APRIL 20209are all no longer buzz words. These are being actively used by social media networks, digital marketing agencies, and brands to further optimize marketing, customer experience and sales efforts.Opportunities and Threats for Brands The ability to measure things, es-pecially, using data that is collect-ed and shared has become a major point of contention at a governmen-tal level, prompting greater scru-tiny and controls. While customer privacy is of paramount importance and it makes sense to ensure we live in world that protects individu-al's rights, it should not lessen our ability to help consumers get better results. Brands and others will need to redefine new rules that will get back to the core principle of provid-ing customers more personalized and timely recommendations on products and services. Increasingly brands that invest in advanced data management solutions will separate themselves from their peers from an effectiveness and differentiation standpoint. The biggest challenge for everyone on data will actually be around talent scarcity, with costs going up for such skills everywhere. Social media companies will contin-ue to vertically integrate capabilities that will position them as marketing and sales entities simultaneously. We already see trends around this accelerating that will present its own set of challenges and opportu-nities. The big opportunity will be for brands to focus much more on the lower funnel with social media companies, or vice versa and driv-ing a newly revamped social com-merce strategy, several have started pursuing this aggressively already. With much more focus on social media companies to justify their valuations and stricter regulations on data handling, they will attempt to drive better ROI to brands that are looking for better close rates. Mobile marketing today is where search marketing was 20 years ago, everyone knows it is important, but no one can really establish proper ROI, so there is great reluctance for managers to shift marketing dollars. This is a big mistake and brands will need to quickly figure out better at-tribution and understand customer experience more holistically. What people are missing is the actual pic-ture of what is happening, which is, the inability to be in the initial consideration set because of the lack of proper mobile presence and marketing. The question everyone should be asking is "how many cus-tomers are starting their initial re-search on their phones and how will that change with the next genera-tion?" if you are not part of that ini-tial consideration, you may not be in consideration at all. Mobile experi-ences are evolving fast, but it is also deeply challenging to provide a clear and compelling experience with various competing priorities brands have between brand messages, ser-vice capabilities, and sales solutions. Regardless, brands have to solve this or face the real possibility of a re-duced opportunity funnel for the future. Last but not the least, new emerging technologies are a great opportunity for many reasons--as an example, the improved user ex-perience in marketing efforts lever-aging the best in AR/VR to help cus-tomers better visualize possibilities or using smart displays in retail for customers to access more informa-tion than what meets the eye at first glance and convincing consumers about value propositions better. AI based recommendation engines that constantly improve experienc-es will help drive better customer recommendations driving up rel-evance to new highs. Matching AI based data to physical products will help drive a new era in user behavior based design that will undoubtedly help drive up product effectiveness and adoption. Monetizing these ef-fectively and using such touchpoints as marketing opportunities will sep-arate winners from losers.The new Marketing we are experiencing is going to get kicked into hyper drive, one that will be even more fast paced, which is extremely data driven, optimized constantly and deeply influencing customer choices. Speed to market and speed to value will become differentiators and marketing will have the ability to impact bottom lines even more than it has in the past. Ajit Sivadasan, VP & GMThe ability to measure things, especially, using data that is collected and shared has become a major point of contention at a governmental level, prompting greater scrutiny and controls
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