Digital changes today VS two years ago

The Squared Online course I went through two years back, now feels like I’ve only touched the tip of an iceberg. Opening up the door into digital realm flooded me with a great amount of knowledge and the privilege to learn digital capabilities and its possible paths. I saw the vast potential via digital means that businesses can apply to reach out to customers! This industry also intrigued me because the future of digital tech is endless. At first thought, it may also seem sneaky and scary of being able to read into consumer patterns, real-time online chatter and “attack” them at vital touch points (content, time, channels) to capture their attention or emotions, turn them into followers and advocates of your brand. This still stands till today.

Two years has passed. Digital is ever growing, ever changing and it is not stoppable. Hence, it is vital we grow and change with it. Every marketer should focus and stay abreast of which digital approach makes customers click and buy/ download/ follow/ like/ tell others. Bear in mind it is not about following the latest trends at the moment. You want to win the customer not only before or during purchase stage, but you want to situate at every part of their lives your product can be part of.

Two Years Back

In the past, it is possible to drive awareness and capture new customers quickly as long as you have a website with your products or services. You may also set up official social media business accounts (looking legit) and post up interesting posts and hope someone stumble upon your brand and products. You can even try to follow them, comment or like posts randomly to gain their attention. This is no longer as effective today, not that it is 100% not effective, it is just not the most effective. Customers are smarter these days and it might send an incorrect impression of your brand. It is not a sure hit, and the like might mean to the ear of a consumer as: “Hello, we just want to let you know our businesses provides facial services, do check us out.”

I have also learnt the See-Think-Do-Care Framework. This is only suitable for one size fit all, 1 message fits all customers. Most suitable for a mega supermarket brands or your business has only 1 core product that drives the revenue. However, it will not be applicable to most of today’s markets. Be critical and truly honest with yourself during this process so segmentation and targeting of master list for the actual intent of your marketing campaign will not be compromised. At the end of this framework exercise, it will be a smaller audience, specifically for this campaign.

An example of See-Think-Do-Care. A Luxury Skincare brand may define their audience:

• See: Individuals 28-45, All genders
• Think: Online signups and followers, Offline store purchase customers
• Do: Those who ready to purchase including followers who were doing research, want to explore alternative brand and/or interested in the brand.
• Care: Customers who purchased makeup at least once online and offline in a year.

Cons:

1. The communication for this framework will be sent to audience of all who is aged 28-45 of all genders as long as they are your signups, have purchased before in 1 year or simply followers.
2. The Luxury Skincare brand is unable to target specific messages to meet the needs of current and potential customers. Eg. Customer Female age 32 purchased a Dry skin moisturizer, will not be interested in an email that says “5 Beauty Secrets for oily prone skin!”
3. It creates a poor communication towards customers kills customer value and might even cause them to unsubscribe.

Today 2019

“where artificial intelligence, robotics, and the Internet of Things (IoT) are transforming the customer experience….. these new technologies comes a new wave of data signals.” -Taken from Salesforce Marketing Cloud website

1. Today, more consumers are inclined for a brand story with meaning and emotions, something that drives deeper than just telling them about features of your product and service. Brand + Story = Loyalty. If you are a new brand and do not have a compelling story, chances are low for increasing subscribers or maintaining customer engagement. This point alone will not transform your business to be successful.
2. Yesterday, I found out that Copy writing skill is the top trend for digital marketing 2019 because words that capture and evoke emotions connect directly with consumers, influencing them to have interest and read your communications. Here’s a tool called Emotional Marketing Value Headline Analyzer. Caring is sharing, so now go and try to test if you are using impactful words on your next EDM headline or digital article headline: https://www.aminstitute.com/headline/
3. Caring is Sharing. Think Win Win at any point of time of your campaign or business strategy. If you can bring in products or services that are also helping consumers and manufacturers to win, naturally it will become a win win for your business too. Driving positive emotions and empowering your consumers can elevate brand advocacy and help marketing campaigns impact last longer.
4. Marketing strategy and goals of your campaigns need to ensure it covers all interaction gaps at every stage, pre, during, and post purchase. The entire thought process of the customer, what goes through their minds. Ultimately, you will have to collect and have access to your customer data, make ample time to study and makes sense of the data. What are the signs, consumer behavior patterns and possible external factors can explains what the data reflect? Ideally we want them to engage them at every stage and have them click “Call to Action” when they are ready.
5. After you manage to capture their interest, using digital communications to connect via machine learning, data gathering and filtering your customer data based on their preferences and needs will elevate customer experience, contributing to high retention subscriber and follower rates.
6. Determining the type of Audience, Frequency(time), crafting the Content (in-journey or outside journey) and Channel are important considerations in working on a feasible marketing communication campaign.

What’s up in the digital realm nowadays? Big Data, Ai, Predictive analytics, Clustering, Classifications, Machine learning. How do we make use of this to drive effective marketing campaigns today?

As a campaign manager, it is my job to form multi-facet and dynamic customer journeys for different goals based on data, while also aligning with the company’s goals and strategy for the intended audience. The journey you plan to deploy will require technical skills, tools, integration of data sources and what type of data you have access to. We need to be able to capture and make sense of all the valuable data in order to deploy intelligent marketing strategies. Making correlation of different sets of data can more complex than we think. Easier said than done.

Let’s just take it all in and move along as the waves bring us. Learn to manage it and control the best we can. It is here so let’s make it beneficial for us.