By Jones Mathew
Marketing in the Digital Age is no longer a new concern. The fundamentals of marketing – understanding customer pain points and needs, developing suitable products and services, grabbing customers’ attention and helping them solve their lifestyle problems – are what marketers have strived for since the beginning.
However, what has changed is the ecosystem. This new environment is clearly different from what marketers worked in earlier. The digital system empowers consumers and marketers both, by being accessible, granular, interactive, trackable, measurable, scalable and alive. From the humble email and SMS to the more advanced platforms (TWIFTTY – Twitter, Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram, Telegram, TikTok and Youtube), to the even more evolved Metaverse which is upon us now. From direct marketing and push messages to images, videos and 3D frames, marketers have a much more nuanced and complex set of ecosystems to engage with its target audience in. Similarly, customers are more agile, can co-create (or destroy) brands with minimal efforts, are constantly seeking novelty, and are brand hopping with ease.
E-commerce as an alternative customer acquisition funnel (for product marketers) and acquisition and distribution channel (for service marketers) has matured rapidly. From its rudimentary beginnings marked by imperfect UI/UX interfaces, high customer anxiety, botched delivery operations and limited payment options, e-commerce has become a strong pillar for marketers globally.
Marketers have been leveraging social media and e-commerce for some years now. What is changing is the intensity, frequency and penetration of both, especially in India. For social media marketing to flourish, an economy needs a clear set of guidelines about its use and misuse while not throttling freedom of speech and content. In the case of e-commerce, a set of infrastructural challenges had to be overcome including setting up a wide network of distribution hubs, modern transportation connectivity, high powered communications networks (4G,5G, etc), security and options of payment transactions, and so on. Once these were being put in place, marketers leveraged the younger demographic, a larger appetite for experimentation, greater comfort with various payment transaction options and the endless aisle opportunity of digital inventories that customers loved.
On social media, partnering with high credibility influencers is a proven way of generating connections with target audiences for marketers. In addition, paid promotions help marketers to be even more focused on specific target groups to share content with and build engagement, help them through the decision journey and create long term bonding opportunities to increase visibility, reach and awareness.
Social media marketing (SMM) is more complex than what it appears to be at first sight. Marketers in order to truly leverage the power of SMM must focus on the following: choose relevant platforms very carefully; optimize content (video, live video, images, text, stories) to match with chosen platform’s captive audience; ensure consistency and regularity of SMM outreach activities especially through marketing automation software like Hootsuite; continuously engage with one’s brand followers on social media; boost your own efforts with the amplification that influencers can bring to the table; leverage paid promotions in a customized fashion across different SMM platforms, offer incentives to SM followers; and strike the right balance between brand promotions and curating useful content for customers.
Marketers must envision social media marketing as the right lever to educate, engage and excite their preferred customers. It may be a consolation that as customers are looking for brands to connect with because of those brands’ meaningfulness, value systems and purpose, all one needs to do as a marketer is to know the customer intimately and then engineer social media marketing strategies and tactics to get eyeballs and capture heartbeats.
Electronic commerce or e-commerce is primarily aimed at acquiring prospective customers either directly or routed via social media marketing activities and traditional marketing methods to a brand’s web assets such as a web page and then converting that traffic into purchasing customers. The bottom line of e-commerce is sales.
Marketers achieve greater success with e-commerce when they do not look at different aspects of the marketing toolbox as exclusive swim lanes. E-commerce gets better and stronger when there is synergy between social media marketing and online sales activities as both co-exist as digital siblings. E-commerce specialists must necessarily work closely with social media marketing experts within the company.
E-commerce marketers must work on the following: Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Search Engine Marketing (SEM), content creation for e-commerce product pages, optimization of product pages by providing the right specifications and details, post-sale follow-up activities with customers, etc are key to leveraging e-commerce as a revenue channel.
Marketers in the digital era need to use the power of experimentation (A/B – [Alpha/beta] experiments, Switchback experiments, Quasi experiments, etc.); data management (data generation, data storage and data manipulation using SQL, Google Big Query, Google Tag Manager, etc); in-house Ads platforms for developing bidding algorithms; in-depth customer data platforms especially in a zero cookie world; and hyper personalization protocols.
The world of marketing has taken a huge leap. Social media and e-commerce will lead the way in customer acquisition, engagement and loyalty. Marketers will need to become increasingly more technology driven to leverage the digital worlds we live in, purchase in, consume in, express our loyalty in and discard brands we don’t find relevant anymore.
The author is Professor at GLIM Gurgaon. Views are personal.
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