Marketers have always wanted to attract customers down pre-determined, controlled paths. The marketing funnel defines this ideal and has underpinned marketing strategies for decades. But as the millennial generation assumes real and rising consumer purchasing power, the marketing funnel and much else too about established marketing approaches is becoming irrelevant and even broken.
Digital channels, social media and mobile communications have fundamentally changed the way consumers interact with brands. Today’s customers orchestrate their own experiences, no longer following pre-determined, linear routes from exposure to conversion to advocate. They utilise a variety of on- and off-line channels to start, stop, rejoin and jump engagement levels, carving out highly individualised paths to purchase – and then ideally, continuing on to help build a community around your brand.
In working out how marketers should best respond, the detail of our recent study is really important here. When we asked millennials how they like to interact with brands, some key truths came out. We found that five out of six millennials said they connect with companies on social media networks. When asked “How do you typically discover new and interesting things online?” millennials indicated they prefer social networks for content discovery, followed by online and customisable newsfeeds. More traditional means, like email and search engines, ranked last.
These and other findings highlight how the customer is driving the marketing process, not simply in theory, but in practice. They aren’t waiting patiently to be marketed to or to be won over by elaborate marketing campaigns. In fact, many customers are totally alienated by traditional digital marketing. Analyst firm Forrester recently surveyed customers on attitudes and the findings were striking: 49 percent of consumers don’t trust digital ads; 38 percent don’t trust emails and 36 percent don’t trust information in branded apps. Given what we know about the millennials own preferences, these percentages are going to go up inexorably as this generation grows up.
Quite simply then, the traditional push-pull style marketing campaign is extinct. So what do you replace it with?
The good news is that customers do want to engage positively with brands. An interesting finding from our study is that when asked why they connect with companies via social media, the most popular responses were “to get discounts” (62 percent) and “to get free perks” (56 percent). Notably, using social media to make a complaint was the response of only 26 percent. What’s more, innovative approaches that are personalised win over millennial customers. More than a half (60 percent) of the millennials we polled said they like it when a company reaches out with a seasonal or birthday card or some other kind of brand building that isn’t focused on selling a product.
So the starting point is focusing on the personalised experiences customers want. Make a priority of building and nurturing customer experiences that are ongoing, consistent, meaningful and mutually-rewarding.
Digital marketing therefore becomes about gaining competitive advantage by how smartly you leverage data to understand and participate in the natural buying cycles that customers create. Some brands are beginning to pioneer this approach but we do have some distance to go to achieving the full benefits of data-driven marketing.
Wherever marketers are on their own journey to better understand customers’ buying journeys, the most important task should be to be thinking differently about marketing overall. Please get in touch to tell me your own experiences of marketing to the new millennial consumers and how you’re putting the marketing funnel to one side and delivering personalised customer experiences.
By Paige O'Neill, CMO, SDL on the Campaign is Extinct.
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