Yesterday my 4-year-old son brought me a piece of paper.

“What’s this for,” I asked.

“Can you build me a paper airplane?”

I looked at him curiously. In a house with multiple TVs, tablets, video games, computers, and screens galore – my son (from the digital age) was asking me to fold up a piece of paper. My memory – slowly but surely – started to fire on all cylinders, and I grabbed the piece of paper. My fingers began moving on their own, and fold by fold it all came back. In no time, my son was running around the house zooming his new paper airplane up high into the sky.

Having fun can be both analogue and digital; just like marketing in 2019. In fact, they both compliment each other. In my recent experiences, there has always been a distinction between “digital” marketing and “traditional” marketing. For example web content was a digital job, and producing brochures was traditional. However, to create the brochures and prep them for print you use digital software. To write content for the web, you need to polish your writing skills – which can be done with a pencil. The foundational concepts we’ve learned in the past still apply today – just in a different medium.

Here are some of the most inspiring marketing tips, strategies, and insights I’ve come across this year – which I believe will impact 2019. While leveraging new technology, many of these are age-old concepts which are essentially based on human nature.

In no particular order:

• Authenticity
• Digital maturity
• Social listening
• Direct-to-consumer (DTC) approach

Authenticity

According to a consumer report conducted by Stackla, 86% of consumers indicate that authenticity highly influences their decision to support a product or brand. In a fast-moving world where content is produced and published in abundance, an authentic voice and transparency goes a long way. Being honest and transparent with your customers will yield a return in loyalty. The infamous Payless shoes influencer prank reminded marketers of the importance of honesty.

“The dark side of the influencer industry is that, while it is standard practice to compensate influencers to attend an event or to post about a product, too few acknowledge that some form of payment has changed hands. This means that followers are often unaware of the financial incentive behind a glowing endorsement.” – Sarah Maisey, The National

Digital Maturity

The Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC) recently evaluated the digital profile of both Canadian and U.S. businesses, and assessed how digital technology adoption and their ability to implement change affected their performance.

They analyzed the results to measure the companies’ level of digital maturity, a combination of a company’s use of digital technologies in its operations (digital intensity) and its ability to implement change (digital culture). Key points:

• One in five (19%) Canadian businesses have an advanced digital profile, while more than half (57%) have a conservative profile. Companies with advanced digital maturity are:

To compete in today’s fast-moving world, Canadian SMBs need to get up to speed on digitization and technology, or risk being left behind. Fortunately there are digital agencies out there like Digitally Sound who are ready to help on both a consulting and marketing phase.

Social Listening

According to SproutSocial, social listening is the process of tracking conversations around specific topics, keywords, phrases, brands or industries, and leveraging your insights to discover opportunities or create content for those audiences. Social listening is basically knowledge gathering. From listening a company can learn more about their audience, industry, and competitors.

According to Social Media Today, “While social media monitoring tools enable you to monitor keywords and brand names on social media to catch any mentions, social listening tools usually offer more options – from being able to monitor the entire web (not just social media, but also blogs, forums, web publications, and so on), to creating complex Boolean searches that can help you catch even the most elusive mentions.”

Microsoft’s Social Engagement – part of the Dynamics package – is an extremely powerful tool. It is noted as a “listening and interaction” product that allows you to follow, collect, document, analyze, and interact with your clients to make real-world business decisions based off of data.

Direct-to-Consumer

The DTC approach in the CPG industry was a hot topic in 2018. According to Gartner, 89% of companies now compete primarily on the basis of customer experience. Customers expect brands to anticipate their needs and offer a variety of personalized offerings—even their own digital “storefront” when shopping online. The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) reports US CPG in-store retail sales are flat across all industries with only 0.5% YoY growth.

Brad Birnbaum (Forbes) suggests, “This shift in customer expectations is a danger to brands in every vertical, but it is Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) brands that face the greatest danger by far. Large manufacturers rely on big retailers like Walmart to get their products into the hands of millions of customers. Unfortunately, manufacturers have little control over the retail environment and can’t manage the brand experience at the point of sale. For most shoppers, this is no longer enough. They want a relationship with a brand that fits into their life. They want personal service and a memorable experience.”

The good news is, DTC eCommerce opens the opportunity to tap into new revenue streams and new customer data. Online stores connect you directly with the customer. Mondelez International cookie giant, Oreo, chose to mark their centenary with a holiday-focused DTC campaign, Oreo Colorfilled, by letting customers customize their Oreo packaging and send them anywhere in the world.

The experience a customer goes through to obtain an Oreo may differ over a 100 years – but in the end, an Oreo is still an Oreo. Just like the paper airplane, some things never change!

Originally posted on LinkedIN:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/marketing-2019-remembering-how-fly-paper-airplane-darren-glowacki/