Digital Marketing in practice (Part 1)

Several times you hear these buzzwords: digital transformation, digital marketing, etc.., but what really is that from a technology point of view?

I will try to give you my point of view (mainly looking at architectures and components involved) but I hope this can be useful to a large audience.

In order to understand the digital marketing ecosystem imagine that we are the founder of one of the an innovative company that is launching a new incredible mini robot that is mainly focused for kids , let’s call our product TheToy:

Now that we have a product to sell we need to prepare the following:

1. An e-commerce web site to sell this product
2. A payment provider that help us to accept any credit card/bitcoin/bank transfer/paypal/etc..
3. A delivery/supply chain provider that help us to bring the goods to our customers
4. Speaking of customers we need a CRM system with integrated call center
5. ……

This of course it’s just an over simplified view of the needs of an e-commerce initiative , but it’s already interesting to speak of this because in this way we can for example evaluate the following options:

• Our IT related “stuff” (e-commerce, crm,etc..) needs servers, where do I buy, host and maintain these servers?
• Do I build from scratch ,hiring some developers, the e-commerce website, the payment provider, the CRM,etc..?

Since our focus , should be, to create a fantastic product and having customers happy and not be an IT company we can do , for example, the following choices :

A) Pick a cloud provider that gives us all necessary “virtual hardware” and bandwidth, pick an e-commerce software package, install/configure a huge amount of stuff and hopefully end up in something (again high level) like this :

B) Pick a software as service e-commerce provider that already has all of this in place and where we have just to upload our product catalog and start our e-commerce site immediately:

Now choice is not simple as it seems because every time we pick a “the shortest route”, there is a price to pay , not only in terms of pricing of the solution, but also in terms of functionalities that we would like later to have.

As we said there are other pieces of the puzzle like our CRM and not only we have to pick the CRM that best serves our needs and budget but that also it has to be “somehow integrated” with our e-commerce site…

Before we dig also in this , let’s imagine for a moment that , magically, our e-commerce and CRM and Delivery/Supply Chain/etc.. are already in place and we are selling/delivering our products successfully , what if we have a new product/offer to sell and we want to notify our customers that we have a new product?

This process of contacting customers in order to sell/advertise a new product/offer is called “marketing campaign” and of course we need a tool for that 🙂 : we need a marketing campaign automation tool that help us to create targeted campaigns (we want to reach the right consumer for the right product….) and deliver those messages in multiple ways :

• emails
• sms
• push notifications if we have also an e-commerce app
• social accounts/pages (btw we need to setup also those accounts!)
• personalized pages and messages on the e-commerce website advertising the new product only to the “right customers”
• personalized CRM responses (when the target customers calls only to these customers the crm agent has to propose the new offer/product)
• etc…

So now the things became to be a bit more complicated, we need in fact an e-commerce site integrated with CRM both integrated with a marketing campaign automation tool .

In order to have even more fun let’s also consider the following : we said that we want to produce “targeted campaigns” , this means that we want to leverage all our data on customers to target only the “right” ones ….

What is the data that we can leverage?

Some ideas:

• The weblogs of the e-commerce site (google analytics logs for example)
• The orders of the e-commerce site
• The calls/cases of the CRM
• The responses/interactions with our previous campaigns
• The interactions on our social channels
• etc…

This , even at small scale of our little e-commerce initiative , seems like a little data warehouse project and if we plan to find the right customers for the right offer , this is also a data science project involving machine learning…..

So we need an e-commerce site integrated with CRM integrated with a marketing campaign automation tool integrated with a big data engine with machine learning capabilities .

In the part 2 we will start to look also to another dimension of the digital marketing landscape: the unknown customers that are waiting to purchase our product but they don’t know that the product exists and we don’t how to reach them 🙂