The world is witnessing profound social and technological transformations, creating an urgent need to examine their impact on the field of marketing. This is the reason behind this article. Here, we explore the most effective methods and key strategies influencing purchasing decisions, guiding them through the transition from traditional to digital marketing and highlighting the role of technology in this shift.
From Vertical to Viral: The Evolving Landscape of Modern Marketing
With the accelerating changes in the world around us, the traditional concept of the market has transformed into something entirely different. What was once a vertical relationship—where companies were the sole source of products and innovation—has shifted to markets themselves generating ideas. Marketers must now understand that the market is open to everyone and no longer monopolized by the power of large corporations. This shift has enabled small brands to compete and grow, thanks to technology and the internet. Startups can now engage more closely with customers and even involve them in innovation. Consumers, meanwhile, have shifted from relying on big brands for product evaluation to trusting external sources like family and friends. The widespread availability of the internet has pushed marketers toward e-commerce, which now rivals traditional commerce. However, this rivalry is based on complementarity, not exclusion. Constant internet connectivity has made customers less focused and more indecisive, with their decisions increasingly influenced by others’ opinions. Positive reviews often represent endorsements, while negative feedback stems from disappointing experiences with a product or similar ones. Companies must strengthen positive endorsements for their products, which inherently rely on the presence of negative opinions. In the interconnected modern market, positive endorsements can remain dormant without negative feedback to provoke enthusiastic supporters of a product and spark engaging conversations that attract other consumers.
Connecting the Dots: Strategic Marketing in the Digital Age
Marketers’ success in reaching the largest possible number of customers often hinges on targeting the youth demographic. Young people constitute the largest portion of the population and represent the future market—a profitable segment being strategically cultivated over an extended period. Women, however, play an equally significant role, as they are considered trusted and reliable references in purchasing decisions, more so than others. The third key group in marketing is the community of "digital natives," who often serve as the most positive advocates and best promoters of brands, particularly emerging ones. The digital economy is uniquely characterized by a horizontal relationship between brands and customers. This forms a horizontal network of customer communities socially connected to the brand. Brands must seek permission and demonstrate a friendly spirit before engaging with these communities. In the digital economy, customers play a larger role in product innovation, supported by companies’ efforts to care for them through listening, responding, evaluating, and continuous follow-up. These actions are integrated within the digital marketing system, creating a strong bond between the producer and the customer. At this point, digital marketing aligns with traditional marketing; however, communication with customers becomes faster and more efficient in the digital realm.
Even marketers whose products and services do not primarily target young customers strive to reach this profitable market.
The Five Stages of Digital Marketing: From Awareness to Advocacy
Digital marketing relies on five stages of customer engagement. These stages are: increasing customer awareness of the brand, followed by enabling comparisons with other brands; highlighting aspects that make the brand more appealing; gathering relevant information about the customer and their preferences through targeted questions; transitioning to the action phase, which includes purchasing and consumption; and finally, fostering advocacy, where the customer develops lasting loyalty to the brand. To attract as many customers and advocates as possible, marketers must focus on three sources of influence.
The first is *external influence*, which comes from advertisements, marketing communications, sales staff, and customer service representatives.
The second is *internal influence*, derived from family members, friends, and reviews on social media platforms.
The third is *self-influence*, which originates from the customer themselves. To measure the success of these customer engagement and interaction processes, managers and marketers must adopt two new productivity metrics.
**The first is the *purchase conversion rate*, which gauges the company's ability to turn brand awareness into purchases.
**The second is the *advocacy conversion rate*, which measures the success in converting brand awareness into customer loyalty and advocacy. By increasing customer awareness of a brand, companies can achieve higher purchase rates and stronger advocacy, both of which ultimately lead to increased sales. Given the many opportunities offered by constant customer connectivity, businesses strive to maximize these opportunities to their fullest potential.
The Human Touch: Anthropological Approaches to Modern Marketing
The concept of the customer journey during the purchasing process relies on the ability to guide the customer from a state of unawareness about the product to an interest in making a purchase. This is achieved by identifying the key frameworks within the industry, such as mapping customer conversion rates, measuring their attraction to the brand, assessing their curiosity about engaging with it, evaluating their level of commitment, and understanding the degrees of connection and affinity.
The best way to build attraction to a brand is by leveraging the power of *human-centered marketing*. This can be accomplished by understanding human interests through *digital anthropology*, a field that explores the relationship between humans and brands.
It is applied using *social listening*, a proactive process of monitoring reactions to a specific brand, and *netnography*, an online methodology that studies human cultures and behaviors within digital communities.
To successfully influence customers, marketers must embody six distinctive and appealing human traits: a pleasing appearance, sound judgment, effective communication skills, empathy for others, a strong personality, and good ethics.
"Human-centered brands treat customers as if they are friends."
The Art of Marketing Storytelling: From Strategy to Success
Marketers should tell compelling stories about the services offered to customers. They can effectively utilize social media by following these key steps:
1. *Define objectives* within two categories: increasing sales and improving the brand.
2. *Identify the target audience.*
3. *Plan to craft a strong and relevant narrative.*
4. *Create balanced, authentic, and rich content.*
5. *Distribute the content effectively.*
6. *Amplify the content.*
7. *Evaluate the content’s success* in terms of sales and objectives.
8. *Enhance content marketing* with new ideas and designs. The customer purchasing journey is described as spiral and non-linear because customers oscillate between online purchasing through websites and traditional shopping in stores or exhibitions. Marketers guide them toward a balanced and organized shopping experience across both methods. Integrating traditional and digital marketing channels helps drive customer commitment toward purchasing. Effective omnichannel marketing requires a *strategic plan* that includes:
- Mapping out customer touchpoints and potential channels in their journey.
- Striking the right balance between market reach and simplicity in planning.
- Providing a seamless and consistent customer experience across key channels and touchpoints.
- Anticipating potential customer thoughts and scenarios.
- Enhancing channels and touchpoints by allocating sufficient financial resources and establishing an organizational structure to implement the strategic plan.
Beyond the Purchase: Sustaining Customer Relationships Through Digital Tools
Once the customer reaches the purchasing stage, it signifies their awareness of the brand's value and products. It also indicates that the marketer has completed the natural sales cycle. One of the most effective tools to ensure the continuation of a successful sales cycle is developing a mobile app, as smartphones have become the most relied-upon source of information today. To secure customer loyalty to the brand, marketers should focus on providing an error-free customer experience. This involves identifying issues that caused customer dissatisfaction with the app, designing an attractive user interface, and integrating the app with all digital elements that can enhance the customer experience, such as social media platforms. Marketers can also optimize the use of social media by following these steps:
1. *Developing software* capable of identifying customer conversations that positively impact the brand and activating those interactions.
2. *Creating social management agents* to foster customer relationships.
3. *Strengthening community engagement* by leveraging loyal followers and volunteers who can respond to negative conversations and assist others in resolving their problems.
It can be said with certainty that constant connectivity is one of the most important factors that has transformed the game in the history of marketing. Since this is a given, it can no longer be considered a new buzzword. However, it continues to reshape many aspects of marketing without showing any signs of slowing down.
Conclusion
The radical transformations accompanying technological advancements have necessitated a profound shift in marketing processes to enable companies to harness the potential of modern technology, increase their customer base, and secure customer loyalty and advocacy. This is achieved by fulfilling the three key customer goals: enjoyment, experience, and engagement. This shift signifies a transition from a traditional economy to a digital one, where studies, research, and experiments are utilized to renew the customer journey, focus on the factors influencing purchasing decisions, and strengthen the relationship between the brand and the customer. Additionally, it involves giving this relationship more human and social dimensions.