Figures released by the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) recently showed digital ad spend specifically on tablet devices, rocketed by 400 percent last year, while spend on mobile advertising almost doubled, taking the figure to just over £1 billion.
These figures showcase the lengths brands are going to in order to reach an increasingly digitally savvy audience. As a CMO, I see this all the time – marketers, like advertisers, spend millions on campaigns and yet still struggle to continuously engage the consumers. This is because they often lack the data and technologies to create highly targeted content across multiple devices. Marketers are also facing an ongoing fight against the noise and conversations occurring on social media platforms.
What are the trends happening in digital marketing that might help them resolve this?
Today’s digital marketers need solutions that provide the insight and actionable data to engage with this ‘always-on’ customer. Marketers across the globe need to be able to deliver impactful experiences throughout the customer journey, regardless of device or location; improving customer acquisitions and powering continuous digital campaigns where they can track audience impact in real-time.
The majority of CMOs (88 percent) admitted in a recent CMO Council study that they did not have a real-time, well-integrated view of customer interactions across their businesses.
As a CMO, I can empathise with the difficulties of knowing where to start, but in an age where technology is advancing all the time, marketers need to catch up and take ownership when it comes to customer experience. To compete as a customer-centric organisation now and in the future, companies mustn’t be afraid to break away from the status quo. They must look to technology trends to modernise their businesses to be able to effectively deliver a global customer experience across all channels, devices and languages.
There are three things marketers can ensure they’re doing right away to move toward this modernisation and better address customers on social media channels.
1. Emerging cloud trends
The cloud delivery model enables organisations to optimise multi-channel customer experiences from any device and understand brand health and product perception in real-time. It also allows brands to adjust campaign strategies quickly to increase marketing effectiveness and impact revenue.
Cloud technologies are also faster to implement, easier to maintain and offer increased flexibility and therefore, increased ROI, which is essential to marketing budgets. Despite all of these benefits, marketers haven’t always been the first to embrace this technology delivery model because it screams “it’s too good to be true”.
But now that they’ve seen the technology evolve into a robust and secure solution, I’m beginning to see marketers accept cloud as their preferred delivery model. Considering the increased need to be agile to respond to customers in real-time through social media channels, for example, it’s essential that brands make the shift to the cloud (if they haven’t already).
Emerging solutions around social analytics to monitor customer journeys are now also being hosted in the cloud which can allow marketers to incorporate past buyer activities, while arming them with insights into future behaviours. This helps to provide marketers with the insights necessary to properly allocate digital marketing resources to improve targeting, engagement and ROI for customer acquisition.
2. Capitalise on customer data and embrace social engagement
In a world where the customer is in control, brands must continuously enhance, optimise, enable and support the customer journey. A great place to start is to develop a deep understanding of the behavioural characteristics of your most important customer segments. By listening to, understanding and analysing customer data, organisations can effectively predict buying and brand advocacy across the entire customer journey.
This involves defining key customer personas, developing playbooks as prescriptive guidance for how to move customers along their journeys toward desired behaviours, and setting KPIs that measure the most important customer behaviours as well as organisational behaviours. Ultimately, this process enables brands to better understand their customers, resulting in more personalised and targeted communications to convert customers across the entire buyer journey.
New digital intelligence offerings now offer the ability to maximise this process across social media channels, capturing real-time web interaction data for real-time decision making and smarter campaign planning with increased ROI.
3. Talk to your customers in their mother tongue
Fortune 500 companies have admitted that while they deliver product information in up to 35 languages, they often only provide support in one or two languages. This ultimately creates a breakdown in the customer experience. To avoid this, marketers should look to the advancements in translation technologies that enable the delivery of content across languages for new markets in near-time. Another thing to keep in mind is that ‘localisation’ goes beyond translation.
Not only should customers be able to read communications in their native languages but the content must be relevant and personalised to their cultures. To manage the complexity of global multilingual campaigns, marketers should leverage tools that include localisation services and technology. This will help to consolidate and optimise the most relevant multilingual content, multilingual SEO, social media analysis and campaign analysis.
While these three steps are not the only changes and trends marketers could consider to improve the customer experience, they’re certainly a good place to start and are digital trends to watch.
In an age where the always-on consumer demands responsiveness and relevance, by embracing a more flexible delivery model and placing more focus on customer data, culture and language, organisations will see major returns in customer engagement. This year and beyond, marketers must take the reins and refuse to accept mediocre, non-personalised experiences which put customers ‘out of touch’ with brands.
The good news is, with these advancements in digital marketing technologies, marketers can listen to what the customer wants. They can engage with them at the right time, with the right message, in the right tone of voice, across the right channel. This will result in an enterprise-class marketing user experience for today’s digital marketers.
