Digital is not a platform. It’s not a channel. It’s a way of thinking. Digitization of the world has not only brought millions of new options to marketers and business owners alike, but it has re-written even the basics of marketing and brand building. The new school of marketing is digital transformation. Or more precisely marketing transformation.
Audience targeting and understanding of consumer behaviour have moved to a completely new level. We are not sending segmented messages anymore, we are targeting everyone individually. We don’t just focus on a few moments (like First Moment of Truth), but we care about every moment where the customer can have an interaction with a brand. The better we map this journey, the better our service will be.
To be able to create the best service a brand can give, understanding is just the first step. Then we need data. Heaps of data. Hence we need data science to collect, organize, filter and visualize data, so our decision making will not be solely based on intuition and past experience but on actual data. As a famous Google saying goes: “Data still beats opinion”.
Every marketer knows this quote, and struggled with the same dilemma to the recent years. But now we are getting closer and closer to have 100% control over our spending. We use attribution modeling to assign value to every single touch-point with the customer. Even if it’s offline. Or when customers move cross-device. We cannot measure yet everything, but we strive for it very hard.
Creativity and storytelling never goes out of fashion. This will always remain the core element of marketing. However the way we come up with stories and creative ideas has changed. Since the 50’s it was limited to art directors and copywriters. Today this is definitely not enough. We need creative technologist, data scientist, PPC and marketing automation specialist. And the list goes on. We need insight from every corner of brand understanding.
Ideas, concepts are the creative transformation of the message we want to convey. What is rapidly changing though is the way we deliver them. Copy has not gone out of fashion yet, neither content marketing is new. This latter though is taking bigger and bigger share simply because people expect a lot more from brands, than ever before. Brands need to entertain. Or educate. Or inform. Or all of these.
