As we work with different clients, we realize everyone is making the same mistake. They all wait for miracles. And cheap miracles. It’s weird to experience a miracle, and it’s even more weird to get a digital miracle.
Our clients are pursuing digital transformation, and that’s the first step. But when they assign a budget to digital, they automatically set an expectation for ROI. They hope each dollar they invest in marketing will be counted back in a while and will come back with lots of earnings, and they feel disappointed if that doesn’t happen quickly.
They complain to their digital agencies, they fire their CMOs, and they continue to expect miracles from the next ones. Well, buddies, that’s not the key to success. Miracles won’t happen this way. In fact, you shouldn’t be waiting for a miracle at all.
We are tired of explaining that, when you invest in digital, you have to think on your brand’s health on the long term and not just on your sales results for the next period. It’s an old paradigm that has been thrown away by the greatest advertising gurus: promotions vs branding. The lack of a true customer-centered strategy can’t take you to your gold mine. If you don’t care about the perceptions and attitudes the public is experimenting with your brand, you won’t be successful.
Some interesting statistics
Do you know 90% of sales are influenced by digital? Maybe you knew. But do you also know that 80% of sales are performed in real life stores? That must be a statement. Digital should be expected to influence, to impact on evolving customer preferences and behaviors, not to perform sales. It must be a continuous hard work, not just some alternative promotional focus in sales actions. It’s like keeping up with your couple. If you stop communicating, everything between the both of you will die at some point.
Highest performance companies are measuring their digital marketing results in several ways: they take into account not just their revenue, but customer satisfaction, web traffic, content analytics and customer experience, among other statistics. Are you willing to open your mind and include all of those?
We could say digital is still new, and that it’s always changing. But as marketers, we know that advertising and marketing concepts are always changing. We can’t do anything else but suggest you to open your mind and try to think beyond that. If you can adjust your mindset to at least half the speed digital is changing, we’ll assure you’ll be a trending high-performance company in the long-term. And long-term nowadays means just about a year.
Pic copyright: https://www.flickr.com/photos/renaissancechambara/5408612857/
