The work of marketing managers has always been intense, frenetic and very dynamic. It is what you have to combine the volume of the daily management of the marketing area, with the launch of specific initiatives to promote offensive or defensive strategies, or even both at the same time.
Effective marketing should be able to sell more, or at least, sell with better results and conditions. This is achieved by uniting marketing and technology, that is known as digital marketing.
Traditional marketing disciplines such as product portfolio management, pricing strategies, or designing effective go-to-market models remain critical to driving growth strategies. The market share, the penetration rate in the channel, the evolution of sales or brand awareness, are metrics that are an obsession for any marketing manager and essential to be able to digitize marketing.
However, as business development takes place in digital environments and new data sources are accessed for processing, business is more alive than ever and revolves around new references. Good marketing will still have a lot of noise and part of science, but it could run the risk of being ineffective if the activity and the work model do not adopt a technological base.
The marketing department has been the first to suffer disruption in its operation, and as such, it is obliged to carry out its own digitization. The world and customers are digital, and B2B or B2C marketing models are required to digitize marketing and its operations.
In addition to continuing to require traditional capabilities to bring initiatives to market, the core value of digital marketing today is to marry strategy and ongoing interaction with customers. Expectations, experiences, and relationships with customers are the main growth engine in companies.
Marketing operations must be organized on a new operating platform designed to interact with and meet customers efficiently and productively. It is the basis for good marketing, also cheaper and more productive.
Every bit of information that emerges in marketing channels produces an interaction and reaction from customers. And on the contrary. Each interaction that customers initiate in the channel is a new opportunity to process information and create an automated marketing action based on a goal.
The sum of all these points and flow around the customer relationship is the basis for the evolution of the marketing strategy. Marketing is ceasing to be a science to become a concrete technology, more effective and productive than simple smell. Also, cheaper and more scalable.
Only two things matter in strategic marketing. Know your customer better than the competition and act faster than your competition based on that knowledge. That is why marketing processes must be redefined and oriented to demand. It is necessary to evolve the traditional sales marketing model towards an interaction marketing model whose operations integrate technology.
The traditional marketing models interrupt; they are only interested in the sale. The new marketing models use artificial intelligence and automation to learn from the customer and, therefore, sell more and sell better. Intelligence and digitizing marketing increase revenue potential and make marketing actions more efficient.
It is true that traditional information systems have always provided huge amounts of data, however, this information placed the company in a context of the past. Data collection and analysis were designed to control management and not deviate from the objectives. However, this information is insufficient to design a business strategy for growth and with a present vision.
In the digital economy, the power of information and, above all, the capture and processing of data is a fundamental productive capacity. Without data, it is impossible to develop a marketing model with a growth orientation. Without technology, it is impossible to design an operating model.
The design of automated marketing processes and operations allows for a more autonomous and scalable operation, more flexible and agile. And above all, the optimization of marketing budgets. Marketing teams have begun to develop the ability to predict scenarios thanks to the use of artificial intelligence.
Learning and prediction are becoming essential to guide any traditional marketing action and guarantee its effectiveness. For example, advanced analytics and forecasting make it possible to anticipate the behavior of demand, develop personalized services, launch a promotional campaign to a specific audience, improve cross-selling, etc. In marketing, practically everything is the speed of action to understand reality and design specific and immediate actions.
That’s why marketing is technology or the closest thing to the brain of Elisabeth Harmon in Queen’s Gambit. And heads like Harmon’s, predicting an event tree and possible response scenarios, while the game is going on, there aren’t many.
By taking a technology approach, digitizing marketing, automating operations, and driving decisions with data-driven interaction dynamics, marketers are gaining time and speed of execution on every marketing action. This is not to say that technology replaces the human being, but rather that the combination of both capabilities, technology, and people, elevates marketing to a superior operating model.
Added to the specialized roles and functions of traditional marketing is the need to incorporate a digital culture and the incorporation of people with new knowledge in such emerging fields as Data Science, Data Analytics, Traffic Management, programmatic purchasing, content generation, etc. A new marketing model is, above all, a new way of interacting with the market.
Hello, I’m Rachel Collins. Until recently, I ran my own patchwork quilt business. Having retired from that I have turned my e-commerce site into this blog where I discuss business, home and garden and lifestyle topics for you to enjoy...
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