As digital technology continues to revolutionise the world, digital marketing, and data drove marketing, in particular, are become increasingly more important for the survival of businesses. In fact, there are few business functions that have been as profoundly disrupted by digitisation as marketing.
As a result, there’s probably little doubt in anyone’s mind that the era of traditional marketing is fast coming to an end. The days of pushing big, expensive campaigns about a single product through the mass media are pretty much over.
Nowadays, consumers, empowered by information, are demanding more and more from the companies they choose to form relationships with. They’re learning more about not just price but about where things come from, the significance of reviews, and what really is the difference between one product or service and another. All this requires a whole different marketing model –and a whole different set of data to drive it.
Creating a marketing funnel that generates sales
Every business with a digital shopfront has steps that people must take to become a customer. Irrespective of whether would-be customers are signing up to your online service or buying a product from your website, they have to progress along the various stages of your marketing funnel, from first awareness of your brand to post-sale evangelism. Basically, the various stages of your marketing funnel make up the process of converting a visitor or browser into a paying customer.
The funnel itself helps to visually show the conversion data between each step. This enables you to determine things like what steps are causing the customer confusion or trouble, what language or content might be changing their emotional behavior up to and during checkout, and so on.
Exposure to your brand is what sits at the top of the marketing funnel and represents your potential pool of sales leads. Next, you need to determine how many people actually do something as a result of their exposure to your brand. Measuring their engagement is one of the most important measurements because it shows how many people actually cared enough about what you are offering or had to say to take in some kind of action. But what action exactly did your message or content influence them to take? In other words, did your campaign influence positive vibes toward your brand or did it have a less desired effect?
Do you know how your digital media is helping your business? Do you want to find out how your digital channels are impacting your brand awareness?
Understanding your reach, engagement and influence will enable you to define your presence and impact. So, how then do you make all this data meaningful? Doing so, and doing so accurately, is extremely important for the future of your business.
Assessing digital data to drive business growth
What digital allows you to do is have something for everybody and use the data that you have about an individual in a particular moment – because of the search term that they use, or because of where they’ve been looking on your website, or due to the social engagement they’ve had with your brand – to categorise them differently and have something for each of them. But that actually means having something for each of them and creating that range of content and offers.
That’s a lot different from the old-style marketing campaigns that focused mainly on pushing something specific to a specific target audience and which took a time to develop and get underway. Digital is way faster. It’s way more complex. It requires constant testing and adjustment. It’s a rapid cycle of test and learn, test and learn, constantly evolving and adjusting.
The customer’s journey now is a cross-channel journey. They’re touching your mobile site, using their laptop, talking to somebody over the phone, going into a store. Yet it’s all one journey. And it’s imperative that you look at that journey in its totality so you can ensure your channels and what’s on them are always at the ready.
A whole new ball game
Digital isn’t simply just one more marketing channel. It’s the whole new ball game. It’s all about using data, faster cycle times, and a whole lot more interactivity with very much more empowered customers.
So you need to ask and get a whole lot more from you data because you need it to drive so much more of your decision making, how you deal with your customers and what value-add you’ll offer them.
It’s no longer just about product strategy or customer experience. Now you also need a data strategy because you need to know how to get more information about your customers, how to use that information so you can drive your customers to do more business with you so you can get even more information about them – in other words, an ever expanding cycle of data gathering that will eventually turn into your source of competitive advantage.
Are you looking for an end-to-end digital transformation service?
Net Branding’s team of digital marketing experts offers a wide range of digital services aimed at optimizing and growing your digital reach and influence.
Our services comprise search engine optimisation (SEO), website and user experience design, web analytics, digital marketing, social media marketing, online advertising, conversion optimization and email marketing. We coordinate all of these efforts to improve and enhance your customer funnels and online reach. As your digital partner, our shared and only goal is to help you assess your digital data in order to search for and exploit all your opportunities and grow your business.
Contact us today to find out more about what we can do for you.
