The Future of Digital - thoughts Part 1

Following on from some questions I was asked at the Marketing Society's Digital Day 2015, I have decided to write-up my thoughts on the future of digital.

This basically takes the questions I was asked on the day and answers those here.

Q: What are you expecting audience engagement to look like over the next 5 years?

An increasingly demanding and savvy customer:
We have to meet the needs of a customer who more & more have either grown up with digital technologies or adopted them & lives online.  Regardless of channel, location and device the customer now expects a response in the next 3 seconds or they get frustrated, in 5 seconds.... forget it.

Forget about generic messages, they won’t cut it anymore
Sending & providing the same information to everyone is going to have less & less effect, relevancy is key. This obviously creates an issue for those who do not have technology & marketing systems integrated.

Have an acute focus on the customer

Understand each touch-point with your prospective or returning customer and then do everything within your power to minimise their frustrations and maximise their delight. Your website, mobile app, kiosk and should be optimised continually to make them better… if you don’t, your competitors will!

Multi-channel shopper marketing

A couple of months ago I write a post about how I saw the discipline of shopper marketing (SM) evolve into digital shopper marketing (DSM) and then into Multi-Channel Shopper Marketing (MCSM).

Now I've had a little while to think about this some more and work with clients on this, I thought I would share some more of my thoughts and observations.

1. Shoppers are now multi-channel
It is not simply the case that online marketing influences online purchases and traditional marketing influences in-store transactions. Online and offline are now just different channels, each potentially contributing to the acquisition and retention of the customer over a range of time.

2. Influence has a huge part to play
The path to purchase starts with initial awareness and continues up to the point that the shopper reaches for the product. In between these two events, there is a wealth of channels, touch-points and devices that the shopper uses to make their purchasing choices. Google calls this the Zero Moment Of Truth (or ZMOT for short) and has produced a number of studies to show just how many information sources a modern multi-channel shopper uses before they commit to a sale.

3. The shopper is getting more savvy
We now live in an age of austerity for most people, where nearly everyone is watching what they spend (in a way, this is the way it always should have been). This translates to a change in shopper behaviour, where they now search around for the best price of brands / commodity products and a lot more now look out for discount codes and promotions. This has a clear effect on eCommerce sites, where a lot more visitors now jump out of the transaction funnel just before they compete the payment process...to look at voucher sites and to hunt down any relevant offers.

In the future I hope to dig into the ways that brands and  retailers can utilise this behaviour and get the maximum benefit from the new ways that multi-channel shoppers act.