Digital communications are rapidly evolving in almost every walk of life. From the boardroom to even the battlefield – I have experience of both - getting the right message out quickly and to the right audience, can often be the difference between winning and losing. Retail marketing is no exception. And with the economy as tough as it is, businesses who do not embrace the digital marketing realm to its maximum potential run the risk of being left behind.
The strength of digital communications means potential customers can engage with a brand whenever and wherever they choose. For marketeers this is also a threat - you only get one chance to make a first impression and a shoddy piece of online marketing can be fatal. The first step in avoiding errors is defining a strategy. Businesses must decide exactly what they want to achieve from the digital realm before deciding how they hope to achieve this, they also need to understand how it will link to their traditional marketing. Unfortunately, many businesses do not go through this planning phase and simply decide to ‘do’ social media. The result is an out-dated Facebook page or dormant Twitter account, which inevitably has a negative effect on the brand.
Since leaving the Royal Marines in 2010, my role is now as Digital Services Director with ITG, a technology led Marketing Services company. ITG has enjoyed explosive growth over the last two years providing a marketing control centre, Media Centre, with associated marketing services to many leading brands including M&S, Weightwatchers, Nationwide, Sainsbury’s, KFC and Pets at Home to name but a few. This broad client base gives us unique perspective to monitor changes in the marketing landscape.
With the battle for customers as fierce as ever, every good CEO will recognise the importance of multi-media communications in business. Good marketing executives will additionally stress the importance of maintaining a consistent message across all of these media. But in truth, few businesses put practical measures in place to ensure that content across all media is coordinated and this is the primary role of Media Centre. For any business with a retail and online presence this disparity in content will usually be most evident between the digital and traditional print channels as they are invariably run, for practical and historical reasons, by different departments. In modern marketing all marketing collateral whether a video, image or even a PDF can be stored as a digital asset. Moving forward the only practical way of ensuring brand consistency across media is for all marketers to share a common workflow and asset library or Digital Asset Management (DAM) system.
ITG has a retail marketing print heritage and we have found across all our clients, without exception, that deploying a DAM pays for itself in efficiencies it delivers to the print process alone. Once a business has a common workflow and DAM then it is a natural step to expand this to the digital realm.
The major advantage of digital marketing over traditional media is that marketers can know more about their potential customers and can communicate with them in a personalised way.
With WeightWatchers UK, ITG has recently implemented an intelligent electronic Customer Relationship Management (eCRM) system with a powerful ‘Single Customer Profiling’ database allowing volunteers to receive personalised digital newsletters about WeightWatchers food products and developments. Every communication is personalised as we recognise that CRM relationships are reciprocal - the tool provides volunteers with an opportunity to comment on food development as well as receiving bespoke vouchers and offers in return. Once you have a good eCRM tool in place most online marketing can be automated, meaning you only need have a great marketing idea once.
Social Media is now so dominant that it almost demands a strategy of its own, but not quite. However important, every communication channel must support the rest For example social media is often used to raise profile (ideally virally) and drive new or existing customers towards the website for sale conversion. However it is also important to recognise the individual qualities of each medium, for example social media is intrinsically reciprocal and so any strategy that simply focuses on sales will quickly result in loss of followers. The social marketing challenge is to build interest in your brand amongst the social media community. It is about give and take.
ITG advises its clients to view digital marketing as an integrated campaign that includes social media, web banners, automated emails and personalised microsites all feeding back to a centralised database. Recently, we have supported Namco, the entertainment company, with an integrated online marketing campaign. Every Friday during the campaign the database behind the Namco website was used to locally segment out a list of members as child, teen, adult, family and corporate users. The integrated tool then sent each of them a tailored and personalised email with a voucher encouraging them to attend that evening. The tool then reinforced the offer with an automated SMS reminder being broadcast two hours later.
Unfortunately the digital battle can never be won as digital communications, like traditional marketing, is in a constant state of development and the most important attribute in harnessing its potential is agility. Centralised control, good procedures and an open mind are key to ensure that the various communication channels can be exploited rapidly. The speed and complexity of modern communications means that this process simply cannot be managed manually and so businesses will need to deploy online solutions that can coordinate all of these tasks into a single, simple workflow and this is the raison d’etre for ITG.
Intelligent databases will lie at the heart of these solutions as digital marketing can exploit and target customers personal preferences. Technology can provide a ‘turbo charge’ to manage multiple online and offline engagements but the real secret it still putting good quality marketeers at the heart of communication to ensure that the customers continue to get treated like people.
Paul Kearney is the Digital Services Director of one of the UK's most innovative and fastest growing businesses, Inspired Thinking Group (ITG). Prior to his role at ITG, Paul was a Lt Colonel in the Royal Marines. It was in this role that he learnt to appreciate the importance of effective communication. At ITG, Paul employs these skills to deliver digital marketing services as part of a multi-discipline marketing services team. Coordinating everything through their proprietary marketing support platform, Media Centre, the ITG team are able to support clients in delivering their campaigns cheaper, faster and better.