CarlNelsonFranceAdvertising: Why Digital Marketing Has Become an Outdated Concept

Tuesday, March 10, 2015

Why Digital Marketing Has Become an Outdated Concept

Today's consumers make little to no distinction between the digital and the real, the online and the offline. Digital is simply part of our daily lives, from working and shopping to sleeping and eating—even finding a partner.

As a result, boundaries between channels are disappearing, and customers expect experiences they personally value. They want your brand to perform like never before, at full throttle. For marketers, this means that digital marketing has become an outdated and rather limiting concept.

For consumers, it's not the device, the platform or the location that matters. It's about an enriching experience in the form of relevant, engaging content. We have entered the era of "experience marketing."

If the Holy Grail of marketing has always been the ability to deliver personalized, relevant marketing at every touchpoint, then what's next? How can experience marketing do better than that? And how can you shape and own a customer's experience, anyway—let alone the experiences of millions of customers?

Our new e-book, "Discover Experience Marketing ", explains the changes that have made experience marketers the industry vanguard, as well as the necessary steps to making sure your team is armed and capable in this brave new world.

Check out the full text of our new e-book, "Discover Experience Marketing"

There have been two key strategy drivers in the digital marketing era: deepening customer relationships by making marketing more personal, and increasing coverage across more channels. The most successful companies have invested in marketing technology that allows them to do both, setting the bar for relevance in their industries. Although relevance at every touch point is key to delivering a superior customer experience, it isn't enough to be called experience marketing.

Experience marketing is about owning every interaction that a customer has with a brand, in both the physical and digital worlds, and creating a continual, relevant experience that wins customers for life. This is a more holistic approach to marketing that connects the customer and the business on a more intimate level. It looks beyond point-to-point relevance to determine what a customer expects and how the business can meet those expectations, in both the immediate and the long term.

If this sounds far-reaching and futuristic, it isn't. Consumers expect this level of engagement today, and that's why it's quickly becoming the standard in marketing strategy.

When you know every customer, you have the knowledge to create more relevant interactions that customers actually value. The sum of these interactions yields longer, more robust customer relationships that result in greater business value overall. This means that marketers who have the resources to execute more personalized campaigns will have the advantage, while imperfect or flawed targeting will put brands at risk. As the marketing world shifts toward providing seamless, tailored customer experiences, fragmented strategies and non-integrated platforms will be left behind.

Experience has surpassed relevance as the end goal. It's possible to hold a single, real-time view of every customer, despite channel and device proliferation, thanks to big data and the consolidation of technology. Check out our e-book and learn how to adopt a strategy that can predict, meet and exceed a customer's expectations through analytics, prediction and automation.