My Top On-demand Marketing Techniques
A new era of digital marketing is on the rise. Marketing is headed toward being on-demand — not just “always on,” but also always relevant and responsive to the consumer’s desire.
The way I see it, the continued evolution of technology along with customer expectations is fueling on-demand marketing. The more technology evolves to address consumer needs, the more there will be demand for the following:
- Instant accessibility and availability
- Effective integration of disparate activities in ways that create value
- Personalized user experience based on available user data
- Easy and convenient interactions with brands and businesses
To achieve this, businesses must mobilize their whole team to deliver high-quality experiences across sales, service, product use, and marketing. They also need to be familiar with tools for gathering the right data across the consumer decision journey.
Instant Experience
If you’ve been around in marketing for a while, I’m sure you recognize consumers’ desire for more urgency and ubiquity. Because of this, we marketers have gone beyond traditional and digital media to reach our audience. Cases in point:
- We found ways to utilize virtualized media, which have become touchpoints with customers who are considering and evaluating products and services.
- We take advantage of social media platforms to connect with our audience real-time.
- SMS and push notifications are used to alert customers on transactions, promos, etc.
Digital information technologies are essential, as they integrate data on all customer interactions throughout the buyer’s journey. They also provide insights into the best influence pathways for the business and create new personalized experiences for consumers.
All these work together to provide consumers with instant access to products, services, and brands so that their demands are immediately satisfied.
Effective Integration
With the robust programming, data access, and interface opportunities we now have, we’re more equipped to make every digital interaction an opportunity to deliver something exceptional. In fact, digital technologies are now capable of integrating disparate sources of information at low cost and at scale for many different domains (think a smartwatch that can track a user’s health data).
The challenge for companies is to look beyond their current interactions with consumers and find effective ways to close the gaps that hamper customers’ digital experiences. This will require businesses to rethink the way they price and deliver their products. How can you effectively integrate disparate activities in ways that create value for your customers?
Precise User Experience
In the coming years, demands for more personalized experiences will intensify. With a single click, consumers can instantly personalize the offers presented to them, using information captured from their interactions online (data footprint).
Even though the privacy, security, and general trust implications are staggering, consumers still willingly provide more data when companies use the information they capture to provide truly helpful feedback, or to offer recommendations, services, and customization tools rather than just push intrusive messaging.
Simplified Interactions
The quest for simplicity has prompted leading companies to provide easy and convenient interactions with their customers. Yet many processes in a buyer’s journey still remain complex and disparate.
To address the demand for simplified interactions, companies must utilize evolving technologies to redesign complex customer experiences. Experiment with approaches that streamline processes and make interactions more inviting.
For instance, use simple gestures to allow customers to personalize their content and user experience. You can also utilize user information to provide secure access to devices and applications, and automatically customize interfaces.
Build Marketing Strategies and Marketers’ Capabilities
Soon enough, or even as early as now, consumers will demand instant and personalized experiences, effective integrations, and simplified interactions. As such, you must prepare your company’s marketing function to effectively navigate on-demand marketing.
Create Interactions Across the Buyer’s Journey
Any company that’s worth their salt is able to define and address their customer interactions across different channels. What we need to think about and create, however, is the entire process of how individuals encounter our brand and the steps they take to evaluate, purchase, and interact with it across the buyer’s journey. Marketing and customer research alone cannot give us the whole picture.
As you dive into this, everyone in your organization must be on board and gain a shared understanding of the consumers’ journey. You’ll be able to implement your marketing strategies more quickly and effectively if the whole team has a shared sense of engagement.
Analyze Data and Leverage It
To win over on-demand customers, you must understand them, their expectations, and needs. Then reach them with the right message using the best touchpoints. Data is essential to achieve this. In particular, you need data to do the following:
- Define and contextualize trends — Having a clear view of the broad trends in your brand, category, and market is essential. If you want to leverage data trends, track what people are looking for, what they’re saying, and doing.
- Measure the effectiveness of activities and investments at key points in the buyer’s journey — My experience in marketing taught me that it’s important to have a complete, integrated picture of where your budget goes, which interactions actually take place, and what their results are. In the world of on-demand marketing, multiple interactions happen along multiple journeys. Deploy tools that rapidly track each customer contact with your brand and push every customer-facing function to work together and form an integrated view of a buyer’s journeys.
- Understand how and why individuals move along their customer journeys — Capturing customer data is key if you want to understand them better. You can use their data to personalize their experience with your brand, which is also an effective way to show customers that you care. They expect brands to be good stewards and users of their personal data, and their expectations for what a brand should know only increases. Information about a customer is the thread that keeps all of their brand interactions immediate, valuable, relevant, and easy.
Optimize Your Marketing Team
To navigate on-demand marketing and deliver new experiences to consumers, marketing teams should be equipped with the right skills and ready to work with other functions within the organization.
Changes may have to be introduced in ways that will transform how campaigns and communities are managed, how performance is measured, and how customer support is provided.
On-demand marketing is inevitable. Across the entire buyer’s journey, every touchpoint is a brand experience, and those interactions just keep multiplying with more marketing channels emerging. To effectively navigate and overcome the challenges of on-demand marketing, companies must:
- Bring team members from every involved business unit to understand buyer’s journeys, predict where they may lead, and design experiences that will meet the consumer’s demands.
- Utilize and leverage end-to-end data across trends, performance, and people to invest wisely and create relevant and valuable solutions for customers.
- Challenge the delivery process behind every customer touchpoint. Are you making the best use of your data and interaction opportunities? Are your marketing efforts timely and do they meet brand expectations?
Ultimately, staying ahead of the design, data, and delivery requirements of on-demand marketing goes beyond compliance — it’s also a crucial basis for competitive advantage.
How effective are your on-demand marketing strategies? Let’s talk about how we can make it better.
About Jeev
A serial entrepreneur with a rich history of launching disruptive online businesses and taking them to the top, Jeev owns dozens of “go-to” reviews and rankings websites. Jeev has invested more than 20 years researching human behavior and how to leverage different sales methodologies to effectively influence decision-makers.To find out how Jeev can help you, visit jeevtrika.com.