Businesses are allocating a bigger share of their marketing budgets for digital marketing plans. Online marketing initiatives are more flexible and they have better capability to reach the target audience. They add value to the total marketing plan by making it more flexible and controlled. An array of Digital marketing services available in the market provides a level playing field for small businesses to compete with big players, without spending a fortune.
One major challenge in the Digital world is that successful strategies will be adopted quickly by competing digital marketing companies. So, businesses need to be creative in their strategies and committed to a continual improvement process.
The main pillar of today’s digital marketing strategy is content marketing. We operate in the attention economy and huge amounts of new content are created on a daily basis. So, it is of utmost importance to manage and make use of your content efficiently. Drupal is a proven Content management system that can help your business to be more flexible and effective in implementing digital marketing strategies.
According to Dr. Dave Chaffey, author of ‘Digital Marketing: Strategy, Implementation, and Practice’, there are 6 marketing trends that are going to impact the digital marketing strategies of today’s businesses. Let us see how Drupal is well-positioned to help your business ride the tide.
Lifecycle marketing
The traditional sales process has undergone significant changes with the prominence of digitalization and the availability of multiple channels. But, the customer journey still encompasses stages of becoming aware, developing interest, comparing and analyzing, purchasing and usage.
Multiple channels will be involved in this process.
For Eg, a customer might become aware of a gadget through an online Ad, might check the product out in a kiosk, clear doubts with a chatbot on the website, and order using a smartphone. The company has to ensure that all the engagements with the customer at different stages form a coherent and smooth flow, designed to delight.
To create a consistent experience across the customer journey, we need a platform that can facilitate frictionless communication among various touchpoints. The API-first architecture of Drupal 8, also known as headless or decoupled architecture, allows it to be used as a central web service and interact with a variety of applications to exchange various types of data.
Conversational marketing
Businesses have been doing market research and gathering of customer data for long. Until now, factual information like demographic, age, income, spending, etc. constituted the major chunk of customer data. Still, Marketers did not know much about the motives of the customer or the mental factors affecting his decision making or purchase process. With the introduction of AI, companies are now able to have one on one conversion with customers via smart speakers like Alexa and Echo or through the various web or mobile applications like chatbots. It helps in understanding customer preferences and how marketers can fine-tune their offerings to match their expectations.
Drupal’s developer-friendly architecture, along with the availability of excellent Drupal programmers from one of the largest open source communities, ensures it can be integrated with many modern libraries like Google Assistant or IBM Watson to facilitate conversational interaction.
Insights-driven marketing
We have entered an Era of Data-driven marketing and every element of customer data is captured and analyzed to derive insights to improve the business process. Big Data makes it possible to process huge amounts of Data, to dig deep, and unravel patterns and trends about consumer behavior. Even the analytical tools have evolved over time and can help us better in connecting the dots.
Acquia, an enterprise open DXP company provides a suite of products including Acquia Profile manager, Acquia Lift and the newly added open CDP, Mautic. These solutions, along with other enterprise products like Google Analytics, Google tag manager, Datalab, etc. help to utilize the power of Data and enable insights-driven marketing to keep up with today's market challenges.
Marketing technology
One of the fastest developing subdomains of Marketing vertical is Martech. Today’s marketer is equipped with an array of tools and technologies for competing in the digital battlefield. Automation is being widely used to free human resources from mundane and repetitive tasks. Tools and technologies are deployed to help in - Information exchanges, Promotion campaigns, email marketing, Search Engine Optimization, User Interface, e-commerce, Social media integration, and numerous other tasks.
Drupal websites are built with interoperability as a key attribute and several marketing platforms that have dedicated Drupal modules can be easily plugged in. So, marketers can take advantage of multiple platforms simultaneously - for eg, Salesforce or Zoho for CRM, Mailchimp for email campaigns, Hubspot or Marketo for Automation.
Consumer privacy
Customers are generally wary of sharing personal information, and the failure of Tech giants like Facebook to meet the expectations regarding security has made it worse. Today, there are growing concerns about the use of personal data, and governments across the globe are responding to this by formulating new regulations like the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) of the European Union or the latest CCPA (California Consumer Protection Act). Companies like British Airways and Marriott were issued millions of pounds of fine under GDPR for their inability to protect customer data.
Drupal has understood the concerns and security goals of enterprises and is secure by design. Drupal has a whole security team and a suite of security modules like Encrypt, Key, Field Encryption to protect your system from breaches. Setting up Encryption in Drupal is very easy and thus it helps in protecting small and medium businesses that are normally considered easier targets for attack.
Digital transformation and marketing transformation
Digital Transformation is the process of restructuring the existing business model to make it more relevant and competitive in the disruption economy. Businesses are adopting emerging technologies and trends like Cloud, AI, Big data, etc. Technology is helping companies for better collaboration among departments, proper monitoring of resource allocation, measuring the effectiveness of projects and initiatives, and faster change management
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The modular nature of Drupal makes it possible to add only the relevant modules as and when required. It helps in optimizing the functionalities while keeping the system as lean as possible. The easy content creation, coupled with the multilingual capability to drive localization strategy, along with the ability to blend with other technologies make Drupal the ideal vehicle for your Digital Transformation initiatives.
To sum it up, Digital Marketing shifted from being a separate team for enhancing reach to a collaborative effort among departments to create better experiences for users. Drupal is a preferred platform for Digital marketers because its robust system can scale up according to the increased needs of the market. At the same time, centralized administrative control of the entire system and advanced security features ensure peace of mind.
Drupal is one of the best open platforms to help marketers to perfectly match the market requirements with business solutions. Get in touch with us to learn more about how Drupal can help your marketing strategies.
