Gone are the days of traditional marketing and advertising where messages were broadcasted without an exact focus on the target audience..for example the ads on newspapers or the billboards/sign posts at traffic junctions. The whole funda was about capturing hordes of eyeballs, never bothering about how many of them would really be interested and get moved by what was being displayed. I agree that this form of advertisement did have a certain impact on the buying behaviour of people, but there were two important missing ingredients .. 'focussed targetting' and 'ROAS' (return on ad spend) measurement.
The advent of Internet technology in the form of search engines and Social media platforms have opened up a new avenue and enabled these advertising messages to be precisely targetted to people residing in a specific geography, demography and also a user base with related interests. Its also amazing to see that the ad messages are being flashed based on the user's intent making the probablity of conversion very high. For example, a person reading a blog on fitness would probably see ads related to fitness equipment, personal trainers etc placed around the blog content. This idea is appealing and sensible since it is a topic of interest and the reader can easily relate to the ad being served.
It is even more impactful in the case of SERP (Search engine result pages) as the user is actually looking for a particular piece of information through a search phrase related to the search intent. This is intuitively remarkable since the user can be targeted at a particular stage of his buying cycle when the probability of conversion is very high. The whole concept has now been expanded further to include remarketing, enabling customer retention and loyalty.
Thanks to browser cookies and data mining tools, we now have data readily available about past purchases, customer orientation, spend patterns and related information that allows for unique ways to reach and trigger a prospect for further sales. The social media platform has added up to this tremendous opportunity to reach out to Gen-X with high spending potential and inclination.
We have seen the field of web analytics grow exponentially over the years and its now possible to slice and dice online data - sources of traffic, online customer behaviour, click patterns and a host of other parameters to assess user interaction and web usability score using tools such as Google Analytics and Omnitute Site Catalyst. These tools help fish out problem areas and improve user experience thus turning your web property into a striking marketing tool.
The 'intent based' messaging coupled with a powerful ad-serving technological backbone has changed the life of customers and marketeers alike for good. With newer technologies hitting the maket each year, imagination is the only stop to what is possible for customer acquisition, engagement and retention.
Digital marketing is a new domain of specialization and will only get better with time.
No comments:
Post a Comment