Digital marketing: goodbye 24/7, hello 60/60/24/7

For Woolworths, a retailer with a vast product range, obtaining access to partnerships in products (and services) in which it is not represented, and monetising that access is the biggest drawcard to joining the digital age. It not only generates consumer insight, but it allows an expanded capacity to capture measurable data almost everywhere a consumer goes. If smartly designed, in return for data on their behaviour, an opt-in conversation will allow Woolworths to offer customers real value for both their money and their time.

Woolworths can achieve this through cookies (tracking files that follow details about web surfing including sites visited and topics searched), or through directly offering the consumer something of value in exchange for hard information about the consumer’s product preferences. For example, Borders bookstores rewards readers who sign up to their electronic newsletter, or answer surveys with frequent discount shopping vouchers.

To see history in the making, compare two styles of advertising currently being practiced.

First, there is your Sunday morning newspaper, groaning under the weight of colour catalogues from retailers who promote their wares to anyone who happens to have thumbed through the paper, regardless of whether they actually need the product or not.

As an advertising medium, newspapers are chosen for the estimated impressions of a particular demographic; such as the number of 18 to 39-year-old professionally employed women, that it claims to deliver to the advertiser. And, the number of impressions made by the insert is reflected in a cost-per-thousand impressions price tag.

Second, and markedly different, is the modern online hotel survey that targets a real person, who recently stayed at the hotel, and whose direct experience (good or bad) will determine whether a future stay is likely. The hotel can bypass the (not very useful) cost-per-thousand model and can instead satisfy its hunger for accountability. It achieves this by paying its marketers based on measures directly related to actual consumer behaviour.

In 2007, when PepsiCo launched a digital campaign in the United States in support of Aquafina Alive, a vitamin enhanced water, it focused its advertising on about 4,000 websites that the company knew delivered a heavy concentration of consumers interested in what is known as “healthy lifestyles”. This campaign gravitating towards interests, rather than demographics resulted in a 300 per cent improvement in click throughs.

Determining the  relationship building value of different options (touchpoints) is the first step to understanding the customer’s behaviour. Detailed analysis involves understanding where, and when, consumers encounter a corporation’s message and, which platforms (television, mobile phone, or PDA), what media (TV shows, blogs, online videos or social networks), and what brands are preferred?

Vollmer alludes to the fact that different groups may indeed choose different touchpoints, even if they prefer the same brand. For example, as a 42-year-old who has used personal computers for as long as I can remember, and has recently decided to proudly junk my clunky PC in favour of the new Apple iMac, I may prefer a visit to David Jones (the closest Apple reseller to me) as my touchpoint, as I am just getting to know the brand. On the other hand, brand evangelists, like my 30-year-old running partner, may choose an online forum. After all, she has been using Apple since she was in school, and what she has forgotten about computers, is more than most of us will ever learn.

This knowledge enables marketers to develop data warehouses and determine whether advertising should be entertaining or informational in nature.

In 2006, US banking giant, JP Morgan Chase, used a touchpoint based approach when it chose Facebook, to launch a new Mastercard named +1 to university students. According to Chase’s Ms Sangeeta Prasad, “Facebook was chosen given its strong credibility in the student world”. JP Morgan Chase felt that students do not believe that credit card issuers really meet their needs, and the bank wanted to convince students otherwise. The Facebook alliance attracted not only a whopping 34,000 members in a year, but as the Facebook group was restricted to university students, it attracted 34,000 relevant members.

This represents a significant paradigm shift in retail thinking, one where ad executives and marketers will no longer lord over consumers.

The real challenge in the world of new media is to recognise customers across the various channels, and to know what you have already told them and sold them. The vendor needs to deliver, in real time, the most relevant message, to ensure the value of each dollar spent on that communication is maximised.

When marketers form a relevant and never-ending dialogue between the retailer and consumer, so that the probability of a sale increases at each point,  that is when success in digital marketing will come.