Digital Marketing: How To Shift Marketing Into The Digital Arena
Coronavirus (COVID-19) has left its footprints on the sand of times, causing disruption in the business and marketing landscape. The disruption is causing a major shift to the digital arena in a bid for brands to stay connected with their target market.
Today, businesses are either changing their business models and moving online or beefing up existing marketing efforts with digital marketing strategies.
Excitingly, consumers are now beginning to trust online platform for engagement more than ever. So, for businesses to capture more market share, online has proven to be the answer. Meanwhile, the importance of digital marketing cannot be overemphasised as it provides businesses of all class with the opportunity to compete with multinationals for market share by leveraging online traffic.
It is important to note that, shifting marketing into the digital arena is more cost-effective than traditional marketing and it delivers conversion. It also helps to generate better revenues, facilitates interaction with targeted audiences, caters to the mobile consumer, builds brand reputation, provides better ROI for marketing investments, earns people’s trust, entices people to take favourable action and ensures business survival. Here’s how the shift into the digital arena can be achieved:
Dominant Online Presence with Storytelling
There is an upsurge in online traffic and engagement and it includes everything from shopping to events. There is also an increase in Zoom conference, Instagram lives chats and others. Brands are taking their campaigns online and for it to attract consumer and achieve desired objectives.
The online space offers brands the opportunity to tell their stories, create brand awareness, sale their goods and services and maintain or build a good corporate reputation in the digital space. Amazingly, most people spend most of their time online. So, community pages and other similar networks are great places to promote a brand and build brand awareness in local communities. Regular Online Consumer Engagement Excitingly, most businesses and brands have turned online to offer bespoke services to their customers and also connect with their stakeholders and consumers with a series of webinar and online engagement.
Businesses need to create their own social media handles if they don’t have one while they need to also equip it with great contents which are engaging. From creating hashtags, giveaways and keying into trends they can boost traffic.
Any reward scheme online that seek to enrich consumers is always welcomed and generates a lot of traffic. Automation Of Services Automation combined with metrics means that consumer behaviour is being tracked; it can be addressed without necessarily requiring a human to supervise the activity and be lucky enough to catch it and react to it in time. Digital transformation now means that when certain data or actions are recognized, the software can act upon those conditions to send emails or personalized responses quickly, without needing to notify a human agent to act on a time-sensitive issue.
Banks and payment solutions are examples of those that use this often for their business operation. Enhanced Customer Satisfaction Today, consumer service is more than telephone calls, SMS messages, and emails as social media interactivity, customer services can be delivered within seconds – instead of hours or days. People can ask questions, and brands can answer them immediately. Unhappy customers can voice their opinions, and brand representatives can interject immediately and offer resolutions – publically. So, consumers’ complaints can also be resolved online. Online Order and E-commerce Today, more people are ordering their goods and services online than before and they get it delivered to their doorstep. Many brands are leveraging on this, the digital platform has further helped the distribution processes as customers can track the movement of the items ordered.
Remarkably, the E-commerce boom is expected to create new household brand names because 38% of consumers say they will continue to buy from online stores that they first visited during the crisis (COVID-19 Pandemic), while another 31% will continue to buy new products and services that they first started to buy during the crisis, this is according to kantar’s research.
Social media channels offer paid advertising, which lets brands access new audiences with their content, for a small fee. These adverts act just like Google Ads; on a pay-per-click model that can link adverts directly to an eCommerce website for conversion. In other words, social media has developed into a power lead and sales generating tool that should be added to any marketing sales funnel. Technology Deployment And Personalization There is no doubt that technology has changed how companies conduct business. Remarkably, social media, online opinions, mobile devices and payments, integration of IoT, Big Data and cloud technology and augmented reality influence consumer behaviour. One of the most effective ways that the digital transformation has changed the way digital marketing works is the way it can now personalize content to individual customers.
Due to the combination of metrics and interactivity, it’s now possible to track the actions and behaviour of consumers at an individual level, then take that data to provide a personalized marketing response. Opportunity For Insight And Data Shifting marketing to the online space gives an opportunity to get Insight and data that would further help marketing activities to thrive.
Interestingly, by paying attention to target audiences on social media, brands get an idea of what people engage with – and what they don’t like to see. This data that is freely available on social media can go a long way when used to develop marketing campaigns and content. Overall, it helps a brand grow remarkably.
Adeola Akanni