Decoding Digital Marketing
It is been a while that I wanted to write about digital marketing. Having attended various workshops and seminars on digital marketing, I realize that people were talking the same thing, using different words. The gist being that everyone was talking about digital marketing from a campaign perspective - Earned, Owned, Paid, Social Media. But Digital Marketing is much more than branding or campaign led... It is how we use the existing and emerging technology to create a positive impact on our business.
My thoughts and trying to decode digital marketing
The Digital Marketing overview is all about creating a seamless and effective Digital Experience (DX) for clients. The DX would address the business objectives through strategic initiatives that will address:
- Speed/drive marketing objectives
- Create positive impact on business objectives
- Interact with the customers in a meaningful and insightful way
- Future-proofing
The 3 pillars that will drive DX are Customer Experience, Channel Experience and Company Experience.
Customer Experience will be all about interactions with the customer in all stages of Customer Lifecycle - Pre, Point of Purchase, and Post purchase. This also means ways to identify the prospective customer, speed-up his decision making process for buying, increase brand preference within the various options, and post-acquisition - relationship management & customer service
Channel Experience, is something we can look at as this involves a lot of marketing activities. I think, we can start with offering services in Platform creation (as in Ecom) and analytics in marketing and social media. Here there will be a lot of services that will overlap with what traditional digital ad agencies provide as service. Need to evaluate the priorities of focusing on this area
Company Experience will be all about addressing and driving efficacy through Digital production (CMS, DAM platforms)... Initiatives that will help management arrive at faster decision making (Real time dashboards, customer feedback, research inputs, etc). Another criteria that I find many service providers not focusing on as part of Digital Experience are Employee and partners... In a connected world, the employees can play crucial role in enhancing customer experience and we need to use that.
Adoption of new technologies, especially in robotics, AI, IoT all will be driven from a company experience, initially, but can shift their categorization depending on how it pans out from a business perspective.
Digital marketing is a misnomer and maybe it is time we use the new terminology about using technology in marketing/business initiative and Digital Experience is an apt word
Cheers!
Santosh
COO & Managing Director - BBH India: Brand Management & Integrated Communications Specialist | Public Speaker | Certified Life & Business Coach | Visiting Faculty at Premier Management Schools
8 年Good read Santosh!
Chief Operating Officer at Jaaji Technologies
8 年Santosh.. good one.. under channel and company experience, I would add Omni-channel experience and omni-channel operations. At the end of the day, customers expect seamless service and experience - he chooses to change his channel before and after the sale, and likes to be serviced in multiple ways.. the company needs to be geared up and be agile to address these varied and at times fickle expectations of the customers
Fractional CMO
8 年Thank you, Murthy Vadapalli Unfortunately Digital Marketing is peddled as a media activity & most marketers suffer from a myopia that is campaign led. Y
Executive Vice President at Centre for Organization Development (COD)
8 年Very well written Santosh E G. The common understanding of digital marketing is nothing but social media campaigning . Your point on Customer, Channel and Company experience is well thought.