Changing face of Digital marketing and trends

I was wondering the other day that when I started my marketing career, digital marketing was more or less confined within emails or a website with contact us page. Because it was still the legacy methods we were following up.

But now if I see digital marketing landscape, it looks like the below attached landscape. Isn’t it complicated? I feel it’s a twisted tale of confusion.

                                                                 * Picture copyright belong to Scott Brinker

Everything is changing, and at a very rapid speed. I am excited to see what’s coming. I still feel amazed by the initiatives like internet.org or project loon. It is about time tech/internet companies like google and facebook should start investing in such projects, and bang on they rightly did so. They did it because user of facebook or google is already exhausted in urban areas, the rate of new user is not increasing currently, as it was couple of years back. So they are trying to tap into rural market, which in the perspective of countries with substantial mass living in rural e.g. India. And it’s is a rosy market at present.

With grown amount of users and internet availability, digital marketing is a proven & veteran ground of marketing hacks for startups. As a result, an assured investment for any internet / B2C organizations. To cater and manage this big crowd we need new concepts and tools into digital marketing starting from strategy to execution. I will try to give a snapshot of new trends of different genes, which might play an exciting role.

We started with mass marketing or generic marketing at the digital marketing stone age. Now is the time for Humane marketing. At the current scenario we can consider everyone whoever is consuming any marketing type/material/content as an individual more preciously different than the previous one, we have encountered. Everyone is more than conscious about who they are, what they want, how they want, when they want and most importantly why they want.

At this point of time some of you might think it holds good for B2C concept not for B2B. Which I would like to differ with all due respect, only because you are considering your client to be the company you are targeting, but for that ‘whole’ company there is a single person who will speak to you, respond to you, meet you and sign the deal for you. And this person is self-conscious. Consider them as an individual confined within their own need-understanding. They also want to achieve success in their personal life, just that if you have to connect the dots between his/her personal goals/success factors with company’s success, then “KABOOM” you got a perfect target person (no more target market). You know exactly what he is looking for how he wants to be there which will make him/her successful and relatedly his/her company.

Now you must be thinking this is very interesting concept but we can do it where you have to target hundreds and thousands of target market. And I will be very honest here, quantity is a problem of this scenario, but when you see that this becomes a better way of marketing I guess you will know how to overcome that. One quick snakable solution is go cognitive, let machine do the tedious repetitive jobs which we are afraid of doing. But suppose you don’t want to go cognitive here then these are some options you can look into. These are my take on how it can done, and some companies might be doing it right now in exactly right way that too in a totally in a different way, (In that case please let me know in comment section about how you are doing / planning to do it).

As per me one of the first way-out is responsive & perceptive content and design. Those days are gone when everything is push marketing, we tried to feed whatever we want to and persuasion was a big add-on. It’s whole different ball game now. Customers have taken the power into their hand. They don’t want to get fed on our wish, instead they know how to eat, what to eat and most preciously when to eat. They are content conscious, brand conscious, intent conscious, time conscious. But still being a marketing person we need to understand, in marketing there are 2 legacy targets, which if you achieve even now. It WILL translate into your success. They are Trust and brand image, even though the meaning and expectations have changed.

For Trust I still follow the golden rule T=R+D (Trust=Reliability + Delight). Till the time we keep on redefining the Delight factor here, we are good to go even in current times. I don’t think we need change unless there is a better formula comes in.

One hand when trust has a static formula along with a quotient of variable in terms of delight, brand image has changed upside down in last few years. It doesn’t go for loyalty or personification or touchstone (e.g. Maggi became bigger than product) anymore. Instead goes for the feeling outsiders hold about your company or you. This feeling creates from their perception. You can’t control it anymore. But obviously like any other marketer I would say “I know can’t make them in customer’s mind but will influence or change them to control it to some extent”. Now if you ask me how will I do it? The one way of doing it is first get believe in the brand with absolute understanding about it. And I am sure it will resonate in a wave multiplier way to the outside world, may be through you or your employees. Good vibes always resonate itself. Now a day’s outsiders make your brand by seeing your companies, it’s employees. They make their perception by seeing what other people are saying, what’s their personal experience and how your employees are. I have said this long back but will say it again, because it looks more real in current scenario with a swap change. “Brand is the extension of your ego”, couple of years back the term ‘your’ meant to be the company but now it’s of every individual’s, whosoever is not part of your brand and trying to form a brand.

When we started marketing, back then we used to get new potentials every now and then because of limited access of internet and everyone was trying to learn. On the contrary if you see one potential getting online there is almost 99% possibility that they might have heard about you or consumed your content once if their digital counter. One fact is 98% people bounce out from your website after they land there. So the need of hour is a retargeting concept. Here comes Pixel marketing which is a cookie base JSP piece of code gives you the opportunity to show your ads when he / she comes online again. There is chance of getting those bounced traffic back into your website.

One big thing we hear nowadays is data driven marketing. I personally love the concept of it purely because, it’s a better choice to shoot with a night vision than in dark. But the what I hate about it, is the dependency it creates within marketers. I am old school marketer for that matter. I like to always have the human interventions in machine automation. So am I opposing data driven concept? I would say no. I just want to use it in a different way. I will use to decide the failure factor than success factor. For an example let the model tell what will not work and I will find out what I will do by my own intuition or may be how much risk I want to take. Intuitive marketing will give you that unexpected edge over your competitors. Don’t forget even your competitors are looking into the same model as you are, so you have to think what you are doing extra? And I have lingering feeling inside that if I follow the data driven model blindly I will lose the edge of out-of-the box concept and bold nature of my campaigns.

