2010 TechNO Expo

Mark Hines, vice president of strategic services, Ratchet, Minneapolis

More and more marketers are looking to take advantage of mobile and social functionality. But across our roster, it’s not the tactics that are most common; it’s that our clients can only afford to invest in their top priorities.

Most of Ratchet’s customers continue to execute projects that have a direct impact on their key metrics. Which metrics warrant investment varies greatly from client to client.

For instance, one of our retail apparel clients has invested in new asset management technology that will reduce operating costs of their Web properties and improve the image quality for online shoppers. Another client in the B2B space has invested in a customer-facing application that offers easier online ordering, tracking, and service and support.

We have seen an increase in activity around foundational projects that set the stage for flexibility and efficiency in the future. We haven’t seen many projects lately that are driven by an interface redesign. Our clients are mostly looking to upgrade the technology that runs their site and add features that impact their primary site metrics. A redesign is typically a by-product of those larger efforts.

Throughout organizations, there is greater visibility into the decisions marketers make, especially the technology choices. The upper-most levels of management demand visibility into the process and the outcomes.

The chief management officer at a client of ours, a publicly traded company, regularly gets updated in great detail about the features and functionality of the projects we work on. The entire executive team wants to know why certain features are valuable and others aren’t, and they push the interactive marketing team to justify their decisions.

We help our clients analyze the stages of their customer lifecycle and understand the online and offline customer touch points in the process. Does a digital project make those touch points more valuable to the customer and the corporation? Raving (and commenting, tweeting, and posting) fans turn into the most valuable touch point for those that aren’t yet doing business with you.