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Digital marketing:
Catalyst to business growth
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Digital marketing:
Catalyst to business growth
Strategies to capture customers and survive the digital age
Traditional online advertising is a thing of the past. The web has been so saturated with flashing banner ads of all sizes, and consumers are becoming experts at ignoring them, even more than TV, radio and newspaper ads.
It's now a CMO's job to stay ahead of the digital marketing curve, keep up-to-date on trends, and stand out in the crowd. Here are key strategies to cut through the clutter and optimise your digital marketing strategy:
Big value in big data
Big data finally becomes a viable marketing strategy for businesses and marketing teams of all size. Thanks to machine learning and automation, you’re no longer limited by the amount of data you can process or the insights you can extract.
Even brick-and-mortar shops can now gather valuable analytics such as in-store dwell time, peak hours, customer preferences and demographics with digital solutions such as StarHub’s Smart Retail Suite.
In fact, the challenge for smaller businesses in 2018 (aside from getting to grips with machine learning) will be getting their hands on enough data.
Get personal or get lost in the crowd
Personalisation has become a necessity in marketing to enhance the customer experience. It delivers an exclusive and unique interaction with the consumer based on their demographic, interests and more, which makes it the better option over a “one-size-fits-all” marketing strategy.
With availability of data such as purchase history, buying behaviour, birthdays, you can customise your content and promotional messaging.
Emails with a personalised message achieve 18.8% open rate compared to the usual 13.1%. i
A study has found that besides getting much higher attention, personalised ads resulted in a better memory recall of content and were deemed more engaging . Engagement means that the customer is more willing to interact with the ad, i.e. click it, make a purchase, etc, which greatly maximises the marketing dollar.
Dive down to the niche
This is the age of content marketing. Whether it is product placement, long-form articles and blogposts, or social feed, marketers are creating significantly more content and consumers are overloaded with information. Not only are you competing against your direct competitors, you’re competing with all the brands online for consumers’ attention. The web is saturated with generic content that speaks to the masses. In order to stand out and capture attention, you must create highly relevant and targeted content.
The goal is to adjust your content calendar such that you find a good balance between mass-appeal and focused content. Consider the underserved groups of target audience and generate topics that would interest them. For example, a cooking academy may create content such as easy home recipes or cooking techniques. Get even more specific with content such as “5 minute recipes for busy moms” or “Healthy meals for the weight-conscious”.
Win the micro-moment
The moments when the consumer need help in making decisions are the times they are open to the influence of brands. Google terms these as micro-moments. To marketers, micro-moments are critical opportunities to engage your consumers and can ultimately determine whether or not a conversion happens.
One-third smartphone users purchased from a brand other than the one they intended to because of information provided in the moment they needed it.iii
Today, you have to earn the customer’s consideration and action at every touchpoint and every micro-moment. The empowered consumer today has more loyalty to their need at the moment rather than to a particular brand.
Three essential tips to win micro-moments:
- A large majority of these micro-moments happen on the mobile device. Make sure you have a strong online presence that is optimised for the smartphone.
- You got to be useful and meet the consumers’ needs in these micro-moments. This means connecting people to what they are looking for in real-time and providing relevant information when they need it.
- Speed is key. Miss a micro-moment and you could lose the deal entirely. Today’s consumers crave for instant gratification and 60% make decisions faster than ever before. Design your user-experience (UX) based on the final action you want your consumer to take, and streamline it so that all redundant steps are eliminated. This way, you minimise the attrition and get your consumers to take the final action through a quicker and simplified process.
Digital marketing trends are constantly changing and it is crucial for businesses to move along with the tides or risk becoming irrelevant. The trend of today is to build trust and loyalty with the customer by creating personal connections and relations with them. Focus on your key marketing objectives at a time and find the right digital tactics to help you achieve your KPI.
