Digital marketing news
As I often do on Fridays, I like to highlight what’s happening in digital marketing news over the past week. This week is no exception, so I have a few great articles you should check out. Each has a link to the original article in case you’d like to read more.
Enjoy today’s digital marketing news.
Digital Marketing Is The Future Of Customer Support by Jesse Himsworth
Imagine relaxing with your favorite Netflix show after a long day when, suddenly, your internet connection goes down. In place of your show are a spinning wheel and black screen. You reach for your cell phone and ask Google about your connection loss. Google recommends your provider’s help page, and on this page, you are greeted with a site that is not optimized for mobile and content that does not answer your question. Frustrated, you look for a customer service number to dial instead.
This is a real-world scenario where customers find themselves, hence it leads our recap of digital marketing news for the week.
Customers aren’t getting the information they need at the moment and get frustrated, which forms negative attitudes about your brand. A bigger problem is that the customer might move directly to complaining about your brand on social media as a way of finding a solution, rather than reach out to your internal customer service agents. This spreads negative attitudes that pose a growing problem for your brand.
In addition, the customer is now using up resources that cost you money– customer service time. Providing customer service via digital is nearly free while providing the same service through customer service representatives costs you around $20/hour.
So, why aren’t more companies providing solutions online?
According to the Forbes article, companies haven’t grown their digital capabilities as fast as their consumers. They’re not optimized for mobile and, face it, every customer is sitting with a mobile device within 10 feet of them. Another problem is they don’t think like their customers, so they’re not providing help in the same way they’re looking for it.
Internationalization of digital marketing
While there isn’t a single article supporting the internationalization of digital marketing, a number of digital marketing news articles published this week highlight various companies moving their platforms to harness markets in other countries. Of course, this makes since when you consider that the internet is ubiquitous and many countries are leapfrogging to become internet savvy rather than transitioning to digital in a stepwise fashion that follows its spread in more industrialized nations.
This spread of digital marketing is most notable among the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa), which isn’t a big surprise given the rapid industrialization and increasing wealth in these countries. Likely, we’ll see further advances in digital marketing in various countries in the future.
Integrated digital marketing: significant facts and decisive framework by Deepak Kanakaraju
This article in YourStory discusses the important topic of coordination across various channels and platforms with messages that work synergistically toward similar goals.
Integration across various marketing media isn’t a new concept, but using it in a digital context earned it a place in this week’s digital marketing news.
Integrated digital marketing derives from the notion that customers and prospects don’t engage with the company across a single channel, but rather use different channels to discover your brand, develop attitudes toward it, and make decisions about the appropriateness of your products to solve their problems. It’s this notion that underpins the idea of multi-channel attribution modeling in assigning value to all the channels that contribute to a sale.
Here’s a quote from their post:
Integrated digital marketing focuses on making the best possible impression at every interaction when your audience comes across your brand. Each time your prospects know more about your business motto — be it through a search engine, social media, email, or display ads — it is a golden opportunity for you to communicate the intention and build a strong connection.
The article goes on to cite reports from the likes of eConsultancy and Marketo showing that managers believe they’re failing at providing superior multichannel marketing. More than half of the companies in one study found they didn’t have the right metrics to evaluate cross-platform marketing efforts while nearly 2/3 said they don’t do a good job of monitoring performance across channels.
Consumers go through 6-8 touchpoints in the process of making a buy decision. That means companies need to do a better job of identifying which touchpoints their customers use, ensuring message consistency across these touchpoints, and using messages synergistically to drive consumers toward purchase and advocacy.
The post proposes a framework for integrating your digital strategy across platforms. The framework begins by recommending an overarching strategy that uses various channels with defined goals for each channel. Next, you need to track all the content produced in your digital marketing campaign along with performance data supporting the ROI of the particular piece of content, as well as its performance across other goals. Aggregate information about individual posts to understand the contribution of the entire channel to reaching your campaign goals. Finally, a company needs to develop a customer-centric view of the customer journey. These journeys are not linear and they’re not across a single platform. Instead, companies should understand the individual customer journeys used in reaching a decision and create content across various touchpoints in support of those journeys.
Digital Marketing Techniques That Will Help You Dominate Online by Makenzie Bonham
Another article I’ve selected to include in my digital marketing news is also by Forbes. In this article, Bonham discusses the increased role of digital marketing in today’s connected world and how to use digital marketing effectively.
According to HubSpot’s State of Inbound report, 63% of marketing and sales professionals reported generating website traffic and leads as their company’s top marketing challenge. For businesses to compete in today’s digital landscape, companies need more than just an established online presence to attract new customers and retain clients.
The post recommends creating valuable content on a consistent basis and cites Hubspot, which recommends 1-3 posts/ week as a minimum number to drive customers to your website.
Another important aspect of digital marketing is recognizing that digital involves two-way communication between the company and its customers, not just talking at them but talking with them. Using email and social media marketing the right way are great tools for communicating with customers and prospects.
Finally, it’s not enough to create content, you need to practice good SEO (search engine optimization) to ensure your customers find the content you’ve posted.
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Deepak Kanakaraju – is one of the best digital marketing professional. As a fellow marketer, I really inspire him. I’ve learned a lot from him.
Very good article. It has a lot of valuable knowledge and information. Thank you for the dose of knowledge. Sincerely Mama Marketing