If Cinderella happened to be a tale created in today’s fast-paced world, the prince would have found her in an instant, using “location” services. The challenge is not in the finding but in the interacting.
Remember, we used to say “Be right back”, or “BRB” all the time when we were online? Ever wondered why we do not say it anymore? Because we no longer leave. We live right here.
2020 is just four years away, and in the past 17 years, (assuming we started the clock when Google’s first Semantic Search Invention was patented on August 31, 1999), we have witnessed a digital revolution. This has fundamentally altered consumer behaviour, which sparked the movement to create a sustainable, asset-light economy that is easy and economical to deploy while disrupting some businesses to a phenomenal scale we could not imagine a few years back.
Digital is not just another platform in the marketing media mix to be delegated to the young marketing fellow who “gets it”, but it is the core vehicle of delivery. For example: think of the last time you shared an update in a newspaper. Now, think of the last time you shared a YouTube video or website link on your social media or messaging platforms.
Like it or not, we do live online. And along with us live several of our other consumers, especially the younger generation (Gen Y and Z). They have brains that are fundamentally re-wired. They do not make buying decisions using the time-tested customer decision journey model and rarely have time to read brand tag-lines. It is about the celebration of spontaneity, instant gratification and feeling good. Exactly like our “spiritual gurus” told us to be.
As easy as it looks, reaching your potential consumers will require simple, yet effective tactics. We need to go beyond the traditional way of tracking our projects by simple means of impressions and reach. It is more about matching relevancy of the communication to a consumer’s state of mind and being influenced by their digital footprints. In other words, it’s about knowing them: one-on-one.
Many of us feel that we have entered the era of digital business, which is true, but honestly we haven’t quite reached the core of what digital can offer. We merely have been playing footsies on its circumference.
The infrastructure and the tools are present and so are the opportunities. Despite that, however, 56 per cent of businesses in the UAE still have not gone digital. And this is where a smart agency gears up to educate a business of the potential advantages of going digital – instead of following a quick gain.
There are several questions a business can ask (actually, the root question is always the same: “How do I maximise revenue and save costs?”), and as the answers evolve every single day, we need to keep on asking and reinventing the metrics.
We believe digital is all about getting precise messaging that is tailor-made for its consumer and dispatched in an automated method for the masses. The blurring line between offline and online merges and the question is not whether one media competes with another, but how well it works together in a consumer’s mind frame for quicker acceptance and action. As offline merges with online, and as consumers get more “connected” it simply means businesses have better access to customers, right?
The great news is that customised messaging is picking up momentum. This is being fuelled by a data-driven world where there are myriad ways to segment our audience. It allows us to set the ‘context’ for communication by leveraging traceable data. How well we do this separates what we coin as “good” versus “brilliant” marketing tools. We have so much data at our disposal – social, search, location, history, customer persona and more – how we leverage it to our advantage is what matters.
As businesses have direct access to their consumers, they do not talk only about direct selling of products and services. Remember, consumers have now been re-wired; in essence we need to entertain, engage and connect with them based on what we know about them. This is also evident with a plethora of entertainment-based social networks that thrive on spontaneously created, individually generated content. Brands are still vying to figure out how to capitalise on Snapchat and other apps such as Musical.ly.
Smart businesses are, as always, re-inventing how they reach out to their consumers, trying new things even if that is not always the easiest thing to do. And that’s great, because, after all, there has never been a society that shares information, preferences and opinions so freely. Which also means as a business we need to provide relevant contents, messaging and information that in turn add value to the consumer more than ever before.
Today’s world of digital brings these tools for the masses and yet they are so customised they fit each customer like their own Cinderella-inspired glass shoes. Oh, and finding her is fairly easy too, we just need to follow her digital footprints.
Gopal Aswani and Ashik Hasim, Managing partners, Essentially Precise
