We’re entering into the 4th digital marketing framework — the first was in 2000 — and there are things your business can do to prepare for coming disruption.
What Is Digital Marketing 4.0?
The previous frameworks includes websites, email campaigns, digital advertisements, basic social media management and basic blog publishing. It only concentrates on increasing traffic to websites but has no focus on lead conversion and proper online lead qualification. This recent iteration, though, includes:
More Integrated Global Marketing: Both inbound and outbound marketing should now be combined. In comparison to cold-calling, consider this “warm-calling.” For example, after someone reads a blog on your site, follow it up with an email sharing more meaningful content.
A Cohesive Marketing Technology Stack: Marketing is not about the productive aspect alone anymore. Marketing infrastructure needs to be designed and integrated correctly. One social media tool alone will not save you, nor will one CRM tool be the solution to a challenge anymore. Study your full stack and how it can work together.
Evolving Marketing Roles: Digital change is no longer limited to the CIO. Your CMO now requires it more than ever. The CMO should know more about the possibilities of implementing marketing automation to not only help execute on the marketing playbooks but also to help CIO’s measure a full, end-to-end ROI.
Omnichannel Marketing Strategy: This hold deep analytics and data mining, such as AI and machine learning. Omnichannel marketing brings a diversity in mediums when it comes to broadcasting your brand and value-add. Focusing only on one medium can be limiting, especially if your customers don’t exist on that channel.
A Focus On Account-Based Marketing (B2B): Account-based selling should be an essential part of your digital marketing process even if you are a B2B,SaaS or a modern managed service provider (MSP). This will be the key changer between B2C and B2B organizations in 2017 and beyond.
Understanding What Drives Disruption
While working in a Fortune 100 company for nine years before moving to lead my current team, I became fascinated by buyer behavior. What kinds of digital offerings most deeply engage buyers in their digital lives? I started by looking at some case studies of the products, services and experiences that had been embraced and adopted by buyers during the first two decades of the internet. Over a period of 7 years working on inbound marketing expeditions, what I found was a recurring pattern of three behaviors that drove the acceptance of new digital experiences, which I call the three core actions of a network:
Access
Consumers are trying to interact with digital content and access digital data as quickly and as conveniently as possible. Any offering that increases this access is incredibly compelling. Think of text messaging on old mobile phones, which revolutionized communications with the ability to receive and send messages from anywhere and at anytime.
Engagement
Once consumers can get this content, they want to engage with something that fits their needs and is sensory and reciprocal — from the early publicity of web portals to the spread of online video, to the coming generation virtual realities. Their digital wants are marked by a thirst for content. The old media motto that “content is king” is correct. There is no question that the desire to engage with content is a key of customer behavior.
How are you changing mass online marketing to one-to-one interaction and engagement in your online marketing plans? How do we become a source of valued content for your customer? Always target on the customer care. Be consultative in your conversation. Seek to ask and go broad into a prospect’s business challenge, and be very honest in your marketing expeditions to ensure you are progressively qualifying the prospect.
Customization
Consumers seek to customize their experiences by choosing and altering a wide assortment of information, products and services. In a time period, customers have gone from having a handful of television channel options to a digital world with more than a trillion web pages. They have been trained by their digital networks to expect more options for choice, and they like this. From Pandora’s personalized radio streams to Google’s search bar that anticipates search terms, customers are drawn to increasingly customized experiences.
Summarizing, whether you are a B2B or B2C business, building the buyer’s journey is very critical when building your marketing engine.
Wahy 