2015 proved to be the year of Uber. I’m not referring to the most valuable startup company in the world, but rather the year’s favourite buzzword. 2015 found the world’s business executives, across every sector, sitting around a boardroom table, trying to decide how to “Uberise” their companies.
It was the year of disruption, where legacy systems were realised to no longer stand the test of time, and new, young-faced, completely digitised players in industries like the banking sector, entering the market to really shake things up.
With this disruption came the acute awareness of the role the consumer plays in this shifting landscape. Now, more than ever, the demands of the consumer are shaping the way organisations interact with their audience. This is why content remains king, but needs to be more and more refined with a greater industry/vertical flavour – generic simply will not do. Digital Marketing remains the only game in town and increasingly, disruptive techniques will be needed to overcome the immunity that is growing amongst customers towards traditional forms of advertising and demand generation.
This year, if CMOs build their campaigns around the three following customer-centric resolutions, they can be confident in their understanding of the pain points customers are facing, to help direct their sales people to know where to fish.
Digital needs to run through our veins
Fujitsu’s “Digital Inside Out” research has shown that most companies have focused on the digitisation of their “front-end”, but few have digitised their “back-end” operation. This means that whilst the veneer that is shown to a customer is modern and engaging, the reality is that many businesses are faced with using old, manual and disconnected processes and systems behind the scenes – and these are expensive to run, and slow to change, when a brand wants to react to a move by a pure play competitor.
As Marketers it is our job to ensure that we understand what customers want, what our competitors are planning, and ensure that we deliver rapidly in the fast-moving world that we now reside, at a price the customer is willing to pay. This means that we need to have digital running through our veins and our operations – it is no longer enough to have an omni-mobile website, if this just loops back into a legacy system behind it that is so costly to run you will never compete on price, where the service experience is clunky and/or where you are unable to react quickly to moves in the market.
Don’t annoy the customer
From a communications perspective, we need to recognise that customers are on the receiving end of thousands of messages, every second of the day, through multiple media touchpoints. As such – very much like the humble mosquito – they are becoming immune to the more traditional forms of marketing, such that only the more disruptive of campaigns cut through. Some brands have approached this with the “saturation method” – simply inundating the customer with the same email, same tweet, same banner – in the hope that they will eventually succumb and make the purchase.
I have got to say that this is a million miles from the scientific targeted approach to marketing that the digital age was meant to dawn. As organisations react to the demand and rapid uptake of connected digital services, we are seeing exponential growth in the data produced and gathered from using these. This is opening up a whole new world of possibilities for businesses who want to gain an even better understanding of their target market.
Organisations need to thoroughly understand the data they have gathered to make real use of it through creating targeted, relevant content that interests our consumers, not drive them away.
Go back to basics with metrics
The true metrics are the same ones they have always been, back in the days of Kotler, Porter and others – sales and profits. If you cannot draw a correlation between a marketing campaign and an ultimate sale, then you are wasting your time. Yes, there are proxies along the way, which I would define as:
- Enhancing your brand’s reputation – would the customer want to buy from you?
- Building your brand’s credibility – does the customer believe that your product can solve their needs?
- Starting conversations – opportunities to meet face-to-face with customers
- Starting the demand generation process – putting specific offers in front of the customer that they may want to take further.
If your marketing is not doing some or all four of these, you are wasting your time. In terms of measurements, you need to demonstrate that your activity is leading to an enhanced reputation (brand tracking studies, positive retweeting), better credibility (customer endorsements, provision of case studies and references), more conversations (more engagements, higher open rates, more leads) and ultimate demand generation (qualified leads and ultimate sales).
The challenges are not dissimilar to those that CMOs in previous generations faced, they are just coming faster and each one is tougher to overcome.
Voice of the consumer
This year, it is crucial CMOs evaluate their approach to truly understanding their customers, to drive this demand and consequently boost sales. Whilst we always talk about customers, we often do that from a sales, financial or operational perspective. The 2016 CMO must realise their role of standing in the shoes of those customers and to represent them in Board-level discussions to ensure their demands are heard and catered to accordingly.
