Kabul, Afghanistan 2007. I was sat at the back of a dusty NATO press conference when all the journalist’s mobile phones suddenly chimed in unison. Whilst I was simply curious, the reaction of the embassy Press Officer told me that this was not a positive development. It transpired that the Taliban had taken the initiative in the ever-important information battle by harnessing the power of digital media; they simply broadcast their version of events by SMS before NATO could possibly react, today they have a website and a twitter account. Whilst the war in Afghanistan is obviously a far cry from retail marketing both are attempting to exploit digital technology to get their message out ahead of the competition.
ITG is a technology led Marketing Services company that has enjoyed explosive growth over the last two years providing marketing services to many leading brands including M&S, Weightwatchers, Nationwide, Sainsbury’s, KFC and Pets at Home to name only a few. This privileged position has offered us with a unique perspective from which to monitor changes in the marketing landscape.
Start with Strategic Clarity
The strength of digital communications is that potential customers can engage with a brand whenever and wherever they choose. For the marketeers this is also a threat as you only get one chance to make a first impression and if a potential client happens across a shoddy piece of online marketing the sale will be lost before it is even considered. The first step in avoiding tactical errors is defining strategic clarity, each business must decide exactly what they want to achieve from the digital realm and once they have done this they need to plan out exactly how they are going to achieve these objectives. Unfortunately many businesses do not go through this essential planning phase and simply decide to ‘do’ social media and the result is an out-dated Facebook page or dormant Twitter account, which inevitably has a negative effect on the brand. A good rule of thumb for social media is that you are either 100% in or 100% out and if you are in ensure you have allocated the resources to keep your online presence updated. The good news is that technology can help with the laborious aspects of this role, for example we offer our clients a module that identifies which website updates should also be copied to the social media pages. It is important however to remember that the marketeer remains at the centre of the marketing process, whilst technology can provide reminders and even suggest some copy, it is only facilitating a skilful marketeer in practicing their art: Albeit at a technologically accelerated rate.
A Single Voice on many channels
For any organization or individual to communicate effectively they must communicate consistently and coherently over time and across all media. Every CEO recognises the importance of multi media communications in the modern world and every good marketer will stress the importance of maintaining a consistent message across all media but few businesses put any practical measures in place to ensure that content across all media is coordinated. For any business with a retail and online presence this disparity will be most evident between the digital and traditional print channels as they are invariably run, for practical and historical reasons, by different departments. In modern marketing all marketing collateral whether a video, image or even a print ready PDF can be stored as a digital asset and so the solution is for all marketers to share a common workflow and asset library or Digital Asset Management (DAM). ITG has a retail marketing print heritage and we have found across all our clients, without exception, that deploying a DAM pays for itself in efficiencies it delivers to the print process alone. Once a business has a common workflow and DAM then the creative departments can generate, archive and deploy marketing assets with a consistent look and feel across all traditional and digital channels. There is nothing that hurts a brands digital profile more, and gets the social media pages filled faster, than a discrepancy between the website price and a price advertised elsewhere. Ultimately the goal is convergence as each form of engagement should support and re-enforce the next. Recently attempts have been made to bridge the natural gap between traditional and digital media with URL’s on Direct Mail and 2D bar codes on packaging. Whilst these are suboptimal interim technologies the aspiration is correct and the technology will catch up soon.
Thinking about the individual
The major advantage of digital marketing over traditional methods is that marketers can know more about their potential customers and can communicate with them in a more personal way. Every website should be supported by a database that records customer preferences and online behaviour within the limits of the law, we have all experienced the relief when a website remembers our details and saves us the laborious task of re-entering our name and address. In WeightWatchers UK we have recently implemented an intelligent electronic Customer Relationship Management (eCRM) system with a powerful ‘Single Customer Profiling’ database that allows volunteers to receive a personalized digital newsletters about WeightWatchers food products and developments. CRM relationships are reciprocal and so, in return, the tool provides volunteers with an opportunity to comment on the food developments as well as receiving vouchers and offers tailored to their specific tastes. The key to communicating with people as individuals is remembering their preferences and only sending the information that they are actually interested in receiving. Ostensibly this task would be too time intensive but with a good eCRM tool most online marketing can be automated so the marketeer only needs to have a great marketing idea once and the system will then work to convert on numerous occasions. A final point when considering the needs of the individual is privacy as online privacy rules are currently under review with a number of bodies including the EU. Hefty fines are liable to be incurred by businesses that breach these regulations and so online marketing campaigns must be agile enough to react to changes in legislation as they arise.
The art of online marketing
Online marketing has both a science and an art and the successful campaign will blend the two. Despite the endless opportunities that the digital realm presents there is still an important role for a human marketer with human emotions. A strong marketer will have a good eye for the aesthetic and a natural instinct to improve the customer journey through emotive touch points. At ITG we have a creative studio and software development team and so we have created an almost unnatural alliance between the two that ensures our User Interfaces, websites and online assets blend both the emotional and technical aspects to the best mutual advantage.
