Making your product/service attract the attention of your prospective clients and customers has become increasingly difficult due to the avalanche of adverts an average user receives within a day. To combat this, businesses are shifting to technology to help them understand their customers better and bridge the gap between what the prospect wants and what your business provides.
Digital marketing provides an opportunity for businesses to improve their operations, gain valuable insights from a large sample data of customers, provide messages relevant and personalized to their customers, as well as creating measurable marketing campaigns.
Everybody is jumping on the digital marketing train; However, are we doing it for the right reasons? or are we even harnessing the powers that digital marketing affords most of the businesses that are preaching digital marketing?
Here are things to look out for when an organization is implementing digital marketing operations to transform Nigerian businesses:
- Reaching an Uncharted Customer base: Gone are the days where you need to physically meet your prospect to talk about the business you do. With a little time taken out to research companies, key decision makers, company initiatives and company values, you can find a common ground to have a touchpoint with your potential customers either individually or en masse.
- Understanding Your customers better: Through careful analysis, it is possible for a company to map out the various interest points of a prospect during a sales cycle. Unfortunately, most Nigerian business do not concentrate on this, as such they have limited knowledge of their customers. Some basic technologies and tracking tools can be used to better understand the customer journey. Digital marketing cannot be truly efficient if you do not understand the customer journey.
- Delivering superior customer experience: Are you selling iPhone accessories to customers who purchased an Android device on your store? Are you sending out messages to your customers to buy something they have previously purchased? Are you communicating to your customers on channels they have never interacted with you before?L’Oreal’s makeup genius app uses webcams so that customers can try out different colours and styles of make-up. While this might be seamless and enjoyable to the customer it is empowered by complex technologies that might not even be available to their competitors.Digital marketing operations will transform your sales number if the technology used can deliver an enhanced customer experience that sets you apart from your customers.
- Selecting the right marketing technology: The customer of today is active on multiple social networks in different ways, has multiple email addresses, multiple phone numbers and multiple means of communication with their friend or prospective vendors. This has instigated the rise of the Chief Marketing Technologists in Digital companies.The Chief Marketing Technologist has the daunting task of navigating through thousands of marketing software. The best marketing technology might not be the right technology for your organization. Choosing the right technology requires several consideration factors such as: Ease of use, ease of integration, scalability, omni-channel capabilities (BIG CONSIDERATION IN TODAY’S MARKET), ability to integrate with existing data, etc.
- Implementing Processes and governance: A tool is only as smart as the user, it goes the same with marketing technology and digital marketing operations. Companies need to establish guidelines on how business units will: use the tools, interact with each other, approach knowledge sharing and data sharing or which capabilities would be managed in-house or by external agencies.In addition, the following should be clearly stated: Key Performance Indicators, incorporating feedback loops, Goals/Milestones, consistency in specifying various digital operations roles in the organization.
- Measuring KPIs and optimization of marketing campaigns: Digital marketers would always boast about the ability to measure. Businesses must use that to their advantage. However, don’t get caught up with the fancy analytics and basic measures of success. Businesses should challenge themselves to go deeper in the insights availed by analytics. Focus should be made on the metrics that focus on customer behavior, customer activity and customer feedback.Metrics should go beyond past data and past activity and should also provide future opportunities and insights to how business owners can create more value for their brands.
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