Nobel Prize-winning Economist, Herbert Simon, once wrote that “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention”. That’s never been truer than today. On average, we are bombarded with more than 3,000 marketing messages a day that are seeping into our brains whether we like it or not (Source: Adbusters 2011).
Prior to the web, we as consumers, lived in a world of information scarcity, where sellers had all the information (as well as all of the purchasing power), and the sales department inside a company held all of the organisational power. But that’s all changed. As consumers, we now have information abundance at the click of a mouse, and as buyers, we hold all of the purchasing power. More importantly for marketers, the organisational power inside a company now resides with the marketing department, not the sales department.
The rules have changed. I could wax lyrical about this in greater depth, but for the sake of brevity (and not overloading you with information), I’ve boiled it down to five critical rules required for successfully navigating the new world of marketing.
1. ENGAGE - Marketing today is all about engagement. It’s not about finding customers. It’s about being found. It’s no longer about finding people. It’s about helping people to find you.
2. PERSONALISE - The days of point in time blasts have been superseded by one-to-one durable relationships based on clever, personalised content marketing that creates both pull and affinity with prospects.
3. SEGMENT - Forget demographics. A good digital marketing platform can enable you to segment customers based on their online behaviour – for example, they’ve looked at features and pricing for a particular product. This means you can have meaningful conversations with your prospects, not generic generalised campaigns. It also means that you can engage them over time with more targeted, personalised and relevant messages triggered by specific online behaviours.
4. INTEGRATE - Isolated marketing channels are wasting your time, your marketing budget and your creativity. Integrate your channels across websites, landing pages, online ads, email, Facebook, events, mobile and the myriad of other multi-channel opportunities available to you and you will engage a crowd (see rule number one).
5. MEASURE - As marketers, we no longer need to reply on intuitive-based, gut feel decision making. We now have the tools and automated processes required to accurately track marketing investment against both budget and conversions. We can track all customer touch points across people and over time. That means you can see which campaign or program made the greatest contribution to sales, and you, as a marketer, can speak the language of the C-Suite with hard numbers on growth, performance and return on investment.
With the right digital marketing platform in place, you can ensure potential customers can find you, nurture and score your prospects with an ongoing dialog based on their behaviours and interests, drive sales conversions, and then accurately measure and optimise the impact of your marketing investments.
The problem of information overload isn’t going away anytime soon. You can try to compete with the noise through a bigger budget or you can apply a smarter approach through a better platform.
By Elizabeth Smyth, EMEA Marketing Director at Marketo.
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