Digital Marketing: Entering the Era of On-Demand Marketing
Digital marketing is about to enter more challenging territory: on-demand marketing. On demand marketing will not only be just always “on”, but it will be always relevant, responsive to the consumers’ desire, personalize the consumer experience radically. It will also cut through the noise with pinpoint delivery.
The infographic given below depicts a hypothetical, tech-enabled consumer, Diane, who purchases an audio headset, helping you understand what on-demand marketing will look like.
Taken together, the scenes from Diane’s consumer journey illustrate the four emerging areas of consumer demands:
1. Now: Consumers will want to interact anywhere at any time
2. Can I: They will want to do truly new things; Commonwealth Bank of Australia’s new smartphone app has changed the house-hunting experience. The app starts a series of interactions which begins with a prospective home buyer taking a picture of a house he or she likes. The interactions cut through the hassle that is usually associated with buying or selling of property.
3. For me: They will expect all data stored about them to be targeted precisely to their needs or used to personalize what they experience; Web retailer Warby Parker, for example, offers hundreds of customized views of eyeglasses overlaid on a Webcam picture of the consumer
4. Simply: They will expect all interactions to be easy; The quest for simplicity led Amazon to create a subscriber model for delivering bulky repeat-buy items (such as diapers) and Starbucks to adopt a tap-and-go approach to mobile payments.
How Technologies Are fueling on-demand marketing
Many existing technologies like, search engine, social media, mobile devices have added new dimensions to marketing:
- Search technologies have made product information ubiquitous
- Social media encourages consumers to share, compare, and rate experiences
- Mobile devices add a “wherever” dimension to the digital environment; Google Shopper has turned smartphone into a shopping assistant
Most leading marketers know how to think through customer-search needs, and optimizing search positioning has become one of the biggest media outlays. Companies have ramped up their publishing and monitoring activities on social channels, hoping to create positive media experiences customers will share. They are even “engineering” advocacy by creating easy, automatic ways for consumers to post favorable reviews or to describe their engagement with brands.
Evolution of technology is a continuous process:
- Consumers may soon be able to search by image, voice, and gesture
- Automatically participate with others by taking pictures or making transactions
- Discover new opportunities with devices that augment reality in their field of vision (think Google glasses). Google glass will allow users to search the web through speech.
So you have got a glimpse of how on-demand marketing will look like. Now the question is what companies need to do to distinguish their brands?
Coordinated efforts across the enterprise will be needed on three levels:
- Designing interactions across the consumer decision journey: Companies need to design the entire story of how individuals encounter a brand and the steps they take to evaluate, purchase, and relate to it across the decision journey.
- Making data and discovery a nonstop cycle: Companies need to have three distinct data lenses: Telescope, Binoculars, Microscope. We already have many devices which could capture date which till recently considered to be too big to be stored . But why is data so important? Because Data lie at the heart of efforts to build an understanding of what consumers expect, and what works with them.
- Delivering with new skills and processes: To deliver new experiences, executive teams must rethink the role and structure of the marketing organization and how it engages with other functions.
Adapted From: The coming era of ‘on-demand’ marketing, McKinsey Quarterly