With an increase in ‘digital lifestyle’ in recent years, digital marketing platforms have become more and more popular. Previously digital marketing was regarded as complementary to traditional marketing activities. Today, this is reversed: digital marketing can be and is used as a primary marketing tool to acquire new customers and also retain existing customers. In today’s digital marketing suite, there are many tools available, to help promote your business, including messaging, social media, web advertising, digital signage, analytical and measurement tools, location-based service, mobile applications, etc. In order to deliver an innovative and richer experience to customers and prospective customers, a combination of multiple marketing platforms should be integrated to provide a targeted and relevant marketing solution or campaign.
Integrated multi-platform digital marketing can benefit businesses in many ways. Organisations will be able to send personalised communications to their stakeholders. No more broadcast messages, which are not relevant and most of the time unwanted. Instead, imagine if every customer was getting a unique and personalised treatment based on their profile, needs, behaviour, purchasing history, preferences and even their activities carried out in your bricks-and-mortar stores. This will be an unforgettable experience which will build an emotional relationship between customers and the company.
On other hand, digital marketing also provides the convenience of managing communications at your fingertips, in real time (including the automated schedules) and also content synchronisation, across all platforms through a unified control center. The unified control center for digital marketing could be built with your own on premise software of through cloud based solution such as Software as a Service (SaaS).
Building and maintaining your company’s infrastructure to support your integrated digital marketing application can be cumbersome. Marketing and IT departments will have different points of view on the integration of multi-platform digital marketing applications. While the marketing team will be empowered to create advanced marketing experiences for their customers, the IT department will see it as tangled wires between equipment and application components.
With a number of various platforms to be integrated into digital marketing applications, complexity within the infrastructure increases as do the resources needed to maintain it. To deal with the complication, we look to cloud technology which is able to integrate multiple platforms into a centralised real time system: from in-store display, location-based advertising, to a personalised newsletter email.
A cloud-based solution option (SaaS) could be an interesting option for business. The SaaS offer can simplify operations, maintenance and technical support all in one place. By using a SaaS solution, companies can focus on growing the business, based on their core competence and on delivering an extraordinary and seamless experience to their customers. The cloud partner will be able to manage the complexity of infrastructure and take care of the day-to-day worries of implementation and maintenance.
Using a SaaS solution in a corporate environment is not a new thing. Many companies from start up to enterprises – choose cloud based solutions to optimize operational cost without losing productivity. Corporate email service and cloud storage solution are the most popular examples of SaaS implementation in enterprise companies. This SaaS adoption trend will continue to grow, the marketplace becomes more and more consumer driven. As such, choosing the right cloud partner is critical to your business. It may take some time, but ensuring the right partnership for your business, will save time and minimise potential loss in the long run.
Based on Adobe’s 2016 Digital Trend report, 53% of organisations chose data-driven marketing as their strategic priority to help deliver a better customer experience. Without analytics tools, organisations are unable to gain insight on customer behavior. Hence, they simply cannot provide complete experiences to fulfill their customer’s expectations. Today, 41% of organisations have a ‘good’ data-collection infrastructure. A 10% increase compared to last year.
Digital marketing enables companies to slice up market segments, to get a more specific and deeper understanding of each segment. Hence, with the right targeting and effective promotions, sales objectives and marketing measures could be realised. Digital marketing also offers more detailed statistics, more accurate and deeper reporting – and analysis on how audiences interact with promotional materials, including the purchasing behaviour information of your consumers. This analysis is critical to maintaining and improving customer loyalty, while building deeper relationships with existing customers.
Integrated multi-platform digital marketing enables companies and brands to deliver extraordinary experiences to their customers, across the entire buyer journey, by leveraging customer data, providing analytical insights and automating cross channel interactions through a centralised portal that you can access anytime and anywhere. Hence, delivering extraordinary experiences to your customers by using integrated multi-platform digital marketing, could differentiate your brand and products in the eyes of your customer. In turn, this could result in the creation of loyal customers, creating advocacy, return business and new business from word of mouth recommendation.