Meer dan 90 procent van de Amerikaanse marketeers wil meer budget in digitale media steken, maar loopt daarbij tegen een aantal barrieres. Dat blijkt uit het rapport Marketing & Media Ecosystem 2010 (pdf), een gezamenlijk onderzoek van IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau), ANA (Association of National Advertisers), AAAA (American Association of Advertising Agencies) en management consulting bureau Booz Allen Hamilton.
Samen met de toenemende fragmentatie en personalisatie van media, heeft digitalisering van de media er toe geleid dat de manier waarop consumenten kunnen worden bereikt is veranderd. Terwijl alle ondervraagde marketingmanagers zich hiervan bewust zijn, noemt slechts 24 procent de eigen organisatie digitaal vaardig. Belangrijkste barrieres die worden genoemd zijn ongeschikte metrics (62%), onvoldoende steun vanuit organisatie (51%) en gebrek aan kennis over nieuwe media (59%). In grote lijnen komen deze conclusies overeen met de eerder gepubliceerde bevindingen uit het McKinsey-onderzoek How companies are marketing online (pdf).
Het onderzoeksrapport was een van de gespreksonderwerpen van de ANA Annual Conference in Phoenix, Arizona afgelopen week. Enkele succesfactoren die werden genoemd door de ondervraagde marketeers:
- Make your consumer an advocate: Shift marketing objectives from sending a message to facilitating conversations with and between consumers. Understand user-generated content and how consumers use your brand. Vest your brand with meaning. Be authentic.
- Elevate media and communications: Develop an internal 'integrator' position (e.g., communications planner). Appoint senior media leadership, incorporate media early in the strategic planning process, and integrate media with marketing.
- Expand consumer insights capabilities: Leverage one-to-one consumer interactions (including ethnography) and digital channels that provide real-time behaviors and patterns. Understand how consumers use media for entertainment, community and information. Lean on partners to provide additional data and insight. Embed them across the organization.
- Apply rigor: refine and iterate your marketing mix: Build partnerships with digital agencies, media agencies and media companies to track ad placement, versioning and effectiveness. Digital media brings a new level of transparency and efficiency to the optimization of the marketing mix.
- Bring digital out of the back room: Digital and interactive are no longer 'niche' capabilities. They are part of the requisite skill set for all marketers. Recruit and train accordingly.
- Don't stop at technology: Align the organization, hire the right talent, and initiate a progressive culture. Identify and address organizational barriers.
- Learn globally: Develop structures to share best practices in new media. Watch technology patterns, social trends and consumer technology adoption rates in leading geographies.
- Institutionalize experimentation and media innovation: Encourage experimentation and support ideas for incremental improvement. Formalize experimental spend efforts. At the very least, have a default budget framework such as allocating ~5% into experimental media.
- Establish an increasing number of marketer, media and technology partnerships. Staff accordingly. Place bets across the media and technology landscape.
- Manage complexity via partnerships: Know the difference between those capabilities to keep in-house and those better managed by external partners. Know when an idea is scaleable, or a competitive advantage, and should be resourced internally.
- Question marketing models: Identify clear brand objectives, evaluate multi-channel (e.g., relationships, event, in-store, email) marketing options to meet objectives, and develop business cases.
