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)
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