Online Marketing has changed dramatically in the last few years. Almost each business company has already jumped on the bandwagon of social media marketing, but only few could achieve the social media results they desired and needed. REASON : most companies have not been able to accelerate the learning curve and implementation.
Companies need to develop real-time customer insights, engage audiences and better understand their customers and the market. Companies need to fully realize that new technologies from social media and mobile communications, richer digital media devices and the advent of natural user-interfaces, collectively, are transforming-- how and where consumers and business users are actually interacting with their content – and therefore how and where marketers can better connect with their target customers.
As social media is evolving, companies are recognizing its many uses such as strengthening and growing customer loyalty, promoting product lines, building their brand or keeping a pulse on their business.
Key Challenges
There is absolute no doubt, digital marketing today has become a top-most concern for marketing everywhere. To survive in these times, companies must make a stronger commitment to their digital marketing efforts and make renewed investment in technology and innovation, foster deeper partnerships with their customers, employees, vendors, suppliers etc. They must take a holistic & integrated approach to customer-centric data. They need to become highly flexible, more adaptive and hugely responsive, if they intended to win their customers. They must realize that the success of their digital marketing solely depends on:
- How innovative and real-time is their connection with their customers?
- How integrated & personalized their websites and customer brand-experiences are?
- How much better their customer intelligence is?
While setting out to search for good quality online marketing solutions, they must know that ultimately, the ideal online marketing solution will fully address the three R's of digital marketing: reach, retention, and revenue. It must harness the power of media technologies and build a marketing platform for the future – one that improves efficiency, effectiveness, and agility across all marketing touch points. It must make the connections between back-end technologies and many touch points available to customers, including mobile devices, PCs, and interactive TVs.
It must allow you to:
- Generate demand with the right people at the right place, and at the right cost
- Monetize the experience through e-commerce and advertising revenues
- Gather and analyze customer data to gain insight and agility
Listen, Engage and Interact More Effectively
First & the foremost is that you take the approach of strategy planning for you digital marketing, making an intensive assessment of your company's current capabilities and gaps. You strive to incorporate recommendations, timing and goals in an effort to sync the social media programs to the corporate strategy.
On technological side, an ideal digital marketing solution incorporates the following:
- Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools
- An assortment of Business Productivity Tools
- Social Computing platforms
- Integrated collaboration tools & interfaces to allow people everywhere in the organization to easily find and share data, collaborating whenever and wherever they need to
- Effective campaign monitoring & management tools for social media
A correct digital marketing solution would enable you to effectively tap the Internet, digital advertising, and social media to drive and measure business results. It would allow you to:
- Provides content delivery over multiple media, brands, and locations
- Drives focused marketing and advertising of products and services
- Increases number of unique visitors, click-throughs, and online conversion rates
- Significantly boosts cross-sell and upsell activities for generating more revenue
Remember : The hallmark of a good digital marketing solution is that it would allow you to influence cross-channel engagement or skillfully manage customer experiences across a variety of touch points with consistency, flexibility, and effectiveness. It will let you to fully connect the front end (e.g., advertising and websites) with the back end (e.g., customer databases and web servers) to ensure that your campaigns are both compelling and productive. You would find it easier to combine with other business insight technologies to create solutions that tie together website analytics, social media information, and customer relationship management (CRM) or enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, for developing unique insight into customer behavior and campaign effectiveness.
In order to fully harness the power of digital media technologies, you must have tools & technologies to support the every stage of your journey. You should continue to incorporate social media best practices, exercises and advices applicable to your corporate culture. It's better to go extra yard or two in your attempt to know—what's being said about you, company, brands, industry or your competitors on social media platforms. You are advised to build mechanics to monitor the conversations for brands, industry or competitors. Reports are then provided with key data insights allowing the customer to take action. If possible, create your own social media command center integrating it across the business as a foundational listening function for all customer facing departments.