Digital has been a great democratising force in reaching out to the customers in the last one decade. As per a survey by Accenture, 62 percent of the businesses are investing in digital technologies, and 35 percent are comprehensively investing in digital as part of their overall business strategy.
SOURCE: WORLD ECONOMIC FORUM
It is paramount that even if you are a product-first company; you have to use technology to enhance the experience. You can be sure that your savvy competitors will be getting in on a digital action. If you don’t adopt digital strategies for your business, you may be slowly and gradually destroying it. So, here are the digital trends that you can’t ignore this year and need to act on.
- Believe the data, not your intuition – Gone are the days when experience, skill and intuition were marketers’ only friends. Now there has been a much more vital component added to marketing – Data. Loads of data is available through digital channels, from which you can determine what marketing strategy works for you and what not. With technology and data in your plate, things like A/B testing can be automated. You can now take data driven decisions and ensure better ROIs on your marketing.
- Break the data silos within your organisation by going digital first – If you are a company with multiple departments not speaking with each other, then a seamless customer experience is a complex challenge for you. Data analytics is required to improve the customer experience and make it seamless across channels and throughout the customer journey – and is not much valuable when siloed data is analysed. The goal should be to tear down the data silos and spread the valuable data collected by one department to the entire organization.
- Go beyond just adding your customers’ names to the messages when you speak of personalisation – Personalisation begins with sending tailored mails with the customer’s name in it. But with consumers being connected across channels and sharing much more information than their names with the brands, adding the only name to the message no longer has any impact. You have to create a focussed personalised marketing message and send it to your customers at the right time. You have to effectively use the technology available to personalise the communication using consumer behaviour, transaction and browsing history, social media mining, location tagging etc. to create a highly effective customer experience.
- Use emails and blend real time with personalisation – Emails are evolving from ‘one-for-all’ mass mailers to data driven, customer focused mails. With the emergence of segmentation, user generated content and automation, you can view emails as a blend of personalisation and real time communication. With the rich data available to you as a marketer, emails have the capacity to facilitate truly one-to-one custom relations and dialogues with your customers.
- Ignore Mobile at your risk – 75% of internet users are accessing web via mobile worldwide. You need to be present on mobile for your customers to find and engage with you when and where they want to. You need to have mobile websites and mobile apps. These will form the top B2B and B2C marketing tactics for 2016.
