“I had been working in color for ten years or so and looked at digital and liked the possibilities it gave me.”
- Fay Godwin, British Photographer
Abstract: The good old ways of doing marketing are no longer sustainable in a digital world. The digitalization of marketing process and operations will strongly enrich marketers’ day to day business, by allowing a better understanding of their consumers and building interactive engagement with the brand. To survive, marketers need to understand and seize the digital opportunity.
Consumers’ habits are evolving faster than technologies, too fast for companies to succeed by sticking to their long-term marketing planning and to their one-shot mass media approach to marketing campaigns, regardless of the consumer feedback and reaction.
Today’s consumer craves for valuable digital interactions.
Consumer digitalization is happening before our eyes as the digital consumer spends more and more of his time on digital channels and less on traditional channels.
The digital consumer is essentially multichannel.
The consumer expects to be addressed in an optimum way whether he’s in-store using a connected device, in the bus reading the news on his tablet, or live-Tweeting a TV show at home. Wherever he or she is, whatever the time of the day, they now expect the same level and quality of interaction with brands. The emergence of digital channels has extended the span of possibilities of interactions for marketers: digital consumers can be widely apprehended and brands can significantly enhance buying process. Could your brand benefit from a campaign in the last first-person shooter video-game? In a Kinect/Wii Fitness program? Within a connected-TV console-powered platform? Would it be expedient to communicate through social media?
Gone are the days when marketing could only be deployed on print, radio or TV!
The digital consumer will value relevance, through personalization and contextualization.
With the multiplication of screens, the digital consumer is overwhelmed by ad messages and has thus learnt to pay attention only what is relevant to him. He has become an expert in selecting those messages that are relevant to him and is pretty demanding when it comes to agreeing to what grabs his attention.
The digital consumer is used to interacting with others very rapidly and to have access to any product, service or interaction at a click’s distance. She has learnt to communicate with brands through the same schemes. She therefore has expectations when it comes to this situation of dialogue, looking forward to a customized, simplified and instant relationship. Consumers of the digital era will expect the same intimacy and intuitiveness in their interactions with brands that they have with their connections on Facebook.
The name of the game for marketing is now to be able to take into account each and every consumer’s context, behavior and expectations, and to push messages only at the right moment and place, to be heard.
The digital consumer expects real-time responsiveness
It takes one click to publish a comment on Facebook. One more click for someone to respond to it. It takes a few seconds to make a search on Google. Why would any consumer in the digital era accept that brands do not react as fast as what they can experience elsewhere?
Being able to deliver the right message, to respond to customer feedback in real-time, to assess in real-time what consumers are doing and to produce a relevant answer accordingly and in a timely manner…this is what consumers now expect from brands and from companies in general.
Digital marketing enables marketers to provide consumers with these valuable interactions.
Fortunately, smart marketers understand that they can also use digital tools to play in the digital playground and reach their new consumers where they are, anytime, anywhere, on the fly, and with more relevance than ever.
Indeed, digital marketing makes it possible for marketers to measure their activity on all digital channels.
Forget about your consumer’s attitude, learn his behavior
What’s the difference? In the digital world, consumers leave usable tracks of their preferences everywhere, on websites, cookies mobile apps, Facebook, etc… These footprints provide concrete information about their behavior, in other words, marketers can now know what they actually do instead of what they might be likely to think and do based on gender, age and other highly general criteria.
The intensive use of analytics, which can be collected and analyzed to provide in-depth customer intelligence, allows for a new approach to marketing. An approach in real-time in which brands can adapt their campaigns as it evolves, in an agile, seamless way to allow for an adaptive reach and engagement of the consumer. Brands should look for real-time adaptation and optimization through continuous data analysis.
Real-time evaluation leads to decisions and budget’s optimization
The days of obscure marketing are over. In a challenging economical climate, companies look closely into their budgets and marketers can no longer launch intuition-based campaigns and hope for the best. They have to account for their budgets.
This is why today’s marketers need indicators and data, so that they can create value through drawn up process which they can account for. By enriching brands’ comprehension of digital consumers and multichannel specificities, they can develop a much more accurate and efficient marketing, that leads to critical decision making.
Think agile and discover our Agile Marketing™ white paper!
Laura Guillemin, Valtech
About us…
Valtech is a new breed of digital marketing and technology agency with a global footprint. Our 1,600 consultants work with some of the strongest brands in the world such as Audi, Bausch + Lomb, Adidas, Bang & Olufsen, and many more. Visit our website.
Social tagging: agile marketing > multichannel > traditional marketing
