PREPARING FOR MALAYSIA’S DIGITAL FUTURE

Reposting my article that was earlier published in CIO Advisor APAC magazine: Special Edition on Digital Marketing (June 2019) 

Malaysia saw its 5th consecutive year of declining Advertising Expenditure (Adex) in 2018. The only media to have significant increase is Digital. Digital share of Adex overtake TV share of Adex in 2018 as shared by the Malaysian Advertisers Association.

With everything turning to digital, it means companies are also jumping online to market their businesses. And to survive the challenges of digital marketing, brands need to keep up with the latest trends. Successfully reaching one’s target audience is no longer just putting out TV and print ads. Digital marketing disciplines emerged e.g. search engine marketing, social media marketing, mobile marketing, content marketing, influencer marketing and others.

Businesses continue to be shaped by broader changes and imperatives like digital transformation, customer experience, data, omnichannel, personalisation, the war for talent, business model evolution, new ways of working (like design thinking and agile/scrum) and new ways of organising teams and how digital marketing gets done. None of these are new but none of them are easy or over in a year.

Digital transformation does not happen quickly. Some companies seem to expect it to happen over the course of a year. In my experience, particularly for larger organisations, closer to five years is more realistic. Even then, the task is never over.

Whilst I agree that genuinely good digital marketing people are scarce, the reality is that most organisations are not mature enough to focus on customer experience and usually don’t understand the challenges they must overcome to deliver something meaningful across even the most established channels.

If you are making an investment in customer experience this year, you’ll almost certainly have done the data thing – finally getting your marketing, IT and compliance teams to put their contrary personalities aside and deliver a single customer profile, comprising the most obvious sources of your customer data but overlaid with a tool that an intern with a maths degree can drive some insightful customer stories from.

The problem with all this insight is that you have to do something with if for it have any value. That’s great, until the bit where most organisations suddenly learn about their real challenge… not insight, but err… content.

If you think you have content then you don’t, if you’re sure you have content then I bet it’s not be organised in a way that lets you to use it for personalisation and if you still think you do, then it’s probably already stale or wouldn’t support the kind of velocity you need if you are to personalise millions of daily web journeys etc.

So, in my opinion and almost without exception – content is the biggest and most common barrier to actually making the customer have a better experience. It fuels all digital channels from search, email and social media marketing. This makes having a defined content marketing strategy essential to competing in many sectors. Content marketing can be applied by all types of business regardless of their sector or size and if the right strategy is followed can make an impact that supports communications across all touch points of the customer lifecycle.

Creating mobile responsive website designs for the dominant use of smartphones is now old news. I see future innovation in digital experience in the areas of speed and personalisation and conversational user interfaces based on improved insight.

Google has long proclaimed the importance of download speed and despite the widespread use of responsive web design, performance Google’s benchmarks shows that many businesses are falling short of the required speeds.

Authenticity remains key to any strategy and people are more responsive to an idea when the impact of that idea touches them personally. Long gone are the days of mass marketing. Personalised content to influence user behavior is indeed very powerful. As marketers we need to be mindful to use that data within the limits promised to our consumers and keep our content pure to its message to truly resonate with our audience.