Marketing in the era of Digital Transformation

In this digital era, marketers constantly need to come up with fresh ideas to help businesses grow and stay relevant. “Change is the only constant”, and as a marketer, this statement is the centre of our existence. Not just change, but evolution is the way forward.

Undoubtedly, social media has become one of the primary marketing channels for businesses today. It is not just used for posting ads, but successful marketers are effectively using social media for engaging the community and building followership to establish a connection with the influencers in their niche. Smart marketers leverage social media to attract customers to their own platform.

Gone are the days of spray and pray. Today’s marketers use artificial intelligence and content strategy to attract attention and eyeballs. For example, the concept of “Content is King” has now evolved into “Content is Objective”. Content today is tailored and personalized to be consumed by a focused set of people and just not generic. Content today is centred around the end consumer vis-à-vis the organization’s solutions or services. Marketing today is completely persona-based, as the organizations focus on providing experience-based marketing.

Globally, over 3.6 billion people use social media and the number is projected to grow to 4.41 billion in 2025. Till a few years ago, most companies were putting out content; but today, they are putting out interactive and actionable information and tracking the consumer’s reactions to them. Based on these reactions, the content is being changed in real-time and re-shared. This is an example of how marketers are using sentiment analysis and putting in intelligence while they market. The ROI is of course long term.

LinkedIn now has more than 722 million users in over 200 countries and territories. Twitter reported 187 million monetizable daily active users (mDAUs) in the third quarter of 2020, up 29% year over year. Instagram has over 1 billion monthly active users and 500 million of them use Instagram Stories. In Q3 2020, Facebook reported over 2.7 billion monthly active users (MAUs).

Companies today are acting on this and are actively using social listening to capture and understand their customers’ voices. Crawlers are being used to track social chatter, and this information combined with machine-learning algorithms and AI create automated actionable insights. This results in real-time brand reputation management.
It is interesting that 96% of unhappy customers won’t tell you directly, but will tell their friends about their disappointment. Also, most will post online but not tag the organization. This is where these crawlers are useful if programmed properly.

Similarly, videos do create a major impact on consumer minds. As consumers would be glued to its visual effects and storytelling. Marketers need to keep themselves constantly updated about how to influence their customers to stay loyal to their brand. They need to know where the trends are going, as businesses heavily rely on trends. At end of the day, it is all about how they position the brand uniquely and sell in new ways and being relevant to the audience in the new era.

With ever-increasing digital noise and decreasing attention timespan, persona-based marketing of curated, personalized, and interactive bite-sized content is the only way forward. Combining the power of social analytics, digital listening and sentiment analyst is the top priority for a marketer today.

Deciding on the right platform and media to deliver this content is very important. Marketers today have a wide variety of choices when it comes to the content delivery platform. The effectiveness of a platform depends on where customers are, its functionality, and most importantly the type of analytics it provides. For example, for most B2B IT companies LinkedIn is the ideal platform; while for CPG and FMCG companies, the ideal choice is Twitter and Facebook; and for Media companies – YouTube. Choosing the right platform is vital to success – but it is not the tools that make one successful; it is the skill.

Do you have the creative intelligence to thrive in this era of digital transformation?

Author:

Arijit Ray
Head, Digital Marketing,
ITC Infotech