Should digital lead your marketing?
Yes
Most of your customer journeys start in the digital world. In other words, today’s top-of-funnel activity is mostly digital. This is true even for current customers. They typically consult various digital information sources (e.g., corporate websites, digital publications, social media) to determine whether they have a job-to-be-done, or an opportunity to increase sales or cut costs. These digital explorations set the stage for the rest of the buyer’s journey.
So, if you don’t understand the early digital phases of the buyer’s journey, you have a big disadvantage. Further, since most journeys start digitally, so should your marketing strategy. Here are the basic steps:
- Define your digital ecosystem.
- How much organic search traffic do you get?
- What keywords bring people to your site?
- What types of content do they find interesting?
- How do you stack up against competitors, publications, and social media on traffic and keywords?
- Look for opportunities.
- Do you promote your content, or is it the proverbial “tree that fell in the woods” which no one hears?
- What could you do to create better content and promote it more effectively?
- Map a path forward and execute.
- Define your strategies, tactics, performance measures, and costs.
- Launch, track results, and revise as necessary.
No
Hardly anything in life is 100% digital. Here is a story where the sale occurs digitally, but customer loyalty is created in the physical world.
A young woman’s Mac Air is a kajillion years old (in computer years) and it just died. She calls her techie dad who lives on the other side of the country. He sets up a remote screen sharing session and they try to reload the operating system. The result is a death screen and they conclude the inevitable: it is time for a new computer.
He gets online, orders a new one, and sets the pick-up time and location where his daughter lives. She goes to the retail store at the appointed time and brings her old computer, hoping they can fix it while she is there. To her great delight, they fix it and she leaves with two working computers. Now she can easily transfer files from her old to her new computer. And afterwards, she can donate the old one to a local community charity or a friend in need.
Even if most of your buyer journey occurs digitally, sales and service events in the physical world can make or break customer loyalty and their inclination to recommend you. For B2C, these physical connections can be created in retail stores. For B2B, they can form during sales and service calls, plant visits, conventions, expos, etc.
Remember:
- Physical connections are often more powerful than digital ones.
- Digital connections and sales can be lost just as quickly as they are created.
Both
Yes, you need a deep understanding of the digital world your customers engage with. No, you can’t ignore the power of the physical world.
Conclusion: A deep understanding of buyer activity in the digital world can help you better compete, not just digitally but during your physical sales and service interactions as well.
Our Mission
Consentric Marketing is at the forefront of marketing strategy and methodologies, both digital and traditional. Our mission is to help you evolve and excel as world-class marketers.
In today’s marketplace, it’s no longer enough to strive for customer-centricity. We must earn the right to speak to customers and potential customers; indeed, to even know they exist. Marketing now includes the obligation to earn the right to market!
We want to work with you on key marketing efforts, from the very structure and orientation of your marketing team, to how and why you create product, to how you collect, organize and ethically use data, to how you chose your customer segments and create conversations and engage them. We have the expertise and experience to be guides and aides, and passionately believe the marketplace will reward those who embrace this marketing philosophy. We’d be honored to share our thinking and discover how we can collaborate together.
