Digital Marketing is Actually a "CEO Project"

Digital marketing has the advantages of high accuracy, low cost, and quantifiable results. Many companies have tried digital marketing. It is actually a "CEO project". Why do you say that? This article talks about digital marketing, I hope it will be helpful to you.

Major merchants and e-commerce platforms including JD.com, Tmall, Pinduoduo, Douyin, Kuaishou, and Xiaohongshu are all reviewing the data from June 18. Today is the first year after the epidemic. Originally, people were expecting a good economy and recovery. However, the fact is that money is harder to make than before, consumption is weak, and we have returned to the era of low-desire consumption and low-price strategies. This year on June 18, almost all platforms have made low prices their main feature, and instead of playing the deposit and pre-sale game, they directly offer low discounts, competing with each other in their respective fields.

The B2C traffic dividend has disappeared, and products have returned to cost-effective and reliable routes. It is almost understandable to serve consumers steadily. For B2C, any surprising marketing methods are no longer so important and unsustainable. Returning to the origin and focusing on brand, products and services are the foundation. It is said that Jack Ma gave a talk within Alibaba and mainly talked about three things: return to Taobao, return to users, and return to the Internet. In the field of B2B marketing, the good times have just begun. If you want to find the dividends of the marketing industry, I think you should invest in B2B business.

Many companies have tried some methods and approaches of digital marketing in the past few years of the epidemic, such as cost-effective content marketing and search engine placement. However, these single-point breakthrough marketing methods are actually difficult to really change people’s perception of digital marketing, and it is difficult to unleash its true value. Ultimately, some digital projects were aborted, and coupled with budget cuts and other reasons, they eventually became "not so important" projects and were abandoned by management.

Recently, I talked with CMOs in the industry and found that there are several common problems that need to be solved:

1. How to build a digital marketing system?
2. What is the use of data?
3. What should I do if departments other than the marketing department do not understand or accept digital marketing?

1. How to build a digital marketing system?

Digital marketing must be a systematic project, a CEO project. If the CEO does not pay attention to it, the project will be difficult to advance. Don't dream of changing other departments' expectations of digital marketing by yourself. The first thing is to win the support of senior managers. Support can be divided into spiritual support (verbal encouragement, recognition of the value of you and your team to the business) and material support (giving money and resources).

I attended a B2B CMO gathering a few days ago, and everyone generally talked about how the sense of meaning and value in work is what they want to pursue throughout their lives. I agree that no matter what age you are, pursuing the meaning of work, delivering value to others and gaining recognition are the internal driving forces that keep you passionate about marketing.

How to build a digital marketing system? First of all, the CEO must understand that digital marketing is a systematic project, which requires a thorough transformation from the strategic, process, application, and organizational levels. Secondly, it requires human and material resources. Single-point breakthroughs are possible, but they have no substantial effect and are difficult to unleash their maximum value.

2. What is the use of data?

I think many CEOs and CMOs have developed a data-driven marketing mindset in recent years, using data to drive decision-making. Whether it is PR news dissemination, content marketing, or offline activities, they are trying to collect user data and overall activity data, but they still lack knowledge and relevant field knowledge on how to use specific data. Internet platforms and touchpoints generate massive amounts of data, but the quality of the data is uneven, which is one of the top challenges for many corporate marketing departments.

From now on, the CMO's top priority should be to clean up the data in the database, set data collection goals and methods, connect the data scattered across different tools and touchpoints, review the existing data processing capabilities, build a data team, find people and budgets, and learn to use this data to drive business decisions.

3. What should we do if departments other than the marketing department do not understand or accept digital marketing?

This is a very normal thing. People don’t know what digital marketing is, what it means to them, and how it is relevant to them. It is normal for them not to understand or recognize it.

You can invite external lecturers with real practical experience to talk about the ideas, methods, opportunities and challenges of digital marketing in a fair and objective manner, and give some case studies on how others built a digital marketing system from 0 to 1, what the real value is to the business department, and how to use data to drive decision-making. Sharing of these very new ideas will not only broaden everyone's horizons, but also be very helpful in changing the cognition of other business departments, deepening their understanding of digital marketing and showing recognition and even support in their work.

Just as creativity serves the brand, B2B marketing serves sales. No matter how the marketing department wants to improve its status and be seen, it must first deliver value to sales. In B2B business, the sales conversion cycle is long, and customers need to discuss with the sales team and the brand's channel partners repeatedly before a project can be established and the transaction completed. During the entire process, sales need to put in a lot of effort. This is the back-end link of the conversion, and what the marketing department can do is to release value in the front-end link and bring core high-value potential customers to sales.

In the lead generation stage, potential customer leads can be generated through digital marketing methods such as official website traffic, search engine optimization, advertising, live broadcast events, etc. At the same time, the user attributes and behaviors are determined, and sales are involved in the planning stage of marketing activities. Through scientific, systematic and quantifiable methods, customers can be identified as high-value or low-value, and whether the transaction intention is high or low. Therefore, the marketing department can fully give the sales department some suggestions at the strategic and implementation levels to deliver high-quality leads.

At the same time, in this process, through the refined operation of private domains, user grouping and marketing automation, we can continuously incubate and influence potential customers with low intentions or dormant customers who have no demand at the moment, thus shortening the conversion cycle of potential customers. Practice has proved that these digital marketing methods are extremely effective, can achieve twice the result with half the effort, and have a very high return on investment.

For example, the average cost per MQL Marketing qualified leads (CCA) for B2B users with high unit price and low frequency of purchase is RMB 1,000. Assuming an average conversion rate of 1% from MQL to actual transaction, the actual CCA cost is 1000*100=100,000. Assuming that this customer purchases 1 million products from the brand in a year and is already a major customer, the ROI is 1 million/100,000=10.

By judging the potential of customers and choosing to carry out refined private domain operations, the marketing department successfully awakened a customer from 100 customers. As a result, he also purchased 1 million yuan from the brand. All the costs here are human operating costs and content development costs. Assuming it is around 10,000 yuan, then the ROI is 1 million/10,000=100.

The ROI of the second method is extremely high, ten times that of the first one, provided that the brand focuses on building its own first-party database, pays attention to the accumulation of user data, and can fully engage in sales at the beginning of operational strategy formulation, formulate correct strategies and models to prejudge and predict user behavior in advance. The effort lies in details, daily accumulation, and teamwork.

Author: Zhu Jingyu

Source: WeChat official account "Jade Digital Marketing (ID: Jade_Digital)"