By Lim Wee Khee, Senior Lecturer and Consultant, Digital Innovation & Design
Consumers today are more technologically-savvy and empowered than before. Democratisation of information brings new knowledge, choices and influence to consumers that they did not enjoy previously. This increased consumer sophistication poses challenges for marketers today. According to Experian Digital Marketing Report (2016), two of the top challenges for marketers are firstly, to understand consumers’ needs, wants and attitudes, and secondly, to increase brand visibility over competition.
To thrive amidst competition, an organisation has to provide a superior customer experience. The discipline of marketing has evolved from “getting heard above the noise” to being relevant to your customers at the point of time when you are needed. Both the art and science of marketing need to work hand-in-hand together in order to deliver a memorable customer experience.
The Science of Marketing
The science part of marketing is almost taken for granted today. After all, the very essence of digital, is the ability to tag, track and measure. With a plethora of marketing technology available, from social media analytics, web analytics, interaction analytics, to using machine learning and algorithms for cross-device tracking, loads of data are readily available for analysis once you set it up.
The advantages of having data are numerous. With data, you can enjoy improved customer insights, informed decision-making, enhanced implementation and experimentation. With A-B testing for instance, you can use data to test options and make decisions in web and mobile design. With re-marketing for display ads, you can target visitors who interacted with you prior, rather than using a “spray and pray” approach.
In fact, return on advertising spent (ROAS), is used as a yard stick of tracking effectiveness of various digital channels. Whether it is email marketing, programmatic ads or search engine optimisation (SEO), you can now track the impact of every digital channel (and some non-digital ones too) and constantly optimise them to reach your goals. Indeed, outcome-driven organisations like e-commerce companies, use performance marketing, where data is used for resources allocation on channels with bottom-line impact.
Data does bring its own set of challenges and limitations as well. One potential pitfall of being overtly centred on data, is to adopt a tactical, short-term and transactional focus, which often sacrifice the long-term relationship with your customers.
The Art of Marketing
In order to build and sustain a long-term relationship with your customers, organisations need to champion the voice of the customer through the art of marketing. Essential skills like empathy, understanding of customers’ pain points and needs are important in order to design an optimal customer experience. Companies like Google and Facebook have raised the bar high when it comes to customer experience and customer journey with their services. That has increased expectations and it is a tough act to follow for other brands. Hence, building the expertise in creating experiences that resonate becomes critical. Coupled with the science of measurement from customer research and usability tests, designing for the customer at heart would also involve galvanising the entire organisation to improve their processes and operations, which would no doubt be another artistic manoeuvre.
Social media is another example that combines both the art and science of marketing. Facebook Insights provide hundreds of metrics about social interaction of your followers with your page and content, which you can analyse down to granular levels. Building engagement and connecting appropriately on social media, however, is an art. Being able to read the feelings behind the words and responding in an empathetic manner, comes with experience, discretion and a human touch that the metrics alone cannot provide.
In “traditional marketing” not so long ago, the art of marketing involves creating innovative ideas and “concepts” which would then translate into a central campaign idea. That same concept is executed as a campaign across channels like TV commercials, print advertisement, outdoor billboards, below-the-line collaterals and online communications. Today, that essence of creativity is still required. That expression however, need to manifest itself into the new trends of content marketing and story-telling.
The story we tell today, needs to be more original and true to the DNA of the organisation, or else it loses credibility. It needs to be more inspiring and visionary, permeating throughout the organisation beyond the marketing department to every employee. The content that is created, needs to be authentic, human and best of all, originating from actual customers’ experiences. With consumers trusting their social networks more than brands’ communications, nothing beats the testimonial and true story of a real customer.
With possibilities like virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR), the realm of story-telling and content creation will go beyond images and videos. The art of creating an immersive experience in different dimensions will be a different ball game altogether. That needs a healthy dose of imagination coupled with understanding of human psychology and technology.
The Mash-Up of Art and Science
Marketing will continue to evolve and grow with the advent of new technologies and trends. For example, we can already experience the artificial intelligence behind the voice recognition and natural language processing capabilities of Amazon’s Alexa today. It is only a matter of time before more organisations adopt the technologies and provide new options for the consumer. Marketers will have to grapple with new ways where consumers search and consume information.
In Singapore, government agencies like GovTech and brands like OCBC and DBS are experimenting with chatbots. Instead of web or mobile interface, where consumers need to adapt to the devices, chatbots provide a more natural form of human communication. Designing a chatbot and teaching it to respond to humans in a sensible matter, is an art, albeit the science behind machine learning and conversational user interface. This opens up a new communications channel for brand building, marketing and customer service moving forward.
Exciting times are ahead. Armed with data and insights, marketers can leverage the science of marketing and integrate the art of designing an experience for their customers, based on who and where they are, what experiences are demanded and when they want it. There is little doubt today that the modern marketing team needs both skills in its arsenal. To win the hearts and minds of our customers, only the best mash-up of art and science expertise would do.
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