Madrid, February 3, 2023 – Adapt or perish– that is how you could briefly express the need to develop digital marketing capabilities to succeed in the ever evolving marketing environments. Technology is transforming everything and the “consumerization” of B2C and even B2B marketing is rapidly materializing.
This neologism alludes to the growing trend in which information technologies emerge first in the consumer market and then spread to business and governmental organizations.
Changes across the board
The fact that consumer markets are the major driver of technological innovation entails a dramatic change in the field of computing, as the first decades of computer development and use were dominated by large companies and government agencies.
This change has been accelerated by new digital customer behaviorswhen searching for and purchasing products, especially in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, and by advances in marketing technologies.
The rise of digitalization is generating an enormous amount of data that can be leveraged to optimize the customer journey. This provides the opportunity to continuously measure and improve the return on investment and ensure that the right message reaches the right person at the right time within the company’s Customer Communications strategy.
Marketing technologyis also evolving rapidly and presents increasing fragmentation and complexity, but that does not make it any less necessary to develop digital capabilities. The number of marketing technology categories and vendors has grown exponentially beyond CRM (Customer Relationship Management), CCM platforms (Customer Communications Management) and marketing automation, thanks to venture capital investments.
All these changes pose both risks and opportunities for B2B as well as B2C marketing. Many companies are finding it difficult to adapt. Those that move quickly and do it well can gain a competitive advantage and increase revenues and profitability.
But getting it right means adopting new approaches and ways of working, developing new capabilities and skills, and establishing a new relationship between marketing and sales and transformational change. The starting point is to collect customer data and understand the customer journey.
A new world
The world of B2C and B2B marketing is changing by leaps and bounds due to digitalization and clear differences can be made between the “old world” and the “new world.” Marketing used to be based on mass communications and a fragmented customer experience. Now B2B and B2BC marketing is based on targeted communications and personalized, holistic customer experience.
Before, most of the channels were physical and now digital is combined with face-to-face interactions, which encourages consumer engagement. Gone are the manual operations with isolated data; now they are automated, enabled by technology and handle connected and real-time data.
Marketing performance used to be measured by activity, measurement was periodic and focused on the latest customer contact. Now marketing performanceis results-based, measurement is continuous, and multiple customer contacts are analyzed. In general, the marketing organization used to work in silos, whereas now it is fully integrated into the organization.
Creative marketing profiles used to be pursued in the past, but now companies go for technical and analytical profiles. The culture has also changed: it used to be rigid and top-down, and now it is flexible, dynamic and encourages collaboration across hierarchical levels.
B2B and especially B2C customers have replaced interaction with salespeople with online search. The buying process often starts with an online search because customers expect to find high-quality content mainly on the supplier’s website, Google, or user reviews. But blogs and social media are not to be forgotten as sales channels either.
This means that more than half of all sales are made before salespeople enter the picture. Depending on the product you want to buy, personal networks and recommendations from friends and family also play a key role.
In the current context, it is imperative to align B2C and B2B marketing models with digitalization in order to expand the Marketing function. To do so, the marketing strategy must become a key driver of business growth; the function must be reoriented towards a customer interaction model based on digital capabilities. The organizational structure and culture must be adapted to the digital environment, and innovations in marketing infrastructure and technology must be integrated.
Indeed, many things need to be changed and it must be done quickly and well on several fronts and with different tools:
- Branding: Beyond traditional radio and television advertising, storytelling is necessary in digital channels and social media to capture customer attention, something scarce nowadays, since we all receive too many messages through too many channels and, to make matters worse, the writing quality sometimes leaves much to be desired.
- Events: This involves leveraging physical events through digital and social media, offering webinars, and creating communities to ensure customer acquisition.
- Content: It is necessary to improve the quality of content, customize it and make it available through various channels. It has been proven that the more content consumers see, the more purchases they make.
- Digital channels: Digital spend needs to be optimized to deliver the right message to the right person at the right time and thus maximize marketing spending. Consumers expect to transact digitally and quickly.
- Data and analytics: Advanced predictive tools and models are now available to maximize the value of the huge volume of data from digital channels.
- Mobile phone: It makes it possible to reach customers wherever they are and should be a priority marketing tool. In fact, consumers already search for more products and make more queries on their mobile phones than on their computers.
In the digital world, data is king, so all companies should harness the power of data and analytics to identify and engage new customers. Quality internal and external data from campaigns, the CRM and CCMsystems, the company itself, field sales reps and emails can be analyzed to contact customers through various channels: mobile phone, computer, social media, telephone, email, face-to-face contacts, etc.
For example, it is possible to approach users who have watched an advertiser’s video on YouTube, have used certain keywords when searching for a product on the Internet or live in an area with a high number of potential customers according to market research. Within the boundaries of international privacy standards, it is even possible to find out who has visited a website and where a certain user has clicked.
The range of tools is very broad (perhaps too broad) and includes everything from CCM, DOM (Document Output Management), and CRM and marketing automation software, to sales intelligence, prospecting, acceleration, analytics and gamification solutions, to video conferencing, account-based marketing, digital signature and document tracking, and customer care software.
All of them allow improving the generation and quality of sales reports, saving time, increasingsales force effectiveness and, above all, focusing on targeted Customer Communications to acquire the highest value leads.
About DocPath
DocPath is a leading enterprise document software company that offers its international customers the technology that allows them to complement their ERP and implement advanced Document Output Management, Customer Communications Management and document software pooling processes.
Founded in 1993, DocPath is based in Europe, USA and Latin America and is present with its Solutions in companies around the world. Among its customers there are prestigious banks and top-tier corporations, facilitating the difficult and complex task of designing, generating and distributing their business-critical documents. DocPath keeps a strong commitment to R+D+i, an area to which it allocates a large part of its revenues, and in which lies one of the keys to its success.
For more information, visit: www.docpath.com.
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