Today, as more and consumers interact with brands across online channels, digital marketing has gained significant traction. From wearables and big data to personalization and multichanneling — the digital economy is transforming the way consumers communicate with each other and with brands, governments and businesses.
According to the Indonesian Internet Service Providers Association (APJII), in 2014 Indonesia already has 88.1 million mobile Internet users, the sixth most in the world.
Furthermore, 95 percent of Internet users access social networking sites with more than 65 million Facebook accounts, 50 million Twitter accounts, 700,000 Path accounts and 10 million Line accounts in the country.
Mobile phone penetration in Indonesia reached 122 percent in early 2014 and is projected to hit 173.5 percent by 2017 (www.researchandmarkets.com, 2013). These numbers are set to explode in the coming years as more mobile and Internet users are expected to come online, led by Indonesia’s younger population.
The International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the specialized UN agency for information and communication technologies, defines digital natives “as the population of networked youth — aged 15 to 24 years — with five or more years of online experience”. They have a generation’s worth of more access to information, especially via the Internet and mobile.
APJII data shows 49 percent of Indonesian Internet users are digital natives aged between 18 and 25 years old. This number provides brands with an excellent opportunity to create and sustain two-way conversations with their consumers. Innovations in technology have enabled new business and marketing models and companies can’t risk being left behind.
More and more consumers are now using a combination of channels to consume content. Advertising on mobile devices, linear TV moving online and new, innovative devices offer a wealth of opportunities for using completely new formats. Smartphones, tablets, smart watches, videos and TVs — there are more screens and channels than ever before and their variety is growing as we speak.
At the same time, consumer behavior is changing. Among those aged 16 to 45, the cell phone has replaced TV as the dominant media consumption format. Consumers now use technology in combination: they check their emails or read messages while the TV is on.
When we shop online, we use a number of different channels. Not only do we buy cross-channel, but we use different channels to compare products and collect feedback. So marketers need a single view of the consumer and a multichannel strategy.
Companies have to tailor their offerings more closely to their target markets’ needs and wishes. Consumers have also become extremely discerning when it comes to clicks and views. Irrelevant content, especially on the digital medium, not only puts them off, but also decreases chances of future interactions.
Brands must leverage the wealth of technology and real-time data analysis to understand now what content will grab consumers’ attention tomorrow and be prepared to deliver it.
This is where predictive analytics can be leveraged by forward-thinking companies to build better real-time customer segments, to allow them to develop and send targeted content to these groups of customers.
Fewer and fewer shoppers go to the store for advice. Instead, they read reviews on digital medium and trust what their social networks have to say about brands and products. Enter the social customer.
Before you develop passionate, loyal customers among today’s digital natives, you need a product that generates an emotional connect, content that relates to each consumer personally and does more than meet their expectations. And you need excellent customer service.
In this era of shares and likes and a vast amount of well-developed, intriguing and average content available to consumers at each click, unique, relatable, sharable content has become the holy grail of digital marketing. Well-presented content across different audio-visual mediums, with relevant information and/or extremely high entertainment value instead of empty phrases and one-way promotional pushes boost a company’s credibility and consumer trust.
Companies focused on e-commerce require tools allowing control of product content from all channels and systems in one place.
A master taxonomy to classify and categorize products, manage catalog versions and import multiple supplier catalogs will help provide the delivery of unique and rich product content to improve search engine optimization.
Companies collect vast amounts of data on how consumers purchase and use products. Their usage behavior on social media and digital platforms can reveal a lot of information about how to sell and when to sell. There are special algorithms to analyze this data and turn it into useful insights.
This is the domain of marketing automation. An example of this would be having omni-channel commerce solutions: state-of-the-art master data management for commerce and unified commerce processes that give a business a single view of its customers, products and orders and its customers a single view of the business.
This can help satisfy the demands of “always-on” consumers as well as of increasingly complex business requirements so as to maximize conversions and revenues by delivering an easy, engaging shopping and cross-channel experience — whether in-store, online, via social networks, or from mobile devices, important as most of the online connection is done via mobile.
Businesses must understand that this data alone holds the key to successful customer interactions on the digital platforms.
There is also a clear trend toward the digital showroom. One example is Nina, a virtual assistant that offers personalized customer service.
Users can ask it for their credit card balance, book a flight upgrade or check whether they can catch an earlier plane to their destination. Nina shows how virtual and real worlds are merging, opening up completely new opportunities for marketing.
What are tomorrow’s challenges for marketers? Marketers will rely even more on data. They will need the right tools and software to analyze and use that data. To reach customers, they will have to define target markets more precisely and fine-tune their interactions.
The customer journey has to become their vision. The marketing of the future will use past data to predict which products customers want and when. This is where predictive analytics and big data play a key role.
Programmatic buying and automation of digital channels are other major trends expected to become extremely relevant as digital marketing continues to evolve.
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