10x: how General Motors improved marketing performance by 1,000%
Change is difficult. Upgrading your marketing tech stack is daunting. Even when you are sold on the benefits of hyper-personalisation. That’s why it’s good to see how other brands have done it.
At 2024’s instalment of Adobe Summit, Hass Khalife from General Motors revealed how his team overcame the challenges of modernising their marketing tech stack – and revealed a strategy that enhanced their marketing performance by 1,000% against their baseline.
You can catch up with the Summit session on demand using the link below. Or scroll down for some of the key takeaways.
>> Case Study: Growth Through Personalization & Scaling Connected Experiences
The dawn of personalisation and connected customer experience
We’re not there yet. But we’re fast approaching a time where non-personalised marketing is going to look prehistoric. Consumers are disinterested in generic marketing messages. They don’t just want personalisation, they expect it.
Personalisation is the new content currency. And modern marketing technology coupled with generative AI empowers you to create thoughtful, hyper-relevant omnichannel experiences for every single person in your database – based on real-time intent set against the context of every interaction they’ve had with your brand.
This future is here now. Real brands are getting transformative results and entering a new landscape of meaningful audience engagement. But implementing this new technology isn’t without challenges. It requires a digital transformation. And that can be challenging.
Just ask General Motors.
General Motors and their ambitions for customer experience
They are one of the world’s largest automotive manufacturers. Creators of some of the most iconic cars on the road. They have over 100 million customers in the US alone. General Motors is a giant in the automotive world – selling over 6.1m vehicles across six continents in 2023.
They had five clear drivers for their marketing tech transformation:
- Deliver differentiated omnichannel customer experiences.
- Nurture and acquire new customers.
- Drive product and service revenue subscriptions.
- Reduce the cost of customer acquisition and improve conversion efficiency.
- Increase customer loyalty and boost customer lifetime value.
The challenges of a digital transformation
Both in preparing for their digital transformation and during its rollout, General Motors encountered some significant challenges. You are likely to recognise them, because they are common to so many businesses who feel overwhelmed by the last decade’s rapid advancements in marketing tech capabilities and data proliferation.
Fragmented data
General Motors had customer data spread across a variety of disparate, disconnected silos. They lacked a single source of customer truth that gave them a real-time view of customer behaviour.
Disconnected channel experiences
It wasn’t just General Motors data that was fragmented. There was a lack of cohesion and consistency between their marketing channels – with each channel serving different content and customer experiences.
Tech debt
The speed at which digital technology evolves means that many businesses have a certain degree of tech debt. Legacy technology doesn’t facilitate personalisation at scale. But it’s also true to say that the most novel, shiny new tech isn’t necessarily right for the objectives as a business. The challenge is finding the balance between innovation and your strategic ambitions.
Buy in from colleagues
It’s human nature to be resistant to change. Change requires effort. To succeed with a digital transformation, it’s essential to help people understand why change is required. Sell the capabilities and what they will enable for the company. Explain how the tools can be best utilised and demystify the process of change. Common goals, a shared strategic roadmap and clear KPIs are crucial.
Change management
There has to be oversight on the change project, managing the transition and making sure the technology is implemented in a way that’s aligned with your strategic objectives. Break the project down into deliverable objectives, laid over a roadmap of milestones. Clear and frequent communication of objectives is essential to keep people and processes closely aligned. There cannot be any uncertainty of the overall strategy or the granular steps required to achieve it.
Knowing what type of real-time experiences to provide
Having the capability to deliver real-time experiences to your customers is one thing. Knowing what sort of experiences to provide is another. Create clear use cases across business functions that give project stakeholders clear examples of how the new marketing capabilities enhance marketing performance and take your brand closer to your customers.
Start small, start with what you know
How did General Motors overcome their challenges? That’s all in their Summit session. But one of the key themes was to start small in terms of adopting the powerful new capabilities. This gave them an immediate use case where General Motors could illustrate the benefits to aid buy in from colleagues. It unlocked the confidence and ambition to go deeper with their customer personalisation journey.
There were conversion rewards too. In fact one of General Motors’ first use cases delivered a 10x (1,000%) increase in marketing performance against their baseline for that channel. (The details of how they did that are revealed in the Summit session.)
Flash forward to today and General Motors have a unified data profile for over 100 million customers – capturing every customer interaction across every channel. They have over 1,500 webpages that are actively managed and monitored. And they serve over 2,500 brand campaigns per year – with real-time decisioning that responds to customer browsing behaviour.
General Motors did it. You can too.
Yes, change can be challenging. But General Motors are just one example of a global brand reaping the rewards of transforming their approach to customer experience. For actionable insight on how General Motors managed their digital transformation and unlocked one-to-one connections with 100 million customers, catch up with their Summit session on demand.
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