Three Crucial Considerations for Successful Marketing in a Digital World

In a digital world, customers own our brand and our business.

If our marketing strategy have implicitly asked them to “trust” us, we are promising them more than our slogan. We are promising to provide them with quality products, services and solutions in a timely manner; we're promising to safeguard their interests with integrity and transparency; we're promising to demonstrate respect and authenticity to them across all of our touch points; and importantly, we're promising to remain reliable to them throughout their experiences with us.

Backing even an inch away from our brand promise in a digital world can literally mean burying the business six feet under

These are 3 crucial considerations for successful marketing in a digital world:

No. 1: Our customers do not trust us. Our customers trust other customers.

The Internet has given our customers the ability to connect with each other and along the way, to become a part of our brand’s customer experience.

With limitless amount of information out there on the Internet for anyone to access at any time, winning the trust of customers is not an option – it is a requirement.

The most important task of marketing is not to find new ways to engage with customers. It is to find better ways to engage with a customer on the terms of the customer. Anything less is labelled as “distrustful”.

In today’s digital world, a brand is the integrity of a company. The slightest lapse of trust in a brand’s integrity and that of its people will result in a fast and expensive damage to the business.

No. 2: Our customers are not metrics. Our customers are the sum of their interactions with us

The number of fans/followers we have on our Facebook, Twitter and Instagram pages are vanity metrics which mean nothing if we are not converting these into actionable metrics.

How soon do we respond to “friends" and “friends-of-friends” who connect with us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram? How soon do we reply to recruiters who reach out for our resumes through LinkedIn. Now, let us go to our company’s social pages. How often have we not responded to feedback and inquires posted on these sites? How often have we falsely assumed that connecting with our customers on the Internet is less impactful than responding to them in person? And how often have we made customers angry with just barely “cover our bases” responses?

If marketing continues to fail towards improving customer interactions across all touch points of a brand, the business will end up planning its exit strategy

No. 3: Customer experience is the only marketing strategy that has proven to support business security

The customer is king? Yes, and it is kicking us like hell out of business in the digital world. But what does this mean?

It means the customer has a stake in our company. It means the customer must be made to feel and to be a part of the company. It means personalised, honest, timely, and real-time engagement with the customers, 24/7.

Customer experience means customer partnership, nothing less will do.

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