happened to have that person on-staff: Alison Lindland, an executive and early employee at Movable Ink. With her background at American Express, broad understanding of marketing technologies, and experience working with our biggest clients I knew she’d be the perfect choice to build an elite team of strategists.
The Accelerate team is embedded with our most strategic clients. They dig into a business, understand their strategic initiatives, internalize their executive objectives and help them accelerate their marketing programs. This team will also document the best marketing practices and develop industry-specific playbooks that they can leave behind after an engagement.
What is the value of a strategy team?
So many companies are operating from out-moded playbooks that are over a decade old. When you’ve been inside a company for so long, it’s easy to be trapped in a bubble and lack the context of what the most innovative companies are doing that is different.
Given this reality, it can be valuable to have an external strategy team come in with a fresh set of eyes and analyze a marketing program against the rest of the industry. This helps a business benchmark itself and gain exposure to new ideas that can have a big impact.
Our team can help you crystallize your objectives, gain new reference points, and come up with modern strategies. These gives you the opportunity to hone your own marketing function to be sharper than it was before. We act as a coach, an advisor, and a trusted partner. With the right chemistry between the team and executive leadership, your business will be better aligned to get the most value out of the relationship.
Why do organizations need to think differently about creating sophisticated visual experiences?
The world is changing rapidly. Every brand is grappling with its own digital transformation. Brands have taken the important first step of organizing their customer data and making it actionable. Unfortunately, not enough companies are using this valuable asset to drive their creative and personalization strategies.
There is a big opportunity to combine a company’s rich data assets with real-time creative to generate engaging visual experiences. For the past 15 years the marketing industry has put a big premium on data and targeting and creative strategy has been neglected. This is unfortunate, as the marketing industry has its roots in creativity and has come up with some of the most innovative campaigns the world has ever seen. The pendulum is swinging back to creativity and the best part is that the modern strategy drives visual experience through the rich data assets a business already possesses.
We’ve also noticed that over many years, marketing teams silo and fragment as they contend with more channels, more campaigns, more devices, and more moments. Aligning on great visual experience unifies a marketing effort and has clear, positive impact on a business’s bottom line.
How is the Accelerate Program influencing Movable Ink’s product roadmap?
Going deep with our clients is a very effective way to gain the insights we need to enhance our platform and make sure it’s continually evolving to meet marketers’ needs across industries. Our Accelerate clients are a great sounding board, which is why we offer these clients special access to our beta programs.
The beta program gives our clients a chance to give us feedback as to whether or not we’re on the right path. Before we write a line of code, before we go out developing features, we want to know that we’re solving the right problems.
We want to understand not just what kind of solutions our Accelerate clients are looking for, but also the biggest challenges they face on a day-to-day basis. We see patterns that emerge from that. That helps us get immersed in their world, which can lead to us finding a more creative approach or solving a much bigger problem than the one we initially encountered.
Movable Ink has always aimed to build products that solve the most important marketing challenges for our clients. The Accelerate program plays a pivotal role in driving our product strategy.
To learn more about Movable Ink’s Accelerate program, read our Q&A with Accelerate Team Lead and VP of Strategic Accounts, Alison Lindland.