The Internet may have revolutionised marketing over the last decade and opened up myriad new opportunities for brands to get their message in front of their target audience.
But while many advertisers have certainly capitalised on this trend, there is still often a disconnect between the marketing itself and the processes in place to take those people who engage with the advertiser from a prospect to a converted customer.
You might think that I am referring to optimising processes at the margins, like complex integrations between lead management systems and CRM systems, for example, but actually there are some very basic things that often get overlooked.
Most of us probably zone out when we see the next article about mobile taking over the world and there is often a healthy sprinkling of hyperbole in many of those articles, but one thing that is undeniable is that people are more and more attached to their phones.
This doesn’t just mean advertisers should only focus on marketing to people on their mobile. They need to also think about mobile as the response mechanism for a marketing campaign and what this means means for their business.
Put simply, people lead increasingly busy lives and their mobile enables them to complete tasks on the move that they would previously have done from the comfort of their own homes. It also means that people’s expectations of advertisers have changed.
Historically, consumers had very little power to shape how a brand would engage with them, but in the age of social and mobile consumers are now demanding that advertisers fit around their lives.
The automotive industry is a great example of where there can be a juxtaposition between the product marketing and the delivery of the product/service. Car brands selling expensive shiny new vehicles packed with cutting edge technology are still often let down by archaic and anachronistic processes.
According to a recent study by Iovox, 1pm to 2pm is the busiest time of the day for consumers enquiring about purchasing a car and almost 20% of all calls are outside of office hours. I can guarantee you that most car dealerships are probably understaffed at these times as their sales people also go on their lunch break or aren’t rota’d to stay much beyond usual office closing hours.
In the private seller market, 18% of calls are not answered on weekends so we can assume that the experience is probably comparable in the dealership world, especially when 30% of calls for car purchases are on the weekends. With the average value of a new car in the tens of thousands of pounds, that could be millions of pounds of lost revenue across the UK each day.
If you are an advertiser that is going to spend hundreds of thousands of pounds on trying to reach your target audience, getting them to interact with you is just the start.
Understanding how consumers want to interact with your brand is just as important and could ultimately make the difference between success and failure for your marketing efforts.
Justin Rees is founder of Talking Customers