Ubiquity regularly stays in touch with its customer base, keeping aware of their needs and concerns. As such we recently commissioned an independent research firm to survey corporate clients and agencies about their perspective on online marketing.
Research participants were asked their thoughts on campaigns which include multi-media elements such as websites, TXT and email marketing. The campaigns would include sophisticated elements such as customisation for each person’s interactions, integration with offline direct marketing and may also contribute to building a customer database.
The research indicated many corporate clients see online marketing as a mandatory part of their marketing mix. One research participant says:
This is where the future of what we do is going – it’s not about single touch points anymore – it’s about surrounding audiences to opt-in in the appropriate manner.
As regular communication to customers is becoming more important, online and multi-channel marketing is seen as an effective way to customise contact and build relationships with customers using the channels they select. “It’s about finding the communication channel that is most suitable – you have a better chance of connecting with customers that way”, said one respondent.
There are some concerns about the execution of any large-scale multimedia campaign. Factors such as large-scale data processing, database management and the ever-present spam issue affect corporate clients’ decisions to proceed with online marketing campaigns. “We’d probably need a pilot to test and demonstrate success” was a common response.
Most organisations lack the internal resources to create a multi-channel campaign, and would consider outsourcing the technical development.
“Any supplier would need to be creative in service design – not just off the shelf”
“a high focus on quality is paramount”, and “we’re looking for someone who understands our business needs” are some of the common responses from participants.
Most companies feel the benefits of a multi-channel approach outweigh the risks provided they find a trusted supplier of online marketing technologies. “We don’t have enough of these programmes running – we need to engage digital interaction specialists” comments one agency client.
As long as a supplier cares about and understands their business, has proven capability in specialist areas like database management and can prove reliability and security of their systems, most corporate clients are happy to outsource direct marketing, email marketing, TXT and websites.
Suppliers who “are experienced market experts”, “add value” and are “proactive around solutions” are preferred.
All of the participants could see the benefits of multi-channel marketing over a traditional mass media approach. And most would outsource the technical aspects, particularly looking for a supplier they could work with in a partnership model, who could provide a broad range of functionality.
The ability to acquire new customers, and track and measure return on investment, as well as manage costs effectively make new media hard to resist. The comments “this is the way campaigns are moving” and “we all should be doing multimedia”, summarise the general feeling amongst corporate clients and agencies to a multi-channel approach.
