Digital has transformed the marketing landscape. Modern customers look for convenience and a frictionless omnichannel experience across physical and digital touchpoints. New-age marketers and brands are constantly modernising their marketing approach and leveraging social media, mobility, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), big data, analytics, and messaging services to stay current, relevant, and ahead of their customers’ expectations. When done right, digital transformation enables enhanced experiences, delivers growth, and most importantly earns customer loyalty. All of this helps build a better brand for an enterprise.

Let’s see how marketing leaders are increasingly leveraging digital to ensure sustained brand growth:

Enabling Intelligent Campaigns with AI 

As per Deloitte, “73% of AI adopters believe AI is ‘very’ or ‘critically’ important to their business today, and 64% said, said AI technologies enable them to establish a lead over their competitors.” AI empowers business leaders to make intelligent and informed business decisions. It can help track the customer’s journey while determining their buying patterns, the preferred mode of engagement channels, their movement to the next stage of the buying journey, etc.

Determining Customers’ Needs with Predictive Analytics 

As per SeedScientific, “Every day, we create roughly 2.5 quintillion bytes of data.” AI utilises this big data to analyse and generate insights into consumer behavior. Based on the voluminous data stored through customer-product interaction, ML algorithms can predict changes in customers’ requirements. The algorithms can recognise the patterns, identify complicated relationships using big data, and assist marketers by forecasting customers’ next action steps and demands.

For instance, based on the previous data and expenditure patterns, banks and financial institutions can approach families during the holiday season with offers on their cards in partnership with other websites/mobile apps.

Personalising Products and Services 

One of the reports published by Deloitte indicates that 40% of the health insurance customers, 38% of home insurance customers, and 48% of motor insurance customers are willing to track their behaviour and share this data with insurers for a more personalised premium. External data, voice analytics, and natural language processing help organisations capture clients’ profiles and sentiments through calls, in-person, and various digital interactions. It helps them understand their customers and predict their changing preferences. Business leaders can tailor advice and recommendations, and optimise price, and service strategies based on data and analytics.

Delivering Contextual Communications

Insights into the buying stage of customers are crucial. Brands tailor their marketing content and communication to customers. Automation and content-driven processes help marketers roll out contextually accurate communications to specific set of customers at the right time, at the right place, and through their preferred channels.

Ensuring Omnichannel Experience Per Deloitte, “97 percent of leaders agree that customer experience management is an integral business strategy for creating loyal and long-lasting customer relationships.” Backoffice integration ensures seamless customers’ online-offline journey and helps marketers deliver a consistent customer experience across multiple touchpoints and through various channels. This can be experienced while opening a new bank account, initiating a lending process, or registering with any healthcare service provider.

Enabling Geo-based Targeting

Geo-targeting uses specific location data and helps marketers create and send messages and offers that are relevant to a targeted set of customers. Marketers leverage location-based push notifications through an operating system when the customer enters a particular location. Organisations send personalised offers to customers based on real-time transaction details and a respective location.

Improving Customer Service Per Capgemini Research Institute, “74% of consumers are using conversational assistants for researching or buying products or services.” Chatbots and speech recognition provide 24X7 customer care services with no waiting time. Speech recognition understands natural language and chatbots can use customer data based on account information, social media interaction, and past customer interactions to deliver contextual responses.

Increasing Leads Generation

Marketers are using the web and dark web to generate leads. AI can analyse browsing patterns, target prospective customers, retarget them on social platforms, and help marketers to reach them with personalised offers, increasing the conversion rate. Many brands use dark web activities to generate leads with the help of influencers.

Enhancing Process Efficiencies

Digital transformation and low code process automation help in real-time collaboration between the internal and external stakeholders. It increases the speed and efficiency of marketing campaigns and enables marketers to improve lead conversions.

Key Takeaways

In a nutshell, digital transformation is changing the gears of marketing and accelerating the pace of brand optimisation through the proper usage of cutting-edge technologies. It indeed is enabling organisations to break the silos between the channels and is empowering brands to optimise end-to-end customers’ journeys.

*The author Hemant Makhija, Global Head of Marketing, Newgen Software