Within the past year, there has been a growing realisation that digital, social and technology innovation are the primary means for acquiring and retaining customers. The divide between traditional and digital marketing remains, and has become starker – fuelled through the growth of the e-commerce sector, borne out of survival and boosted by the newly adopted buying habits, with changing customer behavior driven by the pandemic.
Those who were frequent online shoppers already continued with even greater intensity. However, the sector gained a new segment: those who rarely if ever shopped online, but were forced to change their habits out of necessity. The optimisation of e-commerce marketing channels became key to marketing effectiveness.
So what do companies who still have a large traditional marketing portfolio need to think about?
Communication with customers has evolved over the past 20 years with the huge cultural shifts of social media and mobile marketing. The Communication shifted from “one-to-many” to “one-to-one”, with a much more targeted approach to customers’ needs, actions and wants. The approach was also influenced by recent transformational events, such as the worldwide pandemic.
According to a McKinsey report (June, 2020), these consumer behaviour changes are here to stay with the major shift towards e-commerce and trusted brands. Working from home and other restrictions are leading to consumers spending a lot of time online for both shopping and entertainment. Thus, the customer journey and user experience will be vital for brands during the recovery period. While traditional marketing is mostly built on raising customer awareness and trying to reach the target segment with TV, print, PR and direct selling, digital marketing focuses on driving engagement and personal connection with the customers.
Traditional marketing analysis is still driven by the creation of target personas with a subjective projection of the ideal customer whom marketers hope to reach with brand messaging. In contrast, the digital approach allows marketers to analyse customer behaviours, communicate with them directly with personalised messaging, collect the feedback online, build closer relationships with customers and consequently make smarter decisions about marketing strategy from these data.
Although this is simple in theory, there are new challenges marketers need to consider such as marketing attribution, tracking issues and walled gardens to consider before even measuring the contribution of each marketing channel. Thus, the demand for measurement was created, which can be successfully managed through AI models and predictive data analytics. The high-pressure competition in digital marketing means you cannot succeed without deep knowledge of your target consumers, and this knowledge can be only accumulated through data analytics.
The challenge, then, is to become data-driven and unlock the potential in your own customer data, yet still take advantage of the branding power of traditional marketing. The analytical challenge here is the measurement of online and offline together, for holistic customer journey optimisation.
