Digital Marketing Challenges and Trends
As the pace of evolution in the marketing ecosystem continually accelerates, here’s our round up of the key B2B marketing challenges, and the trends we think you should be evaluating as you formulate your business strategies.
Digital Transformation
The driving principle for digital transformation has become relationship and experience transformation. Where internal IT functions have historically been at the forefront of investment, now more companies are extending their initiatives across their marketing, customer service, customer experience and sales capabilities. This trend towards an integrated digital strategy is maturing to reshape business as a whole as companies seek to modernise and adapt across the board.
Customers now live their lives online and start their purchasing journeys online most of the time. That is the digital transformation and what companies have put in place to address that is often not up to scratch. 54% of companies report that delivering integrated, frictionless and omnichannel customer experiences is their top priority over the next three years, and breaking down internal silos is part of that transformation.
While competitive pressures and evolving customer behaviours and preferences are still key drivers of digital transformation efforts, rising in importance are new regulatory and compliance standards, such as GDPR, in the wake of high-profile data breaches. As the technological landscape develops, customers demand a more sophisticated, seamless experience and governments enforce more significant data and privacy protections; it will be companies who have successfully engaged with their own structural and cultural challenges that emerge as the winners.
Big Data
Data’s no longer merely big. Data is huge. The fifth annual DOMO Data Never Sleeps report in 2017 showed that every single day, we generate 2.5 quintillion bytes of data and that at the time of the study, 90% of all data ever created had been generated in the previous two years.
Big data is also unavoidable. Any company doing business online has a digital footprint and is wrangling with how to deal with the resulting data, including the considerable amount of personal data received as a result of every interaction they have with their users.
Big Data comes with significant opportunities for business intelligence, data-driven marketing and sales lead qualification, but 90% of data is unstructured and as little as 0.5% is ever analysed. Many companies are also finding that the volume, variety and velocity of Big Data comes with big headaches and cost implications. It will be the companies that get to grips with effectively leveraging the data resources they’re sitting on, without overwhelming the creative and human intelligence of their employees, that will have the edge of clarity, focus and more profound understanding in 2020 and beyond.
Attention Economics
Herbert A. Simon outlined the concept of attention as a scarce commodity in a fascinating paper written 50 years ago on Designing Organisations for an Information Rich World. In 2001, at the beginning of the digital revolution, before a world that included Facebook, Twitter and on-demand streaming services, Davenport and Beck’s The Attention Economy echoed the warning that businesses would find themselves unable to compete if they couldn’t overcome high levels of attention deficit. In today’s digital marketplace, we send 473,400 tweets every minute, post 49,380 images on Instagram, and send a staggering 159,362,760 emails. Every single day, over 4 million blog posts are published.
In a world beyond the point of information saturation, where attention is scarcer than at any point in human history and marketing departments worldwide are prioritising creating ever more content for their overwhelmed audiences to consume, how do you cut through?
The companies best able to compete will skillfully blend marketing automation and machine learning with human creativity and sharp insight to deliver unique, relevant and resonant messaging to precisely the right people, at precisely the right time, and in a format most useful to them. Savvy content marketing teams will concentrate on producing high quality over bland quantity, social media marketing will become increasingly interactive and conversational instead of a broadcast medium, and email marketing will innovate with delivering dynamic and personalised content over traditional mass email blasts.
Key Take Aways
Have the conversation about your digital relationships.
Digital isn’t going anywhere, and it isn’t an add-on or a future trend. It’s the new landscape, so it’s time to make sure you’re across the organisational, cultural, and ethical issues. It’s daunting, but there are companies who can help.
Start capturing and using your data.
If you’re thinking “but we don’t have ‘Big Data’’, it doesn’t mean you have nothing to work with. You’re probably sitting on a wealth of unstructured data that, once collated and optimised, will become valuable business intelligence. You’ve already got a wealth of information about the existing relationships within your organisation, perhaps as part of a CRM but certainly within your teams. You’ve probably already got the digital behaviours – website, email and social media clicks – to enable interaction tracking. Look at how you can fill the gaps in your capture and tracking to build a record of your relationships.
Develop your digital strategy
Have a point of view, express it beautifully, and make it relevant and resonant for your customer. The way to stand out in an attention deficit age is to craft a customer experience that is thoughtful, skilful and elegantly executed.
