On our last day in Gothenburg, we visited Zooma. It is a digital marketing agency that is working mainly in B2B with global companies. Anders Bjorklund, who is the CEO of the company gave us an interesting presentation on the issues in the digital marketing area. Currently, using digital platforms has been hot but companies are not necessarily getting the most advantages out of it. In fact, almost all of the firms established before 1994 have been struggling to be “onlinified” or digitalized. Companies need to understand their customers better and adapt to changes in order to be successful in current digital marketing.
How people use the internet is rapidly changing nowadays which makes it difficult for companies to reach customers through their digital marketing strategies. People consider main digital trends to be things such as machine learning, chatbot, artificial intelligence, augmented reality, virtual reality, and IoT. In fact, the main digital trends can be described as following three things; “I know who you are”, “I know what you’re looking for”, and “I know what you want to do next”. Amazon can be an example of a company to follow these trends, but companies which understand these trends and incorporate them into their business is very limited.
Another problem is that companies misunderstand how they behave in marketing. Millions of companies say they are focusing on the customer centricity, but what kind of words do we see the most often on their websites? There are a lot of “we”, “our”, and “us”. Can you really say they are truly customer centered? Also, people tend to think that companies are “senders” and customers are “receivers”. However, this structure should be obsolete in the current days when customers can actively interact with companies. Lastly, companies are focusing on unique selling points rather than unique buying points. You should consider if people would be interested in buying a product with just high technology or with added values to the customers.
People have changed, and companies have to adapt to new changes rapidly. It has never been easier to reach and interact with people with the development of digital platforms, but at the same time, we can also say that it has never been difficult to do so. People have no time and their attention span is decreasing to 2-8 seconds. That means people instantly judge what they are interested or not by seeing advertisements. Also, the profile of people is diverse and complex. With rapid developments in technology, more and more people become digital natives which makes the differences in generations distinct. To reach people, you need to understand how their customers differ and what their habits are. Hence, you need to be more relevant to the reality to reach people.
Overall, the visit at Zooma helped me realize what problem digital marketing is dealing with. The biggest takeaway from this visit was that customers are not treated in the way they want to be treated by companies. It is important that companies realize this and focus on providing service tailored to its customers with simplicity.
