Alin Niță: Digitisation and online: two notions we hear extremely often lately. The trends of online marketing trends are evolving unexpectedly fast. I’m Alin Niță, your host this evening, and joining me on set are my guests: Csaba Demeter and Diana Șerban, who workin the area of content marketing. Csaba is a specialist in online marketing and together we will develop this topic.
Let’s start by saying that 52% of web traffic worldwide comes from mobile. Listen to us, because you’ll be interested in what we’re going to discuss tonight.
A paid ad on the first position on Google’s front page has a conversion rate of 7.11%. 70-78% of location-based mobile searches result in an offline purchase. What is online marketing and digital marketing all about anyway, Csaba?
Csaba Demeter: Online marketing or digital marketing is a branch of marketing in general. Online marketing uses the internet on all online platforms to promote products or services. Lately, internet consumption has exploded, including online marketing campaigns. These have been on an upward trend in some areas and have been frozen in others.
Alin Niță: How should we look at this online marketing? After all, we are buyers. As entrepreneurs we have to sell products and services. We want to adapt to the current situation. We want to sell more, we want to be ahead of the competition. We want to change our strategies a bit so that we can sell. How should we look at this idea of online marketing? At the end of the day, how can we improve our style and the way we look at the buyer or the customer so that we create the best and most appropriate strategy?
Csaba Demeter: I would start with an interesting statistic. In this period, for example, in fashion, according to a recently published study, from 10% online sales increased to 23-25%. This percentage is expected to be reached only in 2023. Basically, this means that our buying behaviour has also changed, the channels we use to inform where to buy have changed. As such, we can say that online has become, especially in this period, a absolutely essential channel for any company to promote products and services and sell as well.
Online and the marketing specialist, practically, is the one who has to make certain decisions. Why do they have to make certain decisions? Or how do they make certain decisions? On the one hand, we understand the customer’s business, and then we obviously understand the consumer and their profile and try to find the best channels or the best communication options to reach that customer. The main objective is to sell. Whether it’s information, a product or a service. Equally, marketing has to offer, propose and support value, because we don’t buy just because of the price, we also buy because of the added value of a product or service.
Alin Niță: Diana, how does a content specialist see this part of online and the events that have happened lately from the perspective of the content that a company or a client should publish on the internet so that it is a winning stake for them?
Diana Serban: In addition to what Csaba said, I would add the idea of being relevant in this period. Basically, you can’t communicate very much commercially anymore, you can’t put your products forward very much, because people are paying attention to something else. I’m going to make a little theoretical aside. One of the best-known theories of communication is the theory of selective influence, which says that a message reaches certain audiences according to their interests at the time. We know that during this period people were very concerned about job security, how they could manage their work at home along with all that meant looking after the baby at the same time, making food etc. Basically people didn’t know when they were at work and when they were at home. In this whole context, brands had to be relevant, i.e. communicate on topics that consumers were interested in at the time, and in this way they saw some campaigns in the public space outside, but also at home, by brands that started to communicate that they were helping public authorities, for example.
There have been brands that have made their factories available to manufacture disinfectants and this is a message that people are paying attention to during this period. It’s basically no longer about whether you communicate commercially or not, it’s about the ability of consumers to remember your name in that context.
Because people se your remember your name and to be relevant you have to communicate something that is of interest at this time. PwC Poland has launched a very interesting concept for brand communication in this period of the pandemic, which is called “Story doing”, which means, in English, doing what you say you want to do. And I think that in this period it is very important to say things, to write content, but also to see these things in the actions that the brand takes forward, because otherwise you risk losing credibility as a brand and end up being ignored. And that can happen very easily because once people have lost trust in you, it’s very hard to tell them that you’re actually a brand that’s looking out for their best interests and that you’re there for them during this time. I think this is an important thing that any communication campaign should start from. Are we or are we not relevant to this context with what we want to say.
Alin Niță: Speaking of marketing… let’s go into a little more detail. When we talk about an online marketing strategy, what do we think about? Starting from the clear idea that we have a customer, we have products, we have services or we want to increase our image online. It’s a starting point. What should we think about when we control a strategy and which channels should we consider as a first step to look at?
Csaba Demeter: It is very important to start from what we have. To identify what resources we have at the moment, what we want to invest in, to set clear outcome targets so that we can measure the outcome at the end or along the way and also to identify very clearly who our target audience is, because here we have seen a lot of errors or mistakes.
Ok, in marketing they say try and error and so we get to learn. But it’s also very important to profile our buyer very well. How, where and what type of information they consume. On what channels or platforms they consume their information and in what form. So, just like Diana said, having a relevant message, we need to be able to communicate with our customer where they consume information. Starting from these important premises, we can establish what the investment budget is and what the very clearly defined objectives are and also who the buyer is. This is where we identify the variant or type of online marketing we can use.
In the past, if you appeared in the Yellow Pages it was ok, everyone looked you up in their phone book, there you had your personal phone number and that was the marketing you had to do. We’re talking decades in the past. Now, marketing has to be multi-channel, which is a lot of channels, because our customer has to get information about you one way or another, whether it’s content marketing or social media or influencing or Google. We’re talking about SEO, about optimising for organic results. Or we’re talking about SEA and that’s optimization for paid marketing in Google. In all of these things you have to find that perfect combination between your investment, your gain and equally succeeding in reaching your customers, your audience.
If you want to learn more about online marketing, watch the show dedicated to this topic by clicking on the link below.
