Marketers face certain challenges that are unique to present conditions. One of them is how to target content at a time when attention spans are getting shorter, and all are promising certain solutions. Also with too many players in every industry, there is the challenge of product differentiation. A number of players are playing the price war, and this provides others a challenge to convince customers to buy their products without providing discounts. Market research conducted by Gartner shows certain buzzwords which dominated the marketing world in the year 2015 such as – predictive analytics, growth hacking, responsive design, social media etc. The challenge for marketers is to steer clear of buzzwords and still delivering value without falling into the shiny object trap. Finally, it has been understood that purchase decisions are based around emotions and that is what marketers must fully comprehend to target content accordingly.

A number of firms have emerged as leaders on social media outlets such as Facebook and Instagram, promoting than brand more aggressively than ever before. However, these firms ought not to be exceptions, but rather the norm, as others must also tap into digital marketing techniques. This can even massively improve customer servicing. For example, airlines can prompt passengers regarding flight delays before they reach the airports. Or pharmaceutical firms can preempt customer needs by offering vaccines before diseases reach epidemic levels. These trends can be easily tracked on social media. In fact market research conducted by CEB, tells us that around 57% of pre-purchase study is conducted by customer before meeting the first salesperson. It is at that stage of the buying process that marketers must find a place. The Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2016 is one such tool launched to keep track of all social media updates helpful for the firm’s business analysis. Sales professionals need to be able to match customers’ involvement with social media.

Some tools have been identified which practitioners of digital marketing must make use of to best be able to measure the ROI of their work. For web analytics, Google Universal Analytics and Adobe Analytics have been found to be the best. Bid management platforms such as Kenshoo and DoubleClick help increase effective investments in search marketing operations. Salesforce.com and Base CRM have been identified as being the best in the business of CRM delivery. DialogTech enables call attribution. Marketing automation is essential and HubSpot is the leader in this act. KnowledgeTree enables best predictive intelligence. Social media marketing meanwhile can best be performed by Hootsuite and Sprout Social. Google provides an in-house tool to conduct A/B Testing. Finally, the most crucial business intelligence can best be served by a tool named Tableau. 

A number of SMBs are struggling hard to cope with ways to maximize benefits out of social media while at the same time working on digital marketing. Thus some of the best tools in various applications have been identified. As social conversations’ listening tools, ideal platforms are Hootsuite Pro and Sprout Social Premium. They even provide us business analysis on trending sentiments. Mention is the ideal tool to gauge influencers. Search analytics tools use Boolean algebra consisting of characters AND, OR & NOT. LinkedIn Boolean Search Primer and Brandwatch Analytics Pro are best identified for this work. Each of these tools mentioned provide certain advantages and they must be used within the market learning curve as and when deemed appropriate.

While digital marketing is so much entrenched into the minds of modern marketers, there still remain some terms which are relatively unheard of. There is cross-channel marketing which enables branding across multiple social platforms. Then there is employee advocacy which is a concept where employees of the organization use their own Facebook or Twitter links to publicize their organization’s achievements. Micro-moments is a term coined by Google which refers to real time incidents which trigger a sudden impulse to check for updates on social media or search on the web further news on the respective event. Something related is real-time marketing which pushes content at the right time when people are hooked towards a particular piece of news or event. Personalization is the concept of customizing content for individual users, usually belonging to niche segment. The process of following up with leads already engaged with is called remarketing. Cookies enable websites to tag users, and those users are more specifically targeted after business intelligence is extracted on them. This concept is known as retargeting. Finally there exists the concept of social intelligence where social media conversations are tracked using massive chunks of data and this is processed to analyze top brands and pain points. 

The CMO’s job profile has undergone a world of change in the era of digital marketing. There are seven skills that one must possess at that level. The CMO must be able to do agile management. He / she must be comfortable with big data and business intelligence thus derived. Branded content must be gauged for sentiment, awareness and SEO. The person must be able to generate and further implementbusiness innovations when needed. Programmatic buying is something that must be integrated with the digital as well as conventional marketing plans. The CMO must be able to handle the marketing agencies and juggle the fields such as PR, advertising and email marketing. Finally, the person must be able to understand the customer journeys and buyer personas.

Digital marketingexperts spoke about brand success secrets at a conference recently in San Francisco. Jessica Sweeney of 1000watt spoke about integrity and how the customer must be made to care. She also spoke about how the company must be clear about its focus areas and be precise in the pitch. Finally she said the campaign must be more focused towards the client and not the vendor. Management consulting guru Katie Lance advised us all to keep handy an editorial calendar as time needs to be kept aside for planning. She then went to comment that the right person armed with the right content must be recruited for the position. The Paperless Agent’s Chris Scott spoke about how there must be clarity duringcorporate strategy formulation. The campaign must be tested before launching and no opportunities must be missed. Audie Chamberlain of Lion & Orb focuses on using the right PR technique to get the message across. Seth Price concluded this event by suggesting that the age old technique of focusing on keywords remains sacrosanct.