Transitioning from Traditional to Digital

 The ripple effects of the pandemic will reverberate for some time. Companies are increasingly forced to look at broader market plays instead of continuing with the status quo.  With massive shifts in marketing channels due to COVID travel restrictions, we saw a shift from traditional engagements to digital ones (e.g. conferences to digital events) along with an acceleration of broader digital marketing investments. While it is apparent to most that digital marketing has in many ways overtaken traditional marketing, it is worth examining their relative strengths and weaknesses in greater detail.

The most obvious example of acceleration of digitization is the speed at which most companies were forced to shift away from traditional face-to-face sales models. Combine these kinds of trends with the massive shifts in various global markets, impacts on industries, and the massive acceleration of digital transformation efforts, digitization of marketing becomes more important than ever. Ensuring that your coverage model adjusts to these differences is critical to ensure revenue capture going forward. Moreover, in the increasingly competitive market, customer expectations have changed accordingly, which requires marketing teams to re-align their strategies accordingly. With traditional marketing, businesses have very little control over the audience that views the ad, however with digital marketing, one can identify and target a highly niche audience most likely to be their customers. Moreover, digital marketing is a step towards levelling the playing field between big brands and small businesses, as the relative quality and strategy of digital marketing initiatives can help small businesses overtake bigger brands through key words, high quality content, influencer marketing, and so on.

However, it’s important to note that traditional marketing arguably has more of a personal touch than digital marketing. For many, traditional marketing feels more personal, tangible, as it lends a ‘human touch’ to marketing initiatives that digital marketing cannot always compete with. Thus, while digital event engagement increased initially, with these digital events now replacing face-to-face engagements as opposed to augmenting them, the challenge for B2B marketers going forward is to find ways to humanize digital experiences —more than just a talking head on a screen— more actively. The companies that can best bring back that “human” element to their digital marketing will find the most success in driving customer relationships moving forward. Engagement Marketing has become an important aspect, which aims to form meaningful interactions with the target audience, humanizing the digital experience for many customers.  Sales and marketing leaders need to re-balance their resource mix, re-skill their sales teams, and decide who fits where in the customer journey based on expertise and product knowledge.

Key Focus Areas of MarCon 2021

• The digitalization as a global trend and growth factor of the modern economy
• Digitalization as a trend
• “Humanize” Digital Experience in an almost completely digital world
• Rethink (or fix) how to utilize analytics and measurement to drive decision -making
• Re-aligning marketing strategies to match with current customer expectations
• Bringing to light the latest tools and trends in marketing
• Highlighting how technology goes hand in hand with marketing these days