Marketing has always been about sculpting and projecting the right message, but now as a result of the digital revolution and a significant shift towards mobile & social channels, today it’s as much about the timing and delivery of message, as the actual message itself.
The latest research from Barclays delivers some telling insights for the marketers of the future: UK consumers are expected to spend £53.6bn a year using their smartphones and tablets by 2024, while mobile’s real influence on spending is expected to be more than double this; with 42% of all retail sales set to involve a mobile device in some way or another.
Maybe even more revealing is the fact that less than 3% of retailers believe their business is at the ‘cutting-edge’ when it comes to being mobile ready, and a further 70% said they did not currently even offer a mobile optimised website or app for their consumers. Furthermore, sales made through apps now account for a third of all retail spends on mobiles, yet only 10% of retailers offer apps.
While these findings are more mobile, than social-orientated, the key message they convey for marketers both today and of the future is clear: adapt and evolve to your new surroundings, or prepare for a fate similar to that of T-Rex and co.
While every day, marketers are taking steps to improve their digital marketing programs (a new email initiative here; a Twitter campaign there), buyer sophistication has meant that the marketing game has become increasingly sophisticated and consequently, difficult to measure.
But before you dive headlong into your next task, consider this: how will you know if you’re improving unless you step back to take stock of your marketing program and assess if its digital elements are truly translating into success.
While the key areas of assessment will vary based on industry and product or service sold, most digital marketers should systematically review at least the following seven areas: target market; pipeline; content; engagement; technology; mobile marketing and social media.
Over the course of the next three months we’ll be taking a closer look at each of these seven areas, in an attempt to provide all you digital marketers out there with a ‘tick list’ of key questions to ask as you’re (first up), pulling together and, finally assessing the success of your newly fledged digital campaigns.
As our first instalment, let’s consider the topic and importance of correctly identifying your target market…
The key to tapping into today’s mobile and social landscape is to understand behavioural marketing: just what exactly makes your existing customers tick and what will be the sweet spot for those (potential) customers you’re yet to engage?
Because mobile and social have complicated and put such a premium on the communication of a brand’s message (it might sound obvious), it’s never been more important to ask yourself; what is the total addressable market for your products and services? The identification of your target market is a key starting point for any assessment and should include good definitions of the different personas most likely to purchase your products.
Secondly, companies and brands need to collect data. It’s essential to the learning processes about their markets and the different personas within them, and data crunching crucially allows for more relevant content development, more appropriate profiles and more successful engagement and loyalty building along the way.
The key question is; how can you do this without using long, cumbersome forms that cause people to lose interest or become impatient? Or without ‘creeping out’ those they are seeking to target with 1984 style big brother snooping techniques.
The answer lies in progressive profiling. With robust new marketing automation technology, marketers can pose new questions each time a contact visits a website, landing page, or any other digital touch-point, steadily gaining deeper insight into their interests, and in the process building up a richer profile of an individual customer, or larger target sector.
So there you have it. If you do nothing else as a brand, do these two fundamentals well: spend time working out what your target markets are, and how the personas within each sector actually interact and operate; and work out a way to collect their data in as subtle, discreet and unobtrusive way as possible – if you can do this you’ll have a strong foundation from which to kick on from.
Stay tuned in May for the next in the series of the ‘tick list’ for digital marketing!
By Ellen Valentine, strategic marketing evangelist at Silverpop.
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