Situation: In traditional marketing, many marketers were more focused on activity than results. In the digital environment, successful marketing organizations must become better at listening to their customers, watching them, and tracking their purchase decision behavior. What does this mean for the marketer? What is coming in digital marketing?

Advice from the CEOs:

• The digital world has changed marketing. The traditional marketing campaign was led by creative. Through the early 90’s marketing was directed by media players and large publishers. Once a campaign was developed the pitch was “buy lots of impressions and customers will come.”
• Since the dot.com boom there has been a shift to ROI – originally it was spend $x with Google, get y clicks that will yield z buying customers. This was very transactional and could be expressed relatively simply. Behavior is now changing, and the model is becoming more collaborative: a potential customer expresses interest and a need, a supplier offers a solution, the potential customer verifies and validates the offer through online communities: LinkedIn, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, Facebook, and other online communities. Eventually the potential customer may make a buying decision
• The buying decision today is very different from the traditional offer-driven process. The whole decision process can happen in minutes.
• For the marketer, this means moving far beyond simple advertisements. The marketer needs a presence on the sites mentioned above in addition to their website to woo potential customers. For marketers this is expensive and requires a different level of resource commitment. It is important for them to attribute the appropriate value to each online presence that the customer engages as they evaluate their buying choices.
• Only through developing complex metrics, which change real time as customer behavior changes, can the marketer track and understand customer behavior and adapt the offer to the needs of the customer. As individual consumers increasingly engage employ new forms of digital technology the challenge to marketers only increases.
• The digital marketer who will thrive will develop a sophisticated, metric-driven understanding of the multiple touchpoints and social interaction of a given transaction.

Thanks to Vikas Sharan, CEO, Regalix, Inc. for his contribution to this article.

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