Phygital Marketing 4.0: Is DARK Social messing with your Marketing Strategy?

Phygital Marketing 4.0 is a series of cutting-edge and evolutionary concepts in Marketing.

Did you ever see a sudden spike in Direct Traffic during one of your recent campaigns?

Despite your Brand having a strong Word-of-Mouth, it was always elusive to quantify & attribute spends accordingly in your Marketing Mix?

Does your Marketing Mix Model (MMM), always is biased against your referral strategy?

If you have encountered these questions before or are thinking about them now, either way, the evolutionary concept of knowing & cracking the mystery of the DARK SOCIAL becomes inevitable.

6.7 Billion Active Users globally (not essentially unique) are talking about your brand, referring it to their friends, family, acquaintances and driving traffic to your business, without you knowing about it comprehensively.

Global MAU's (in Millions) during July 2020, across leading social messengers.

Global Messaging Apps are on an ever-increasing curve, making it difficult for brands and businesses to account from any informal text,video,links being shared over them either talking or referring to your brand. Consecutively, most attribution tools account them as part of your direct traffic, making your Marketing Strategy grossly inefficient & optimised for the wrong levers.

DARK SOCIAL is the part of referrals, shares traffic that remains un-attributed to a specific source or channel. A leading statistic says 84% of all Social shares are DARK.

Quantifying the DARK SOCIAL?

Conceptually, if let's say if all the traffic accounted by Google analytics during a period is excluded fro the traffic coming on the App, Homepage & Landing page, it would lead you with a lot of residual traffic, which most possibly is from the Dark Social. Find out what percentage of traffic is attributed to the wrong (unaccounted source) from Paid, Owned & Earned Channels.

Tools to Measure DARK SOCIAL?

1. Quick Hack: Every Social Media, Offline & Omni-channel campaign to be attributed with a disticht short URL code like the bitly.
2. Reasonable Solution: Make all your sharing buttons and modes trackable through something like Sharethis.
3. Sustainable Solution: Leverage more cutting-edge tools with AI/ML which are available on cloud like GetSocial, Po.ST, etc.

Author: Harshavardhan Chauhaan, Phygital Marketing 4.0 is a series of cutting-edge and evolutionary concepts in Marketing.