Digital Marketing Evolution Are You Prepared For A New Digital Era

The digital marketing industry came of age in 2019; and the United States was the hotbed of this digital revolution. For the first time, organizations spent more money on digital marketing than traditional marketing. According to eMarketer, in 2019, companies spent about USD 132 billion on digital ads in the US, which was 54% of their overall media ad spending. The same study suggests that this spending will increase to USD 278 billion by 2024, a whopping 75% of the media ad spending.

This paradigm shift in spending on digital ads highlights that brands now understand their tech-savvy customers better, thus the need to digitize their business.

However, companies should not consider the shift in approach as the mantra of success and feel relaxed. In today’s dynamic market, it is imperative to align your business model with digital engagement and be at the forefront of this change to avoid the risk of extinction.

The first step towards this change is Digital Transformation or DX.

Understanding the change in DX practices

Digital Transformation doesn’t happen overnight. It is built into the enterprise DNA bit by bit, with forward progress both large and small. From the company’s culture to business operations to infrastructure, everything requires remodeling.

The first step towards successful DX is to understand the difference between the traditional and the new digital era practices. Today, the customer is the king. They are defining the boundaries of their visibility and consumption, and not the brands.

With a short attention span and variety of available content, brands have to align their communication strategies with customers’ demands.

How DX helps grow your business

As per research by Forrester, enhancing consumer satisfaction is one of the top strategic priorities of every business. This aligns well with the key drivers of DX – customer satisfaction, improved ROI, and faster time-to-market.

DX helps safeguard the future of your business by leveraging next-gen technologies, such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML) and Internet of things (IoT). The solutions powered by these technologies offer handy business insights via data analytics, help optimize operations, and enhance the speed of services.

DX and its four verticals

DX is a vast universe and trying to understand it all at once can be cumbersome. To make things easier, we can categorize DX into four broad dimensions:

Experience
Engagement
Personalization
Insights

Scaling all these dimensions holds the key to success. And for that to happen, brands need to tailor their solutions and offerings to match their consumer’s expectations.

Experience

Improving customer experience does not only mean improving their interaction with the brand (physically or digitally). It also means studying the entire customer journey and identifying all potential touchpoints in their journey. Brands have to combine and analyze all the data elements from both online and offline channels. This enables brands to develop a unified plan (say a spreadsheet of solutions) that can work at every step and assist in improving communication and experience at any of those touchpoints in the journey.

Engagement

A healthy relationship with the customer is a key to success. While word of mouth still rules the charts, online engagement has emerged as a big player. However, it is also one of the greatest challenges for brands. The plethora of distractions and decreasing attention span means generating and retaining genuine engagement is tricky. Thus, brands need to focus on delivering the best experience at all times. One way to do this is to make customers think and desire your offerings.

Personalization

Personalizing with the customer helps in building effective communication and generates excitement towards the brand. It also helps grow the bond between the brand and the customer, and strengthens the brand’s commitment towards its customers. Leveraging the customers’ geographic location, requirement, browsing history, etc. can empower brands to develop a strategy or campaign for sales conversions. NLB’s Personalization Framework assists brands in creating relevant, data-based, customized engagements and prepare a launch pad for a great personalized interaction that promises high conversion rate.

Insights

The combined power of Experience, Engagement and Personalization might not bear fruitful results in absence of accurate customer insights that can help align the brand to the diverse needs of customers. Powered by AI & ML, an insight generator system self-learns by leveraging the historical data. It extracts crucial information from the data in real-time to influence business decisions.

In the End

Digital transformation can be overwhelming in the beginning. But as time goes by and with the right mix of next-gen technologies and strategies brands can gain valuable insights into their consumers’ preferences and build a strong digital presence.

Identifying the needs, problems and behavior of customers empowers the brands to personalize their offerings as per the platform or channel their customers are using.

If you desire the digital transformation of your business, NLB Services can be your strategic partner. Our experts will deep dive into your business framework, understand your problem areas and suggest solutions that integrate technology to help you build a future-ready, digital infrastructure.