Welcome to the first in a new series of guest blog posts about digital marketing strategy. Today’s guest contributor is Amanda Vanderboegh, a marketing consultant with a wealth of digital marketing knowledge. Amanda helps businesses plan and execute effective social media, SEO, email marketing and PR campaigns. Find her on Twitter and LinkedIn.
In today’s post, we’ll be answering your top questions about digital marketing – from strategy recommendations to useful tools and what’s in store for the future. We had a fantastic response from our Twitter followers last week and would like to thank everyone for their contributions. Here we go!
Marketers are continually told to segment, segment, segment – the more targeted the message, the better response you’ll get from your audience. I think this is true at the level most marketers are operating today but very soon we’ll come to a point where the average business may have to grapple with the ‘TMI’ threshold.
Hyperpersonalisation can take customer experience to the next level if it’s done right but as marketers, we have to exercise a bit of empathy when deciding how to use the vast amounts of data we’re collecting about our audiences. There’s quite a lot of evidence to show that at a certain point, ads and messages that are too targeted make people uncomfortable.
It’s even worse if you draw incorrect conclusions from the data. Pinterest, for example, recently sent an email to female users congratulating them on their engagement. The assumption was that because these users pinned wedding-related content, they must be planning a wedding. Big mistake. Thousands of single ladies longing to walk down the aisle received an email with the subject line “You’re getting married!” Sad times.
Bottom line, people don’t want to be sold to. They especially don’t like to feel used or manipulated. Give them personalisation where it makes their online experience easier but keep in mind that cultivating trust in your brand is a painstaking process. Loyalty is fragile and all it takes is one creepy marketing come-on for people to click ‘unsubscribe.’ That’s the line, I think – when you get creepy and intrusive with it, you’ll hit a point of diminishing return.
Real-time analytics. Most marketers have embraced the importance of analytics and data-driven decision making, but reporting methods are still lagging. We need to move away from relying solely on post-campaign analysis to find out what’s working and what’s not. We need to be agile. Many of us are still reporting on pageviews, click-through, bounce rates and other engagement metrics after campaigns have completely run their course. With real-time analytics we’ll be able to cut our losses quicker and adjust the strategy for maximum ROI. Real-time has been around for a while now but it doesn’t play much of a role in the day-to-day for many of us.
Revenue attribution. It’s time to say goodbye to the last-click model. With the rise of big data and ever-evolving analytics capabilities, we’re starting to get a clearer picture of the customer journey – and it’s not always straight forward. For years, we’ve been awarding all the credit to the last click by default, ignoring channels that play powerful assist roles in the conversion process. Basically, we’ve been wasting time and money on tactics that we think work better than they actually do. Savvy digital marketers are already incorporating attribution modelling into their strategy – it’s definitely something I’ll be prioritising this year.
I’m not going to point to one technology in particular, but I do think the marketing profession as a whole will finally let go of the Mad Men image and embrace the geek within. Analytics, geo-targeting, automation, revenue attribution, beacon technology, wearables – you need to know about this stuff. Requirements on marketing job specs will change. Programming skills, for example, will become more important for entry-level marketers. Most of us in the digital sphere spend a lot more time working with developers and web designers than sales teams. It’s becoming increasingly important to communicate in their language – to understand the possibilities and limitations of digital solutions from a technical perspective. You don’t have to be a full-blown code ninja (yet), but I do think knowing your way around a stylesheet will be the new standard.
Have a burning question we didn’t get to in this post? Tweet it to us @SmartFocusWorld and we’ll make sure to get back to you. If 140 characters aren’t enough, pick up the phone and give us a ring on +44 (0)20 7554 4500 or fill out our contact form today to arrange a meeting with a SmartFocus marketing specialist.