Conventional marketing is getting exposed for being extremely costly and difficult to measure its effectiveness. The method of gauging business intelligence using customer insights is a painfully long process. Digitizing the marketing process on the other hands provides instant real time analysis of marketing spend vis-à-vis its returns. This has even led to cost reduction over marketing fairs and promotional events. Marketing research conducted by Nielsen has confirmed that 59% of such forums fail to break-even these days as vendors are turning away from them. Digitization affords firms to quickly respond to market demands. Data driven marketing is increasingly being used by competitive organizations according to a study by the Winterberry Group.

A study was commissioned to understand the influence social media exerts on buying decisions of prospective customers. This study is likely to help digital marketing agencies to better position their efforts over platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. More than a quarter of respondents across Europe confirmed that they are likely to be influenced strongly on their purchase decision by social media. However this figure varied per product category. The percentage was barely 15% for utilities but around 40% for travel. What was also understood is that social media itself is less powerful unless backed by strong influencers. Most successful marketers though needed a mix of digital and traditional modes of marketing to reach the final customer. Offline recommendations still exert substantial influence on prospects.

A study has been concluded on how best a company website can be leveraged as a marketing hub for mobile based business environment. A genuine strategy must be developed for how the website must be used including specific actions to achieve objectives, audiences to be targeted, implementation schedule and maintenance plans. The website must be designed in a way that it is receptive to customer insights from which responses may be directed accordingly. Content is key, so the customer must get valuable and timely matter. The approach will not succeed unless the plans are scalable and abide by budgeted actions. Business analytics must be leveraged to get relevant data from which appropriate action may be undertaken. Nowadays brands get massive amount of visibility on social media so the company website must be linked with specific pages on these platforms. Websites must always include CTAs (Call to Action) so that beyond relevant content, business conversion can also take place.

The difference or the lack of between ad tech and mark tech has never been clear cut. Business consulting provided by a senior Gartner representative has outlined that ad tech focuses on the entire market without differentiating while mark tech is targeted at segmented audience. This definition though has some irregularities caused mainly by the fact that a lot of advertising technology firms were gobbled up by IT giants such as Adobe and Oracle to create aligned marketing solutions services. The use of ad tech applications then ran into mark tech territory and this created major overlap between the two. The ownership of data is another important aspect. The same piece of data can have different uses under the leadership of CTOs, CMOs or CIOs depending on their respective approaches. Thus at present these two fields have converged and the differences are still unclear.

Customer servicing has historically been a reactive process. The customer approaches the service representatives about the problem which is then addressed by the executives. Now marketing technologies are providing us with data warehousing capabilities which can store enormous amounts of data on customers thus enabling marketers to predict their exact needs. In depth customer knowledge using analytics has now become a critical component of the CRM process. Various marketing channels such as emails, mobile apps, social media and websites facilitate the capture of this vital data. This also allows personalized services to be offered to customers.  

In the upcoming future, marketing of e-commerce will be generated by visuals and user generated content (UGC). Social media has managed to encourage individual users to get themselves photographed next to experiences they value and share with the wide world. Instagram and Facebook have lent themselves perfectly well to this model. Due to lowered barriers to entry, everyone is today a critic and posting blogs, comments and videos. Marketing research conducted by Forrester, clearly shows that less than a tenth of respondents consider direct ads from companies or banners to be authentic. However, 70% of that same audience considers peer recommendations very highly. Online reviews by other customers are also trusted by about half the market. This trend is giving credence to UGC’s rise as a serious means of marketing.

It has long been understood that social media forms an important cog in digital marketing. However, now these channels have moved beyond the awareness and brand building part to direct final sales. Facebook has experimented with certain businesses on financial transactions directly via its Messenger app. More than one out of every four respondents in a recent survey confirmed that they are open to making payments via social media channels. So while a larger number of users are currently active in engaging with retailers, the buy button on Facebook is set to transform the industry itself.