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The communication and media landscape is changing so rapidly, how should businesses keep abreast with the dynamic technological changes to be effective in marketing their brand, products, solutions and services?
The communication and media landscape is changing so rapidly, how should businesses keep abreast with the dynamic technological changes to be effective in marketing their brand, products, solutions and services?
Technological innovation has dramatically changed the way brands, organizations, individuals and communities communicate in recent years and the advent of the digital era has yet again shifted the paradigm.
According to MediaCT BE: Asia 2010’s study, 45 percent of business elites visit social networking sites, over half read a blog online and 45 percent access digital content on their mobile. It is vital that companies keep up with the digital development to drive digital brand building and business growth with no geographical boundaries.
Let’s look at five innovations and techniques marketers must know in the world of digital marketing:
1. Search Engine Marketing. This is a highly effective way to drive relevant targets to your websites and generate quality leads. It is a search engine marketing model in which website owners engage the services of a digital marketing firm to design its web development and make its site search engine optimized to improve its targeted digital reach. There are millions of searches performed on the internet daily, in fact it has become the number one research engine for products, services, solutions, organizations, people and information. SEO campaign will enable a company’s online digital estate to be right in front of the potential buyer at the right time to the right audience.
Marketers can either work on their web design and content to optimize organic search or engage an agency to assist with search engine optimization as well as smart contextual advertising campaigns that generates measurable return on marketing investment fairly rapidly.
2. Digital gadgets that are an important part of online marketing implications. Digital gadgets such as mobile phones, laptop computer, game consoles and recent additions like E-readers and tablet computers are a big part of people’s lives as we are living in an age when users want everything, anytime, anywhere, any access via the internet world.
Look how easy access to internet via multiple smart devices has increased the value of digital assets and the important brand engagement through these mediums:-
• Facebook replaced Google as the most visited website with 600 million users.
• Google demonstrated internet commercial success with market capitalization crossing US$500 million with billions of searches per day.
• Apple continues to push boundaries of innovation with 15 million iPads and 73.5 million iPhones sold.
• Apple demonstrated success principles built on openness and partnership with more than 300,000 applications on iPhone.
• Twitter has 190 million users, generating 65 million tweets a day and handling over 800,000 search queries per day.
Marketers must respond to the new mobile online environment with mobile and other smart device strategies to stay relevant and use it to complement your social media and offline strategies.
The contributor is Rick Quzek, management consultant with the Marketplace Ministry and managing director, Corporate i.
3. Mobile marketing. This uses the most personal communications channel and the most adopted medium in the world to develop mobile strategies to market products, services and information. Mobile marketing integrates mobile tools, approaches and innovations to attract, engage and build relationships with prospects, and customers in a most intimate way through person devices. Some advantages of mobile marketing includes:
• Portable web access.
• Ability to deliver content/promotions to on-the-go consumers
• Convenience for immediate consumer support/sales support/loyalty
Some of the highest adoption interactive mobile platforms are mobile websites, mobile apps, mobile messaging/SMS, mobile display ads and mobile search engines.
4. Marketing Automation (Analytics) enable marketers to deliver measurable results. In the world of advance analytics technologies, marketing has gone techie. Gone are the days where marketers are challenged to justify marketing investments and provide tangible results due to lack of reliable data. With an extensive choice of marketing automation engines, marketers can easily perform complex marketing programs across a different marketing mix, time-frame and language and still effectively track how each interaction generates revenue growth. Analytics also help the marketers gain a stronger voice in planning and decision making; it helps them determine where to invest resources to gain the best return. Using quantifiable metrics to track and improve performance can boost confidence not just in Marketing but also in Sales and Finance, which have stakes in the successful brand building and business growth.
5. Web 3.0 enabling a whole new marketing paradigm. Web 3.0 is based on “intelligent” web applications to allow customization of online searching request specifically to users’ preferences and needs. With Web 3.0 you are able to publish structured data and link it to other sets of related data and anywhere on the web. Instead of just data stalking, Web 3.0 allows you to do data talking. You are able to customize data that you want to share with your prospects, customers and partners to strengthen your relationships and win more business. Creating data branding with Web 3.0 allows you to position your company through the data you create and publish in a linked data world determines how you want to relate the data to others. Disseminating data in a linked world allow you to:
• Grow your market.
• Position your company as a leading authority in your field.
• Define your market through data vocabularies.
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