Demystifying digital marketing – Three reasons why today’s marketing is more efficient

There seems to be a lot of confusion about what digital marketing represents. Is it a revolution? Is it about big data, digital communications? What is it really? Actually, to me digital marketing is a set of tools that enables companies to get closer to their customers and helps them to further enrich the consumer experience.

Despite the fact that digital disruption continues to affect every industry and every discipline in today’s business landscape, the core mission of marketing hasn’t changed; it’s all about understanding, creating, delivering and communicating value to the customer.

However, in my mind there are 3 ways that digital has made marketing more impactful:

1.   Digital has allowed companies to bypass the middleman. With online platforms and social media – including blogs, Facebook, Instagram, you name it – companies are now bypassing channels that once separated them from being in direct touch with their customers. On social media companies that were once just manufacturers can make more noise about their new products and services and reach both current and potential customers. This is providing a huge opportunity for B2C companies and marketers alike.

2.   Now you can experiment and make corrections much faster thanks to digital marketing. Let’s look at an example from the brewing industry: Dutch craft beer company Beerwulf, which specializes in delivering direct to its customers, was unsure how much to charge for delivering its products in different quantities. But thanks to digital marketing, the company was able to test their delivery pricing and adjust it in one week’s time thanks to digital metrics and direct customer feedback. No need anymore for cumbersome traditional market research, focus groups or face to face interviews, digital communications does it faster and better for you!

3.   Big data allows companies to know about their customers’ habits; what they want, like, dislike and more. How do you use digital marketing in a very traditional industry like luxury watchmaking? In that particular industry in the past the retailer would prevent the manufacturer from getting to know who their customers are. Today thanks to digital marketing tools, like cookies on websites, watch manufacturers have much more data about their customers. They know what webpages they have visited, how many times and what products seem to be of best interest to them. That allows companies to interact directly with prospects and customers and to follow them onto their preferred channels where they can inform them about their products, events and more. All of the information that consumers publish on the internet is also an opportunity to conduct market research in a much more flexible way. By monitoring social media and other plots of the internet closely, companies are able to track what customers are saying about their products and know what their next moves should be. Today much better metrics are available than before and more and more customer types of behaviour can be measured. Before, as the famous saying goes, marketers knew that only half of their budget was effective but not which half. Nowadays marketers know what their budget is doing for them, so they can justify the money they spend and ask for more.

Soon the new European data protection laws (GDPR) might limit which data companies can store about their customers. In a way, we have gone from one extreme to another: Not knowing much about the consumer to sometimes knowing too much. In order to protect the consumer, marketers will have to deal with more restrictive legislation and this will redefine the relationships between marketers and customers.

But digital marketing and data will remain a part of the picture for the foreseeable future!