For the curious, a world of wonder where CRM, digital and social media marketing converge!
I was that child who always stood fascinated in a candy shop – in part wonder and part anticipation. I must confess, I feel very similar today when I see myself surrounded by what is on display on the shelves of the digital environment we live in. What is also exciting is that while there are some truisms that we know of, the last word on the endless possibilities of this digital ecosystem has not been spoken yet.
The potential interplay of channels and platforms that are available today have the power to facilitate extremely potent consumer engagement initiatives in an ecosystem that is increasingly witnessing abundance of non-linear and unconventional approaches targeted at the ultimate objective of marketing: the ‘holy grail’ of earning consumer preference by creating brand proposition through better understanding of needs and reaching her with that proposition in the ecosystem she cohabits for the most part.
My nascent experiments on marrying brand-owned, CRM-derived customer data with ‘Custom Audiences’ on Facebook have been very exciting. The sheer ability to reach your current consumer on a platform she inhabits, and at the same time, the potential opportunity to reach new audiences (“look-alikes”) who mirror her behaviour, is truly exhilarating! I believe that the efficacy of this route of campaign planning and targeting will be exponentially higher versus the more traditional “spray & pray” approach that marketers have employed so far in conventional media plans.
Yet another admittedly exciting experiment of mine revolved around hyper-local targeting of customers and audiences. The genesis for this experiment was anchored in yet another fundamental challenge faced by almost every retailer who has a large and well spread physical store footprint – using marketing on social and digital media to drive footfalls into stores. The route we took was to white-list our stores on Facebook, and while mapping our customer database living in a vicinity of 3 km to these individual stores in the pilot territory. As a result, we served campaigns on products that were available at the stores to which the audiences were mapped, whilst also providing them the option of getting directions (via Bing maps) to their nearest store.
As I mentioned earlier, these are truly exciting times and the last word on the seemingly endless opportunities in the digital ecosystem has not yet been spoken. In fact, I would even caution marketers to guard against and not be in a hurry to find one! It is very endless opportunities that in fact make these present times truly exciting for a marketer to thrive in. We must embrace this massive ocean of knowledge where quite honestly the potential to explore is only limited by either the marketer’s own imagination and appetites or perhaps by the company (of media owners and partners) he keeps.
#BolderMarketing
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