Digital Marketing at your fingertips

Let's talk about what is digital marketing in the real world, focused in the real needs of the companies. Done by real people, like you, like me.

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The importance of marketing in times of crisis.

Is broadly known that 2020 has been a challenging year, in all aspects of life. 

Covid19 has shaken everything off, and most of the plans were thrown to the rubbish bin.

Not all of the companies can keep the marketing budget during uncertainty, because their main goal is to survive the crisis. Here is where the contingency plans and the ability to adapt business comes to action. 

Digital marketing specialists during Covid19 times, must be a customer support, brining a high quality service, where the main goal is to survive and keep the revenue loses at its minimum. 

Digital marketing acts in companies favour, using the internet as its tool. 

In prolonged isolation periods, digital marketing has became a fundamental component in the success of the business, simply because customers can’t move in a normal way.

The visibility and the validity will relie in a solid digital marketing plan, hence it will translate in the survival (and why not success) of any company. 

Some business have sent a solidarity messages to their customers “together, but apart”, “we are all in this together”.

Many business have also used social network platforms, because of their bilateral communication channels, where they can get feedbacks, and provide a better product or service. And the use of different platforms can be simply explained as diversification -their target audience are different, and as companies they need to make good use of each one of them. 

I’m not suggesting a total change of the marketing plan, but adjust it in this Corona times, in order to survive and even increase profits.

In my opinion, companies should see the crisis as an opportunity (cheesy, right?) 

Companies should invest in what is important. Do not cut the marketing budget. And use the marketing as a survival tool. 

DM has the advantage that is measurable, so it will reduce uncertainty. 

DM, will allow the company to get a better knowledge of its market and customers. 

Don’t be afraid of keep the budget, adapt the marketing plans, be smart.

Remember: 

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Psychology, neuromarketing, where is the limit?

Have you ever wondered why people buy a specific brand?

For most common people marketing has the only purpose of make consumer buy products or services. But, if that was so easy, wouldn’t most of the company be successful?

Sounds logical to combine the art of marketing with science: Psychology and the art of the human behaviour. Furthermore, the new called Neuromarketing, which uses non traditional techniques, to intent to predict in the consumer’s behaviours. 

On the side of psychology is easy to find several principles and experiments can that be used as support for marketing campaigns.

Reciprocity principle (Regan, 1970)

Compliance experiment (Freedman and Fraser) 

Kahneman’s Framing experiment (Kahneman, 1980)

Subtle priming techniques 

Loss aversion experiment (Kahneman, Ketsch, Thalers)

The Baader Minenhof Phenomenon 

Worth to check Dr. Robert Cialdini’s book: Influence: The psychology of persuasion. (Cialdini, 1984) 

On the other hand, neuromarketing looks for data, beyond the traditional marketing techniques (Plassmann et al.2015, Yoon et al. 2012), with the mere goal of finding the “Purchase button inside the human brain”, it uses fMRI, EEG,  among many others. 

The decision making process has 2 components rational and irrational (Kahneman 2011), neuromarketing tries to understand the irrational part, (emotions play an important role in the purchase process) with the goal to create marketing campaigns that are almost impossible to resist. 

Combining these two sciences, companies have a powerful, yet dangerous tool in their hands.

Are the customers really in control of their decisions? (Airley, 2019)

What happens with privacy of the market? 

How far the companies can go to take “over the control of the customers”? 

Worth to mention the “facebook emotion experiment” On 2012 Facebook (without the knowledge of the users) ran an experiment over a week to manipulate user’s emotions (Adam Kramer), finding out that emotions are contagious and users can be manipulated against their will. (k. Hill 2014, Forbes)

Where is the limit? And what problems can be related with for example the subliminal marketing? One argument is customer aren’t 100% in control of the decision making, let’s talk for example the advertising that tobacco companies were doing years back, they linked smoking habits with being “cool”. 

The Facebook experiment where it was shown that users can be manipulated. This should be a reason strong enough to admit that this kind of marketing should be regulated, it could be extremely dangerous in the wrong hands. 

There are some regulations for the industry: AANA has an advertising regulatory guide, there is also IIC/ESOMAR international code, NMSBA has also an ethical code that protects the human integrity, autonomy, privacy and security, among many others. These are organisations that they don’t practice marketing as it is, so they can be neutral when it comes to regulate the field. 

Marketing, is a constant developing field, with many benefits ahead, but marketers need to be wise and take caution of how these tools are used.

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Growth hackers: where science meets marketing!

I always have loved science, specifically biology and chemistry. Why? Both of them are exact sciences which, help me to understand the world.

How can I combine my passion with something that is fun, and makes me want to go further?. Businesses were the answer, so I decided to study a Bachelor of business with a minor in Economics. In my head all made sense.

But something was still missing, and then, I caught up for the first time with marketing.

When people think about marketing the first idea that comes up is create a need, make people buy, and so on. But let’s get serious, Dr Philip Kotler defines marketing as “the science and art of exploring, creating, and delivering value to satisfy the needs of a target market at a profit. Marketing identifies unfulfilled needs and desires. It defines, measures and quantifies the size of the identified market and the profit potential. Then you have the traditional marketing, then digital marketing came around, many complex types of marketing.

We all are aware that the market and its trends are in constant change, and businesses are in need to adapt their strategies to survive this competitive new world that we live in.

A quite new term has been used by many companies around the world. Growth hackers, specifically what is this? The term was first used by Sean Ellis and used by many startups “a combination of creative marketing, data analysis and coding with the absolute focus on growth” (R. Bohnsack, 2019, what the hack?)

So in simple terms growth hackers refers to someone “a person whose true north is growth” (Ellis, 2010).

Growth hacking is involved in all stages of the customer journey to achieve long-term sustainable growth (Ellis and Brown, 2017) Hence, this gives up a more holistic approach. And this is why growth hacking is perfect for startups, where the bullets are limited, and the team tends to be more collaborative among each other.

To understand Growth hacking in simple words, the process starts with finding the PMF, create a must-have product/service (by asking) in a market large enough to scale it, then we need to stack the odds for growth; learn as much as we can about the customers to add value delivery, translating into long term growth.

When I mentioned that growth is holistic, I meant that is collaborative, I wanted to say that the growth team is formed by people from different disciplines. Also, we need to know that testing drives growth (Twitter case) because this leads to know what it works.

So if Growth hacking is this awesome, what are the challenges that come with it?

Thanks to the enormous amount of data that business can collect, there comes the main challenge, the quality of the data recollected.

Growth hackers are rare to find.

The industry is constantly changing, trends are platforms that have a short period of time. Companies need to stay on top of it to success.

To summarise is vital to understand that is not only one idea which is going to lead to the success, is a group of ideas that needs to be processed by a team, that it will help us to find the silver bullet that will yield our success.

Correct me if I am wrong, but if companies don’t see the potential that growth hacking can bring to the business, they’re missing out a whole lot of opportunities to grow.

Ps. Worth your time to read: Hacking GrowthHow Today's Fastest-Growing Companies Drive Breakout SuccessBy: Morgan Brown, Sean Ellis

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In simple words...

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