Now comes one of the most important part of our day to day live savior, the Content. We all have heard that there are 3 kinds of media items, paid owned and earned. This was the teaching we got couple of years back. But slowly and steady that picturing revealing itself. And now we can say that they are not 3 different persons, but 3 faces of the same person. And at the same time everyone is dependent on the other one. So if one of your face looks good it’ll resonate itself into other faces, and if one face gets a blow, all three will bear the mark together.

Static vs dynamic vs Snackable content in current scenario we have almost retired static content type and adopted dynamic concept but again we need to understand either of them will follow push marketing concept. To cater you the data marketer wants to push through your mind. Snackable content is another most popular piece. If you know your content is big and boring, make some snakable version of that content. Something like a movie trailer. It will bring people in but then it will depend on your story.

There is another marketing channel became popular in last few days, The great social media marketing. What I feel in this field we are yet to reach the final innovation. We have just started to reach to a level where we can track the traffic and have started to see some ROI. So we can go miles with this before it dies the natural death. There is one thing we are overlooking now, and it can be a great boon in future. Is the dark social traffic. In this world of messenger, chat box, whatsapp and so and so, anyone can send anyone a direct link. And only because it’s a direct link, it’ll not be tagged with your social carry over script. So you will not be able to track them. As per current scenario 30% (approx.) traffic doesn’t come under search, social or referral which we can call as dark social and organic.

There are ways of reducing it like let people share from your page directly using UTM parameter into your share button. Another way is giving people option to share once they select a text. But still we will continue to see dark social playing their role. It’s a good thing that dark social is bringing in some new traffic we haven’t expected. The only problem is it makes parallel world which does not leave traces or get tracked, as result it makes retargeting is kind of impossible. There are other related issues too, for an example if I search one specific keyword once and then from that search result I get into a destination page and then send the link to 7 different people. Search engine will give impression as 1 but in reality it’s 7. So getting the actual keyword impression is hard in this scenario. Again think about it, these people are interested in your product, but alas you can’t retarget them. Then what happens to your keyword performance.

Mobile actually increased the rate of content consumption. People consume more content that they used to be couple of years back. And it’s totally understandable, that people is using as little time they have into consuming content more and more. It’s good at one side as people are more informed, viral marketing can play a big role now, but on the other side the remembrance / recognize / recollection window has become very very minimal. People are so impatient now a day that on an avg. if one’s search doesn’t populate within 3 secs he/she goes to another place or simply bounces. It’s the same case about company websites also, you can use the 3 sec as a benchmark and make sure that your content / website loads as fast as possible. Websites with a liquid design is popular choice but you have to remember the responsive design too. Along with that, content has become a different ball game altogether. Everyone is looking for a story teller. It doesn’t matter how long (in case of video) your content is. They will watch it only if it has good story inbuilt inside, and flow should be seamless. Attention has become one of the most precious commodity in digital marketing space (I can’t resist myself from mentioning it again and again). No one has time to read text so infographics is playing their part currently which will soon get replaced by videos and audios. Want to know what next? i.e. Virtual reality (described few paragraph later)

If you have seen in my previous details, one thing related to another. It’s because Humane marketing concept is a very complex harmonious combination of many concepts. It’s the queen of marketing concepts. And you just completed building the bee hive for our blue eyed queen.

So does this change happening only into digital marketing and nothing else? No, for events think about the effect a virtual reality can play. For events the main issue most of the marketing managers face is, clients don’t have time to visit them, because numerous reasons, personal, professional, time, flight delay. Not think about this that if you are organizing an event and people can join in through virtual reality medium, what happens to your audience? A MASSIVE MASSIVE growth. How can it happen? You only invest into 360-degree camera and record the event and feed it live into your client’s virtual reality device. Are you thinking it’s a costly affair? It can be depending upon what you are selecting. If you want to use oculus rift then please go ahead and it might be a bomb for your budget (but if you have high profile few customers then it’s a customer’s delight), so you use a cheaper device like google cardboard. Send your client as a take away, create and mobile app and let your customer register in there to get one. Obviously you pick and choose whom to give and whom to avoid. And then once you have the customer base, use and reuse the same platform for any future events at the same way.

At the end what I feel is we have to be proactive with our strategy but at the same time, reactive and receptive to our audience analytics and our client’s needs. There is one last thing which I feel can be proven game changer in coming days, i.e. responsive content (not speaking about ads only). Because after mobile the next big thing will be wearable devices. Which will have smaller windows, where you can fit couple of words or may be a scrolling line. It’s a challenge to be faced in future. I am pretty sure will get ourselves into something else by then. Happy fighting till then fellow marketers. And yes I almost forgot. At the starting of this blog, I attached one complex landscape, to add onto that. I would like show another picture to show the future.

This is a personal scribble ground. The opinions expressed here are all personal they do not express any direct or indirect linkage to the organization I am attached to. But I love changes so they might be changing time to time. :o)