Marketing has been going through a renaissance where it has been moving from a closed container to a more open style revolving around customer lifecycle. The marketing department model that stands out and can sustain itself day after day is a model structured around the customer’s experience, so that customers can receive a consistent and quality experience all throughout their buy cycle.
Marketing organisations have to exert extreme expertise to allow customers choose their own experience. But to make this a reality, you have to ensure that you have a strategy in place and your budget most importantly can support this.
The debate: Point-to-point engagement or not
If you are a marketer, you know that the sheer number of marketing channels are overwhelming for anybody. The immense pressure that every single digital platform exert on marketers can cripple busy individuals who are struggling to keep up with the staggering number of social media posts and personalized messages for their customers.
According to Content Marketing Institute’s annual B2C Content Marketing: 2016 Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends, out of 12 most popular marketing tactics used by marketers, 9 of them are digital approaches, from email newsletters, to website blogs. As is resonated throughout the research, we can clearly understand that the B2B report does not deviate much. It echoes similar results and exposes the fact that webinars, email newsletters, blogs, online presentations and other digital approaches are the most popular and successful.
Unfortunately many companies are still stuck in an ancient marketing phase where every branch of digital marketing is just stacked upon one another instead of seeing marketing through their customer’s perspective.
What is Your Customer Looking for?
If you look at marketing from the point of view of customers, you have to understand that they do not classify themselves according to anything. They expect to open their devices and access the information from any platform that is accessible to them. It can be a Facebook post that talks about a great offer and they want the “buy” button present there so that they can buy it there and then. What you have to have in order to give the customers a great experience is a multi-channel suitable to support all platforms and devices so that the customer experience is not hindered.
But what makes customer experiences haphazard is when a marketing department is silo-ed. Mostly what happens is that the social media team fails to coordinate with website development and your customer ends up bearing the brunt of this miscommunication. They are stuck and often face duplicating messages during their time on your website. Soon, they lose faith because they are not satisfied with everything that is happening.
What you need is a marketing team that devotes itself to customer experience rather than anything else. Your marketing budget will revolve around the customers and what they want so that you can convert as many leads as possible and increase sales. You need a budget to support that and tools that will ensure that customer experience will be top-notch.
Why do you need to Increase Digital Marketing budget?
To get the best out of your marketing team and make it more about the customer than the company, you should consider increasing your digital marketing budget. Offline marketing channels have been taken over by digital and you have to invest more money in that if you don’t want to fall back.
Gartner’s CMO Spend Survey of 2015-2016 reported that digital marketing budgets have almost increased by 10% in 2014-2015 and it will continue increasing every year with so much importance allotted to digital marketing channels. Every marketer admits that online and offline marketing channels are merging and there are a few concrete reasons why:
1. Online Customers: More and more people are taking to social media from the teens to the elderly. It is becoming a place of communication extremely fast. Since you can reach out to such a diverse group of people on digital marketing channels, it is a complete no-brainer that you need to increase your marketing budget so that you can have access to a wider customer base.
2. Faster: Digital marketing is faster than its offline counterpart. Customers now demand instant information and gratification. If they do not get that they will go to your competitors. These demands become extremely easy to fulfil if you invest heavily on digital marketing channels.
3. Tracking: When you spend on digital marketing, it becomes easier and better to track marketing ROI. Marketers can now justify where, how and why they spent part of the marketing budget.
The Bottom LineEvery company is trying to take their business online at this day and age. Marketing itself is becoming digital and soon there will be nothing called “Digital Marketing”. If your company still hasn’t gone digital, you should be thinking about it because it will dawn a new era for your organization.
How do you decide your marketing budget? Let us know in your comments below!
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