Digital Marketing Is Beyond Marketing

How Does Digital Marketing Impact On The Product Lifecycle? I Define It Beyond Marketing.

How does Digital Marketing impact on the product lifecycle? I define it Beyond Marketing. Why? Because Beyond Marketing means that we don’t only do sales, but in digital we do many different things, because digital channels are now impacting all aspects of product lifecycle. It involves research, product design, customer support and even in corporate social responsibility. Let’s see these aspect one by one. And I’m giving you also some example and case history telling you my personal experience.

Digital Marketing Is Market Research

Using Facebook for example we know exactly what our customer would like or not and if we check our competitors we know what our potential customer like and don’t. If we only have 1000 followers and our competitor have 1 million followers, let’s see what our competitor, what our potential clients want. Let’s read our competitor company read, what they post, what they ask, what they engage with. So then we know exactly what our potential customers want.

Digital Marketing Is Product Design

We do product design. Nike asked many times how many times on Facebook “How you want your next Nike be.” Then you say pink, purple with rubber without rubber, longest stretch, whatever whatever, whatever… and based on that Nike produced new Nike shoes. Apple check this as a religion, going through every possible feedback from clients.

Digital Marketing Is Customer Support

Northwest Airlines, and now KLM Airlines, have been awarded many times by being the best online customer supported airlines: the one that replied the fastest. It has been announced in one conference that KLM got 18 millions euros revenue in one month proven by Social Media. So, 18 millions euros, coming from Social Media! Now, in Social Media they have 250 employees, it is not one or two persons posting, posting, posting! It makes sense: if you are making 18 million euros you can pay for 250 people!

Digital Marketing Is Corporate Social Responsibility

And even more, if your company is doing corporate social responsibility, in this case with digital, you blast. Because when you post a special promotion of the day nobody cares, guys. You think as a marketer “It’s amazing! 50% discount, this is incredible!” and you blast your promotion every minutes… and all of your competitor do the same blasting, the same promotion, because they see your page and then they copy. If you are giving 50% discount they will be giving 60%. Because “We are even more clever!”

Nobody cares about this! But if you post that you did something amazing, everyone is gonna share that. Everyone shares a good cause.

A big example about Vatika, the largest company in India producing shampoos. They did the campaign for cancer awareness and they took in the video a lady who had an advanced cancer stage and she was completely bald without hair, so instead of using shampoo with someone with long and shiny hair, they took a lady without hair. That campaign got massive over 20 times more than any other possible campaign ever launched before.

...Then people start loving the brand.

We Are All In Marketing Now! My Personal Experience

I have done a few campaigns where I used the biggest marketing workforce ever which are the employees of the company. They don’t need to know marketing, they don’t need to work in marketing, but by simply doing simple little things you can make a big difference.

I give you an example. When I launched a video for a commercial bank of Qatar, they did a professional video and they put it on YouTube. Because it was an emotional video they expected a big number of people viewing that, but after a month they got 125 views. Just before the National Day in Qatar, we needed to boost that so we needed to pay for you to bought their time.

In the commercial bank of Qatar they work more than 4000 people in total. If you just send mail to all of them asking “Guys, check it out our new amazing incredible video”, they just click OK and after 2 seconds they close the video and at least they get 4000 views.

Simple. You do more, you get more. That’s what happened!

Now I tell you another funny story. For Dubai Airport I was part of the digital campaign to do some viral videos and then they needed a flash mob where they put a professional pool champion to do some pool tricks.

So they grab the media like “He is coming from the airport and just waiting and he goes to the pool table in the airport and he starts doing some tricks”. The video said that he was very cool, and in the airport you don’t expect something like this, but to make the video going viral you need to boost it, you need to blast it here and there.

So I prepared for the full blasting plan, we launched it and after less than one hour we put it online, the video was showing 999+ views! I don’t know if you have ever seen something like this: when the video goes up so fast, even YouTube servers cannot count it, so they show 999+. Two hours later, it started booming. Three to four hours later they shut the video: YouTube thought that they were fake views, because it has never ever been seen by YouTube such a fast growth.

How did we do? We just tell people what they need to exactly do, with certain amount of steps, sent to a list of fifteen thousand people prepared to take action.

This made the difference!