Digital marketing is intrinsically interactive and every good piece of social media will have some form of ‘call to action’ that encourages the recipient to act by either clicking through to a website, providing data, printing a voucher etc. A good marketer understands the emotional touch points and the importance of keeping these choices simple and highly visual. For Social media it is important to focus on the ‘social’ element as brand loyalty will only nurtured online if it is presented in a fresh and interesting way that people want to share with their friends. Good social media management is the art of building and maintaining strong relationships and no computer can do that, but it can help.
The Science of online marketing
There are a number of principles that will maximize the efficiency of any online campaign and increase its conversion rate. A coherent online strategy will include all the relevant tools in accordance with the strategy but at the heart is almost invariably a website. The design of websites is an art, a creative process that needs to be keenly aligned to the desired brand experience but once this is done the next essential step is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). It is essential that your website is being accurately represented when Google comes looking to ensure it returns near the top of the list. A good website will also come with an intuitive Content Management System (CMS) that allows you to update your content whilst automatically sending updates through the SEO process allowing you to improve your website copy through trial and error.
Social media is now so dominant that it demands a strategy of its own but this strategy must be integrated with the broader digital strategy. Social media is often used to drive new or existing customers towards the website for sale conversion although such a self-centred view of social media will quickly result in you losing followers. The marketing challenge is to build interest in your brand amongst the social media community whilst avoiding the simplistic and self-defeating tendency of sending a constant stream of advertisements. In this respect it is exactly like any other form of relationship you need to be prepared to both give and take. An important element of social media for brands is third party endorsement as customers can choose to ‘like’ one of your posts thereby passing it with their ‘endorsement’ to everyone within their own community. This is the beginning of a Viral Marketing Campaign as a popular post gets forwarded from one community to the next increasing exposure at an exponential rate. It is also important to recognise the breadth of social media when designing a campaign so that it plays to the nuances of the different tools. For example Twitter cannot deliver as rich an experience as Facebook but it is an unparallelled micro-broadcast system that most users view in real time using their smart phones. Twitter is often used to redirect people to a website but it would be wise to offer a website optimized for mobile devices so the recipient can engage immediately or the moment will be lost. The exact mix of social media depends entirely on the demographics of a business’s target customer base and consideration should definitely be given to other large social media sites such as Linkedin, MySpace, Google+, Reddit and You Tube. The successful online strategy will integrate these tools with others such blogs, microsites, web banners and “remarketing” / “retargeting” to achieve clearly defined objectives.
Today in the US it is estimated that 86% of under 30’s use social networks and as a direct consequence amongst the under 20s the use of email is undergoing a sharp decline. Despite this fact however email will remain a powerful marketing tool for the commercially active over next few years although customers and spam tools will become increasingly selective with individually tailored (automated) emails dominating the medium. ITG have supported Namco the entertainment company with an integrated online marketing campaign. Every Friday during the campaign the database behind the Namco website was used to locally segment out a list of members as child, teen, adult, family and corporate users. The integrated tool then sent each of them a tailored and personalised email with a voucher encouraging them to attend that evening. The tool then reinforced the offer with an automated SMS reminder being broadcast two hours later.
Social Media Optimisation and Automation
Whilst Search Engine Optimisation has dominated the online marketing world for the last few years it has ignored the dominance of Social Media and with 750 million users on Facebook alone spending an average of fifteen and a half hours a month on the site, it stands to reason that your website also needs to be optimised for Social Media interaction. Social Media Optimisation will drive customers to your website and, with an associated database, every visit should be seen as an opportunity to gather additional information and track visitor behaviour about your potential customers so that you can market to them in a more effective and efficient manner. At ITG we encourage our clients to view digital marketing as an integrated campaign that includes social media, web banners, automated emails and personalised microsites all feeding back to a centralised database. Ultimately the goal is to ensure that every person that is encouraged back to the website lands on a web page that is tailored to their specific interests thereby reducing their bounce rate and hopefully increasing conversion. In the future businesses will use integrated campaigns that are driven by a personalised database to exploit the digital realm to its full potential.
Conclusion
The digital landscape is in a constant state of development and the most important attribute in harnessing its potential is agility although a robust strategy must be in place to ensure that this agility is maintained without losing control. The common thread amongst all of the developing opportunities is centralised control and data management. For a large business the myriad of marketing ‘assets’ will need to be organised in a central marketing control centre to ensure that the various communication channels are both coherent and mutually supportive. The speed and complexity of modern communications means that this process simply cannot be managed manually and so businesses will begin to look for additional online solutions that can coordinate all of these tasks into a single, simple workflow. In a cluttered digital environment the customer experience is key and so successful online campaigns will need to be individually tailored to the individual, offering customers exactly what they want in the manner that they want it. Intelligent databases will lie at the heart of these solutions building a profile of every potential customer from their first interaction with the brand to a rich understanding of the needs and aspirations of repeat customers. Once these profiles and patterns have been identified the optimised online campaign will aim to automatically nurture leads and increase conversions. Whilst that may sound a little too Orwellian for most of our tastes the good news is that the computers can only do the repetitive tasks. Whilst technology can provide a ‘turbo charge’ to current online engagements the real secret it still putting good quality marketeers at the heart of communication to ensure that the customers continue to get treated like people.
