Turning trends into transactions

In the past when we talked about marketing and communications, it seems like it was primarily focused on brand building, awareness and engagement. But the biggest problem marketers faced in this mindset was how to turn marketing dollars into real sales conversions?

In the digital world, 2016 will be all about how to keep up with trends to drive more higher quality leads and finally convert to sales.

To achieve that, marketers need to embrace the customer experience model. Marketing departments are moving from a traditional advertising and non-interactive communication toward becoming a natural part of the sales cycle and an extension of customer service.

Marketers, using integrated tools, can engage with customers online, track the buyer’s journey, measure sentiment and loyalty, and match behavior with outreach tailored to meet their audience’s needs and interests. But for customers already bombarded with information, a great customer experience is becoming baseline.

The year 2016 will see brand ambassadors given a higher priority, more effective customer engagement and tighter collaboration with sales and support to directly affect conversion rates.

Marketers will recognise social media as a channel but not a strategy. Social media isn’t marketing and it doesn’t work as a “strategy” on its own — something that seems to have finally sunk into the collective marketing consciousness.

As the working relationship between marketers and digital agencies becomes more seamless and agile, agencies need to help clients transform their business into digital, instead of just providing marketing ideas. To achieve long-term success, every business must become digitally enabled.

In-depth of understanding of the marketer’s business and challenges are required to make agencies become more results-focused, that’s why business consulting giants are aggressively building up their own digital services to provide results-oriented end-to-end digital transformation capabilities, complete integration of left and right brain offerings. Agency with only creative capabilities will not be able to sustain themselves in the long term.

Moski Mok is regional business director, Asia Pacific at PacificLink iMedia Group.