In a recent presentation in Manchester, IBM’s Peter Jakob gave an interesting assessment of how modern marketing has evolved with his ‘nine layers’. It made for a fascinating presentation and hopefully interesting reading – with a twist from yours truly.
- Planning. A prerequisite. Understanding where you want to get to and how you’ll measure the journey is critical to establishing return on your investment.
- Listening. Obtain deep insight into what your customers really need by listening and observing. It is powerful, often overlooked and gives a great opportunity to understand things like sentiment and perception.
- Engagement. Businesses try to humanise themselves to build brand value, but ultimately people buy people. Being fast, first, proactive and reactive consistently is the best way to build engagement and trust.
- Search. Your business needs to be found so search optimisation is a priority. Social media referral and recommendation will help as the two disciplines become ever more embedded, but if you scrimp on search marketing you do so at your peril. Remember – niche, long tail search can be your friend.
- Content. Build your profile with relevant, useful, usable, dynamic, interactive and sharable content. Every business and every product in the world has a story to tell and a benefit position.
- Paid media. Pay per click, especially highly targeted advertising on social media sites can serve as a powerful awareness generator for new brands and in lead generation for established brands. Don’t under-estimate the twin effects of a first page position on Google in both organic and paid search.
- Mobile and emerging technology. Yes, there probably is an opportunity to develop an app, or invest in an augmented reality direct mail piece, but work on the basics first. Is your website optimised for mobile devices? Does it load quickly? Are people channelled efficiently to the information they want?
- Enurture. Use event triggered technology through your website and database to delicately keep your customers engaged with your brand.
- Analytics. Use Adwords tools to find the keywords and conversations you want to be associated with and analytics tools to establish which parts of your site and which content resonate and which don’t.
Contact Rene for a no-obligation review of your digital approach.
