marketing strategy |

Click the animation to open the full version (via http://pennystocks.la).

People (aka also your – potential – customers) spend a lot of time on the internet, searching, buying, communicating, creating & sharing content, liking, commenting, reviewing… Bringing along, as a side effect, a couple of challenges to face, in a marketing perspective:

– identify, be visible and take control of a maximum of touchpoints
– offer great experiences at those touchpoints – engage, inform, reward
– optimize your presence at different stages of the digital journey – dream, inspire, plan, buy, experience, share… on the right platform
– tap into the “wisdom of the crowds”, enhance your community, have your “fans” speak for you and transform them into ambassadors
– connect emotionnally, create that bond that will “make your brand travel” (metaphor borrowed from Ariel, during an EMBA course) , with its emotional content encapsulated
– find what makes your community tick and have the word spoken out loud for you
– see your customers, fans as partners, co-create to achieve richer content and ideas
– crowd-source content

Volatile attention span to capture, good data mining and analytics to better understand your customers, their habits, expectations, performant monitoring are among critical success factors in this extremeyl quickly evolving environment.

With a dose of soft skills leading to bring life and a soul to your brand. Storytelling being clearly a winning differentiating factor.

Enjoy your ride on the digital journey!

Update:

A few hours after having published this post, McKinsey has released this fundamental article:
Digitizing the consumer decision journey. An absolute must-read article.
Extracts:
“[…] devise the perfect cross-channel experiences for their customers—experiences that take advantage of digitization to provide customers with targeted, just-in-time product or service information in an effective and seamless way.”

“..digital channels no longer just represent “a cheaper way” to interact with customers; they are critical for executing promotions, stimulating sales, and increasing market share. By 2016, the web will influence more than half of all retail transactions, representing a potential sales opportunity of almost $2 trillion.”

“Yet tools and standards are changing faster than companies can react. Customers will soon be able to search for products by image, voice, and gesture; automatically participate in others’ transactions; and find new opportunities via devices that augment their reality (think Google Glass). How companies engage customers in these digital channels matters profoundly—not just because of the immediate opportunities to convert interest to sales but because two-thirds of the decisions customers make are informed by the quality of their experiences all along their journey […]”

And read on for the details on the “how”, which you seldomly have the opportunity to see. Digitizing the consumer decision journey.

How to gain more customers and how to make them come back? Those are the key objectives when it comes to marketing. How can marketing contribute to achieve business objectives?

Traditionnally, you have the 4 P’s of the marketing-mix: Product, Price, Placement (distribution), Promotion.

With new technologies and new media, the 4 P’s remain, but they can be influenced and enhanced in new ways: internet has deeply modified the distribution channels, technology can augment information about the product and the experience with the product (or the brand), you can have more price segments and price calculation, such as dynamic pricing (think of EasyJet), and last but not least, the promotion opportunities have grown exponentially, bringing along huge progress (segmentation, tracking, social graphs, etc..).

But considering the contribution of new media & communication tools to the above mentioned objectives, coming back to the basic sometimes cannot hurt.

And for me, explaining the different aspects, in a very simple (yes, a bit simplistic, too!) way would be as in the image. From there on, you can dive into details, explain the points of convergence, how social media mechanisms impact almost all aspects and how to leverage them in an optimal way according to your company’s objectives. But at least you can get the big picture.

The mobile is in grey, but it could be illustrated in another way, as it permeates all aspects of communication, now.

Do you agree with the general idea? What would you add or change? And why? I would love to know!