Social media brands such as Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter are now going deep at their attempts to directly monetize the digital marketing they themselves generate. For that to happen, the ‘buy’ button in various avatars has been added to these various platforms. Even Google’s search ads now include a buy option. Today’s version is different from the ‘gift’ option Facebook had couple of years back as that reflected excessive commercial intentions. The sales platform Shopify, payment processors such as Stripe or even Apple Pay are enabling mobile phone payments. In fact legions of fans are showing interest at purchasing brands such as Michael Kors and Nordstrom endorsed by their favourite stars over Instagram. This is how social commerce is progressing from simple content creation for brands to the final sales.

Source:-  http://www.fastcompany.com/3048652/app-economy/buy-buy-buy

Some of the best digital marketing statistics have been rounded off for this week. Not surprisingly advertising on Facebook has risen by more than double. Ad viewership overall though has reduced as a trend. Six out of every seven marketers now claim they understand customer better than before. Decision making is now influenced bybusiness analytics in two-fifths of organizations. The data thus analyzed particularly pays attention to CRM. Journalists have now become quite reliant on social media. This is particularly so in the English speaking world of the UK, USA and Australia. A positive piece of news from the continent of Africa comprises that half the mobile internet user base there uses the same for ordering of food. Peculiarly, 15% of millennial smartphone users are yet to use their devices for purpose of shopping. But nearly half the respondents have bought clothes from third party sellers such as Amazon. Trend also suggests that inspirational videos are most likely to be shared with others users.

Source:  https://econsultancy.com/blog/66743-15-best-digital-marketing-stats-from-this-week/

Marketers are making enormous effort and investments to garner information about customers. However, substantial bits of the same can be collected for free or from existing investments. Google, Facebook, Quantcast and The Trade Desk are examples of such. Google provides us with Analytics, and AdWords. We use these tools to get business analytics on user demographics, interests, engagement levels, content consumption, devices being used and the conversion ratio. Facebook usage by customers gives us indication on social life and attributes. Quantcast is a tool that adds on to the work done by Google by providing predictive analytics on expected outcomes. It takes care of demographics, cross-platform behaviour, shopping interests and political affiliation. The Trade Desk and User-Report are similarly two other free information sources which must be garnered.

Source: http://marketingland.com/understand-customer-free-162483

The major reason why customers flock to big corporations is the consistency they provide irrespective of geographic location or demographic segmentation. The modern customer wants personalized content and that is something that reluctantly these large firms are now integrating into their process. Business analytics captures specific information about individual buyers and that data can be used to conduct targeted marketing for specific person or segment. Usually the kind of information that marketers display is of the positive kind about their product. While this is natural, if exhaustive information is not provided the customer may move on citing lack of authenticity. This is especially true for services such as room rentals or holiday packages. On the other end of the spectrum, there are products such as chocolates which will not require such extensive research on the part of the customer so less but vital information needs to be provided.

Source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/steveolenski/2015/12/22/embracing-the-customer-experience-in-marketing/

A number of organizations are gaining credibility as well as business share thanks to content marketing efforts. The marketing part of the content however must be extremely subtle as people do not want to be told what to buy, but instead want to be informed. Thus the “teach, don’t sell” principle works perfectly well with content marketing. Unfortunately, business analysis produced in the State of Small Business Report claims that while nearly half of the respondent organizations use content marketing, a majority of those push information on sales, discounts or promotions. No CTA (Call-to-Action) button must be inserted with the content which asks readers to buy something. Genuinely generous intentions on informing the public will ways be appreciated by the market. It is also important to inform them about aspects which they want to know rather than force-feeding them stuff that the marketers want to broadcast.

Source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/briansutter/2016/02/19/want-to-be-successful-with-content-marketing-teach-dont-sell/#2a41251a45f0

The connected customer is very much going to dictate terms with marketers in 2016. Certain transformational ideas business must consider to leverage this trend. Marketing research conducted by Forrester has pointed out that self customer service is now more popular than all other such forms including phone. Thus customer service agencies must consider such methods in-fitted with video based instructions. Instead of large corporations, majority of customer facing mobile apps will be developed by individual developers. Marketers will increasingly invest in e-commerce platforms. IT firms will get more aligned with business needs by developing capabilities in cloud computing, social analytics and Big Data. HR departments must encourage employees to improve health and engagement by using wearable technologies. Chief Marketing officers will invest more in automation by developing buyer personas and buyer process maps. CEOs on the other hand will focus more on innovations. Finally, data driven sales organizations will do better than others in the market.

Source:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/vala-afshar/2016-the-year-of-connecte_b_8833496.html?ir=India&adsSiteOverride=in

There seems to be a plethora of software tools to help professionals with sales, manufacturing, finance, engineering and customer support yet almost none for marketing. Even the handful of tools that are available are mainly targeted at advertising. This is what makes the job of the CMO really challenging and as a result usually short lived. Marketers are instead using business analytics to measure click-through-rates and recording customer views using traditional spreadsheets. For this a marketing mix has been developed to yield best results over digital media. It follows the chain of ideas then work resulting in results. There is this need to develop marketing technology which can store memory or customer data, sales and trends. http://www.forbes.com/sites/joelyork/2015/12/01/the-missing-link-in-marketing-technology/