Demystifying Digital - Make Your Marketing Work Harder

Make it earn its keep. Measurement based Marketing with Technology.

With digital being the main focus today as well as constant technology innovations - it’s hard to keep up isn’t it? Whether we like it or not, technology is moving so fast, both for the consumer and for businesses that are trying to win and keep customers as well as induce purchase behaviour/sales.

What does that mean for marketing?

The same goes for marketing and its accountability. It’s moving at a rapid rate with incredible new possibilities for measurement and consumer insights.
Buyer behaviour is also on the move. With every product or industry innovation and their associated campaigns; buyer behaviour with all demographics (especially with Gen Y, Z, iGen, or Centennials) is quicker and savvier, with consumers ever more jaded as they are incredibly spoilt for choice. This in turn means as marketers, we have to be much smarter on how we target & engage with them. On the positive note, this is where Technology WILL work in our favour!

Technology is our friend

We now have the power to TRACK EVERYTHING!!!! Globally, 50.8% of us use mobile phones for everyday uses vs. 44.8% on desktops - we need to tap into this. People are using mobile technology to shop, socialise, make enquiries, learn more, be entertained. In our measurements, we can use much more than numbers via google analytics and now obtain data on actual people visiting our websites, interacting with our brands - by name, gender, age. We have the power to know where shoppers come from; where they go to, what they look at, how long they look at it for, what other products they are interested in, when they are likely to buy, what they tell their friends and family, which products are great and those they dislike. That’s powerful!

Knowing your numbers

With any business, knowing your bottom-line numbers and understanding who your customer is, what they want, knowing the numbers achieved via your marketing activities is fundamental and therefore having great intelligence will help guide Marketing and make it work harder.

Let’s get Smart! So what does Smart Marketing look like?

Smart Marketing is fully measured, tracked, reported and understood. Its provides value for both planning and assessment. Your marketing can provide almost real-time reporting and enable agile responses for any needed changes & opportunities - including campaign results as they unfold, spending habits via e-carts, user experience with your website and much more.

Is measurement really necessary?

Back in 2016 (not so long ago!) global websites had one of highest ‘cart abandonment’ stats in history. As high as 77%! (see link). Shopping cart abandonment is where customers add items to their cart, but leave the site without completing the purchase.
What does that mean? Well in short, many businesses could be losing 3/4 customers and therefore sales - because of issues with their website, or its process, products, and pricing.
Having digital smarts and tracking tools, will identify any of these potential issues so that you can stop them in their tracks and make your marketing work!

With smart marketing tracking and measurement tools you can also measure:

• Audience - such as age, gender
• Interests - personal, but also products (what products they like)
• Marketing and messages - what marketing is working for you, ie compare social over e-news, pay per click and digital ads.
• Measuring ROI (Return on Investment). No business wants to splash thousands on marketing that has no return. Digital is the most effective way to test and measure. There’s no need for guess work anymore - its possible to measure almost everything now, even Facebook has measurement tools.

Make sure data collection is recorded for all your marketing activities:

If you are doing marketing yourself or using outsourcing make sure your marketing is accompanied by smart data tracking - if not, its going to be harder to win the battle, let alone war. It could almost feel like turning up to a gun fight with only a knife!
Data is the key. But it has to be accurate with no bias other than to serve your business or brand.

Having a team to resource data driven marketing

In business, having the time to track every single marketing move - is time consuming. You need dedicated staff or a marketing partner to do this for you. Here are some questions you need to ask when considering a marketing services;

• How do they measure the marketing activities and with what tools?
• How often do they report that data to you? Ask to see a report example.
• Is it clear and concise or full of industry jargon?
• Are they being transparent?
• Are they reporting responsibly on the good and bad for learnings and true outcomes- or just the good? 

BEAM Creative & BEAM Intel = Smart marketing OR Smarketing!

At BEAM, we ensure ALL our activities are measured and tracked. It also aligns with our business name acronym “Brand Evolution & Accountable Marketing”

You can read more about BEAM intel here

We offer quarterly BEAM Intel website performance reports as well as monthly campaign reports, as well as many other services including for consumer research, to ensure our recommendations are both responsible and accountable.

If you’d like us to give you a demo on how we track and measure marketing and campaigns, give us a call or send us an email to craig@beamcreative.com.au

Don’t rely on guess marketing - get Smarketing - get BEAM intel!

Written by: Craig Edwards (brand consultant / director)