Marketing Reinvented

What is the des­tiny of the tra­di­tion­al mar­keter? I’ve fol­lowed the devel­op­ment of mar­ket­ing tech­niques close­ly as the play­ing field in the dig­i­tal world has changed to the advan­tage of the cus­tomer. The term Mar­ket­ing Cloud now dom­i­nates the con­ver­sa­tion. The ini­tia­tives one can cre­ate from a Cloud per­spec­tive can be mind-bog­gling. I’ll keep this sim­ple … if I can.

Var­i­ous col­leagues of mine at Adobe have tak­en the oppor­tu­ni­ty to write about the chang­ing of the guard in mar­ket­ing. One blog post, is an excel­lent syn­op­sis of mar­ket­ing tech­nol­o­gy and the new skills that are need­ed for tra­di­tion­al mar­keters to mas­ter to be effec­tive inthe emerg­ing tech­nol­o­gy of the Mar­ket­ing Cloud. The results of our Dig­i­tal Dis­tress: What Keeps Mar­keters Up at Night? sur­vey pro­vides an inter­est­ing per­spec­tives on the dis­com­fort of the tra­di­tion­al mar­keter try­ing to adapt. The vol­ume, veloc­i­ty and vari­ety of the Inter­net is set­ting the pace. In my own pre­vi­ous blog post, I ques­tion the speed at which we are rein­vent­ing the new mar­keter. How­ev­er, one must pay due respect by doing things in the right order. The new mar­ket­ing tech­nol­o­gy does not solve the many issues that arise when tran­si­tion­ing from tra­di­tion­al to more a mod­ern way. It is an enabling tech­nol­o­gy. We first must address the peo­ple skills, cor­po­rate cul­ture and orga­ni­za­tion­al end of things need­ed. Bot­tom line- You’d bet­ter be dig­i­tal­ly mature before you take the plunge in to your mar­ket­ing transition.

One thing is crys­tal clear. Tra­di­tion is less impor­tant and change must occur. The AIDA mar­ket­ing fun­nel mod­el still has rel­e­vance sim­ply because not all the busi­ness­es in the B2B and B2C world even have a web­site. How­ev­er, the bulk of the buy­ers for your goods and ser­vices are on their smart­phones look­ing for you. Are you there?

https://blogsimages.adobe.com/digitaleurope/files/2015/04/graph.jpg

The Rel­e­vant Statistics

Did you know that in 2014 only 53% of small busi­ness­es in the Unit­ed States had a web­site. This was a mod­est increase from the 45% of small busi­ness­es with web­sites in 2009. Yet, in the Unit­ed States, the use of smart­phones and tablets offi­cial­ly sur­passed the use of desk­tops to access the Inter­net in Feb­ru­ary of 2014? Your cus­tomers are on the web whether you are or not.

Let’s pause to con­sid­er the impli­ca­tions of these sta­tis­tics: 47% of small busi­ness­es have not yet even estab­lished a web­site for desk­tops and their cus­tomers are already mov­ing on to mobile devices and are “always on” via many dif­fer­ent dig­i­tal chan­nels over the course of a day. More­over, the term “small busi­ness” does not only apply to “mom and pop shops.” Many are rea­son­ably mod­est enterprises.

The Busi­ness Case for Change

That leads to an inter­est­ing per­spec­tive on how to approach the dig­i­tal tran­si­tion of our mar­ket­ing efforts. This per­spec­tive is best under­stood by look­ing at a recent blog post by an Adobe cus­tomer in which he pre­sent­ed a very strong argu­ment for ditch­ing the mar­ket­ing fun­nel and respect­ing the new­found pow­er of the cus­tomer. The cus­tomer is forc­ing new think­ing into the mix and has wrest­ed con­trol, at least tem­porar­i­ly, of what it takes to get the cus­tomer to con­vert and buy your brand. The best way to describe the sit­u­a­tion is that the dig­i­tal­ly con­nect­ed cus­tomer is always well over halfway through the tra­di­tion­al mar­ket­ing fun­nel before they ever con­tact a brand sales rep or mar­keter. They have become the mas­ters of their own des­tiny. We need to reclaim that role but with­in the con­straints of mak­ing our mar­ket­ing efforts cus­tomer cen­tric, mobile focused and con­tent rich.

If you’re not pur­su­ing a mobile first mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy using respon­sive design web­site tech­niques, then you are not putting your cus­tomers first in your mobile engage­ment strategy.

Mobile Mar­ket­ing is the Key to the Future

The fun­da­men­tal shift that needs to occur is for mar­keters to lis­ten, pre­dict, assem­ble, and deliv­er in per­son­al­iz­ing our mes­sage to the cus­tomer on his turf (mobile) and pro­vide the ad con­tent, offers and infor­ma­tion at their pre­cise moment of need.

The cus­tomer jour­ney and user expe­ri­ence has become an always-con­nect­ed world across mul­ti­ple chan­nels, using mul­ti­ple devices and screens. You’re most flex­i­ble mar­ket­ing tech­nique is to devel­op your web con­tent on web­sites con­struct­ed using respon­sive design so that as the cus­tomer changes screens and chan­nels, your con­tent adapts to make the cus­tomer expe­ri­ence pleas­ant, rel­e­vant, and positive.

Mobile first should be the new ral­ly cry for the marketer’s look­ing to remain rel­e­vant and have pres­ence where the cus­tomer is seek­ing the answers they need in a tech­ni­cal, data-dri­ven, cross chan­nel mar­ket­ing environment.

Adobe believes that the only way to deliv­er suc­cess­ful busi­ness out­comes is by con­sis­tent­ly exe­cut­ing bet­ter than your com­peti­tors across sev­en dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing dimen­sions — Chan­nels, Audi­ences, Con­text, Con­tent, Assets, Cam­paigns, and Data. We will exam­ine each dimen­sion indi­vid­u­al­ly over the course of of the next sev­er­al weeks.