It’s no longer about traditional vs digital. It’s ALL marketing. The challenge of a CMO is getting awfully difficult as there are so many marketing channels and programs that span across traditional and digital that connecting the dots to determine an ROI is becoming increasingly difficult to do. Keep reading and we will tell you how a CMO can create extraordinary marketing in a connected world while leveraging existing marketing assets to deliver an outstanding and easily calculated ROI!
There are No Lines Between Traditional and Digital Marketing
Digital marketing is a vital part of the marketing landscape, forcing marketers to grapple with scaling across a variety of engagements. In this evolving environment, many marketers struggle to stay relevant in the minds of consumers and build long-term brand loyalty. And while there’s a surplus of data available to help inform decisions, selecting the right data and combining, analyzing, and creating actions from that data is challenging. Before we dig in too deep it’s important to keep the end goal in mind: How we can make it as easy as possible for consumers to notice and buy from your company.
The first step in obtaining this goal is to recognize the fact that consumers engage brands across a variety of channels and they expect seamless integration. This is forcing executives in a marketing role to set integrated strategies as a priority. Nearly 75% of marketers say they are setting integrated strategies, up from 67% in 2015 and 59% in 2014.
Even within digital strategies themselves there is ample opportunity to combine cross-channel efforts in mobile, tablet, and PC.
What Does this Mean for Marketers?
To deliver a seamless consumer experience, marketing teams need to align digital and traditional strategies, working in tandem towards a central objective. It’s not only traditional and digital strategies that need to mesh, but strategies within digital channels and platforms need to be designed to complement and connect brand experiences.
Ensure your organization is aligned by understanding the role each channel plays towards established objectives. Monitor, measure, and optimize these activities individually and in tandem with each other to maximize impact and set your team up for measuring the performance of strategies.
Marketers are Having a Hard Time Keeping up with Changing Consumer Behaviour
Marketers need to keep up with the beat of consumer behavior, but these behaviors are shifting quickly. Only 45% of marketers feel confident their organization understands the consumer journey, indicating over half of marketers aren’t sure they know how and where to reach and influence people at the touchpoints of the consumer journey.
With so many channels available for consumers the path to purchase frequently changes and makes it difficult to truly understand the customer journey. Marketers have an idea of what the ideal media mix looks like, but getting there means understanding the consumer journey—the audience’s online and offline behaviors, attitudes, and preferences. If successful, marketers can master media mix allocation. A central tool that filters customers through regardless of channel will be paramount to obtaining deeper insights into what triggers a consumer to buy and why.
Data Plays an Integral Role
Marketers use a mix of tools to inform their decisions, but shifts in consumer behavior are impacting their insights needs. To be truly effective, marketers have to be able to integrate data to measure marketing performance and unleash an impact. Calculating and increasing marketing ROI continues to be the major challenge for marketers, agencies, and media companies face today.
Most marketers would increase their spend with online channels and cross-channel marketing if they had better ability to measure the impact of those channels. Forty-three percent would increase spend on traditional with better tracking, but traditional measurement and its role in cross-channel studies will still prove valuable for its part in the consumer journey.
How Can ShipEarly Help?
Unlike traditional eCommerce that is solely direct to consumer, ShipEarly specializes in combining digital and retail sales channels to empower consumers to decide how they want to shop. ShipEarly captures significantly more sales online than traditional direct to consumer eCommerce by integrating the offline channel of physical retail to allow consumers the option of how they want to shop from the comfort of their home. ShipEarly is the technology leader in online to offline cross-channel eCommerce that drives incremental revenue for brands and retailers alike. ShipEarly provides a single view of a consumer and provides a calculated ROI to determine its effectiveness. The company also has a scalable platform that works across mobile, tablet, and PC to seamlessly integrate your digital tools and track their effectiveness. Rather than scattering your marketing budget across different media, we encourage our customers to invest in digital as it can now impact both the digital and retail sales channels.
Interested in learning more? Contact us
References: Millward Brown Digital, 2016
