Value from Digital Marketing

Nice recent thought piece by McKinsey on Four Ways to Get More Value from Digital Marketing (premium membership required)

It argues, since the days of the internet becoming an important channel to reach & influence, marketers have regarded it as a vast laboratory, launching experiment after experiment to crack the code that generates sales & customer loyalty. Fair point.

But that most experiments fail, as they are not centered around the way consumers are adopting digital channels and fundamentally altering the way they make decisions (see the changing Consumer Decision Journey).

The article goes on to offer 4 suggestions to help improve success:

1. Coordinate marketing activities, to engage the consumer, throughout an increasingly digital purchase journey. 
2. Harness expressed interest in brands by syndicating content 
3. Think like a large-scale multimedia publisher to manage the staggering increase in the content needed to support products, segments, channels, and promotions. 
4. Finally, plot how to gather and use the plethora of digital data now available.

Whilst the first 3 suggestions are elaborated well, I specifically liked their classification of monitoring & usage of digital data via a simple 2 x 3 matrix

 Y axis specifying intent - Passive Tracking / Active Probing

 X axis seeking answers to 3 basic questions: What are customers seeing? What are customers doing? What are customers saying?

 

This simple matrix helps map a brands focus around digital data and it's current emphasis on active probing, whilst marketing continues to find ways to crack the Digital Marketing code.

Posted via email from Suresh Ramaswamy's posterous