Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia – October 10, 2017
Digital marketing revolution has long since taken place, and companies must now compete in a whole different world. The markets are more turbulent than they have been for generations, creating both opportunities and risks, and the pace of new product and service development has accelerated considerably.
Globalization and the digitalisation of many businesses is making the market more anarchic than ever, creating fierce competition where new players enter the game every day with something new and innovative to offer. This is all happening around you right now, and that means only one thing: stagnant businesses will die.
Today, we offer a preview of how the digital marketing landscape will look in the coming year, and how businesses can effectively catch the next great wave in digital best practice to keep pace with the competition and make themselves stand out from the crowd.
Before we begin, we’ll give you the marquee term for the next twelve months: omnichannel marketing.
This will be your key to audience development, conversion and business success in the future.
What is Omnichannel Marketing?
Omni (all) channel (touchpoints) – omnichannel simply means using every platform available to you to promote your products. The mastery comes in delivering a consistent experience across all of these platforms, and making that experience seamless.
Nowadays, individuals are starting their consumer journey on one platform, but may well complete that journey on a separate platform, device, or even in person. Someone may see an ad on Facebook on their phone during their commute, check out the website on their laptop when they get home, then visit the store to make a purchase.
Omnichannel really means every channel, and that includes new and emerging channels as well. Both virtual and augmented reality have emerged into the mainstream market for the first time in 2017, and can be used to create outstanding and unique customer experiences.
Ensuring you can guide people toward these actions across all of these different platforms with a consistent tone, messaging and brand is what makes omnichannel marketing so compelling.
The key to success in omnichannel marketing is effectively bridging the offline and online world, creating a consistent and cohesive campaign across all touchpoints, and most importantly, delivering a personalised experience.
Customer Experience
The primary objective of omnichannel marketing is to create a seamless customer experience. That said, this experience must also be positive and compelling. If you feel your business has had a lapse in strategic vision, making this the center of your efforts will doubtless help you reverse this trend in the coming year.
To begin creating a compelling experience, you need to know who your customers are, what your customers buy, and why they buy it. You need to understand their needs and fears, and how your products or services fulfill those needs and alleviate those fears.
There’s a wonderful scene in The Prestige that talks about the importance of showmanship (or experience) in selling a trick (or product) to an audience. Magic excites because it feels extraordinary – more real than real. It plays on the need to believe in something greater, on our in-built curiosity and imagination. In also alleviates our fear of the banal – that life is insignificant, ordinary, and terrifying. It gives hope, and childlike wonder. People don’t watch magic for the illusions, they watch it because of what it makes them feel. The experience. That’s how magicians ‘sell’ – how will you do it?
So, how do you go about finding all this out?
Big Data and Analytics
In order to better understand the people you are providing an experience for, you need to analyse data. Before, this market research would be difficult, time consuming, expensive, and riddled with problems in methodology. Now, Data & Analytics are more accessible than ever.
The current trend is to do away with trends – stop looking at data sets as a global analysis and start breaking them down into smaller niches that will give more clues as to how to compel people more specifically.
By crunching the data down, you can begin to provide 1:1 marketing – personalised experiences for individual clients. By following a person’s path across social media, websites, stores and even phone calls, and collating that data into a journey, you can better understand how to integrate that journey using originality, storytelling, and optimization.
The technology is now available to track these journeys, using machine learning algorithms to stitch together data from disparate sources. This enables you to remove roadblocks on your path to marketing innovation. It can even help you create better products.
Growth Hacking
The omni-ness of omnichannel marketing means that the flow of information created can go both ways. As well as understanding and providing better experiences for your customers, you can also utilize their feedback, insights and responses to shape and iterate your products and services.
This is known as growth hacking – pivoting quickly in response to rapid experimentation, identifying the most efficient way to grow your business in response to user needs.
Growth hacking can help you jump-start your business from growth stalls and stagnation, by throwing away your old assumptions and starting with a blank slate, with the direction dictated by concrete results.
Growth hacking borrows a lot of cues from the scientific method of testing hypotheses to collect data, then build actions based on the interpretation of that data. As in science, there is a lot of ‘failure’, but this is seen as an opportunity to learn and redirect energy in response to feedback. Failure isn’t failure, it’s the acquisition of knowledge that better illuminates the path toward better results.
Data capture and interpretation can help streamline this process. It provides the insight needed to use growth hacking methodology when developing every aspect of the business, from campaigns to products and services.
2018’s Holy Trinity
Omnichannel marketing, data analysis, and growth hacking. These are the three keys that will unlock greater success in 2018’s ferociously competitive market. Using this unique combination can transform your company’s processes in both public facing and internal applications. If there’s one takeaway from this article I want you to remember, it’s personalisation. The more you can deliver experiences that positively affect individuals in a real and meaningful way, the more success you will have.
If you want to learn more about this augmented approach to marketing and innovation, the Digital Marketing Innovation Conference (DMICON) is a 2-Day event in Kuala Lumpur, 29-30 November. At DMICON, the emphasis will be on Innovation, Leadership & Strategy, featuring Key Strategic Thinkers representing the region’s biggest brands, influencers, industry disruptors, and business change agents across all industries, from Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Hong Kong, Shanghai and more. For the latest, please visit: www.talentcap.com/dmicon
Source:
Reuters, Tue Oct 10, 2017 – 05:15am UTC
http://www.reuters.com/brandfeatures/venture-capital/article?id=17871