Find the best omni channel marketing campaign for your brand  

In today’s hyper-connected world, we’re sure you’re aware of the importance of finding the right digital marketing strategy to deliver great customer experience.

Previously we discussed the concept of customer experience (CX), and how it impacts on your brand. Essentially CX is the delivery of your brand promise at every customer touch point. It aims to exceed expectations and increase customer satisfaction, loyalty and advocacy.

The first step in delivering a successful CX to your customers is to establish your single customer view (SCV). Once you’ve achieved this you can devise your 360º omni channel marketing campaign, using digital marketing.

Define digital marketing

Digital marketing can often seem to simply consist of making social media posts, increasing your Google search engine ranking, or sending EDMs (electronic direct mailers). However, at Bridge, we define digital marketing as the collective use of electronic marketing channels to build and maintain two-way relationships with customers, across each and every interaction with the brand. In essence, digital marketing is the vehicle through which your brand and customer experience are promoted to your audience. It’s also a highly effective means of soliciting regular feedback.

The right digital marketing strategy is crucial

There are of course many other online channels than those mentioned above, so it’s extremely important to make sure that all your campaigns and activities are part of a clearly delineated, outside-in e-marketing strategy. In other words, your brand should strive to personalise the right message, to the right person, at the right time.

It’s easy to believe that digital marketing is only about the acquisition of customers through lead generation. However, today’s customer behaviour is extremely fluid. In a recent survey[1] up to 79% of loyal customers stated they would consider changing brands. In other words, if your brand is not providing a fulfilling CX, your customers will simply take their business elsewhere.

Align your digital activity with customer needs

Given the ever-present risk of customer churn, it’s important to make sure your digital marketing strategy is as closely aligned with your audience’s needs as possible. As you can see from the illustration above, digital channels can be grouped into three media types:

• Earned media comprises the value given to your brand when third parties such as customers, press and the public voluntarily share and promote it. In other words, media which creates advocacy for your brand.
• Owned media consists of the assets and channels that your brand owns, and which you control and don’t have to pay basic usage for. Examples include your website, email database, blog, Facebook page and YouTube content.
•  Paid media is the media you pay to leverage a third party channel, such as paid search, display advertising on third party sites, events and sponsorships.

All these types of digital marketing strategies will have variable response rates. They’ll also generate differing marketing return on investment (MROI) values, based on your campaigns and audience profile. For example, EDMs continue to give the best overall ROI (18%), followed by social media (14%), and then search engine optimisation (SEO) (11%)[2]

Some common challenges?

Some frequent digital marketing conundrums include:

• How do I promote my products, or generate leads if I don’t have a subscribed email database?
• How do I kick-start my social media engagement in order to create advocacy?
• Considering my tight budget, should my brand only focus on one channel?

These situations require an approach that’s both strategic and tactical, ensuring that your investment in a particular channel increases brand awareness and/or generates customers. An effective digital marketing strategy is to engage at least two or more types of media to secure the most engaged audience. With today’s demanding consumers your brand needs to effectively manage as many different touch points as possible.

Optimising your online marketing

Although every aspect of your digital marketing activity can be measured through sophisticated analytics tools such as Google Analytics, it’s not a perfect science. So your best approach is to continually test and optimise.

Here are some challenging and all too common scenarios:

• You don’t have a valid SCV because you’re unable to manage all your channel and agency data
• Your customer data is of poor quality, causing your digital marketing campaigns to be ineffective
• The integration between your customer relationship management (CRM) and other customer facing systems and digital assets is poor, restricting your 360º view of your customer interaction.

Starting your digital marketing journey

So, how do you get started on your path to digital marketing success? We recommend that as a starting point you carry out a full scoping of your customer touch points, and available data from previous campaigns. From this you can leverage as much (clean) analytics data as possible to audit insights and related customer behaviour. You should then establish clear objectives for your digital campaign, related metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs). All this will give you the best chance of achieving your goals.

At Bridge, we provide digital CX as an integral part of designing and delivering solutions that will help transform your brand.We’ve successfully delivered digital marketing strategies for multiple clients.  To discuss how we can help you develop and manage your brand’s digital marketing program, get in touch with us today.

Ashish Kidecha, Senior Consultant

Meraj Huda, Managing Consultant

[1] Which? Magazine; stayoutfront.com

[2]  smartinsights.com