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Four Lessons from McKinsey on Digital Marketing and the Opportunities They Present

I just read a great article in McKinsey Quarterly called "Four ways to get more value from digital marketing" by David Edelman, a partner in their Marketing and Sales Practice in Boston.
Here is a summary of the four lessons with a couple comments of my own thrown in:
1. Orchestrate an integrated consumer experience.
Coordinate activities to engage the consumer throughout an increasingly digital purchase journey. Some examples: TV commercials should offer keywords that can be used later for online searches, links should go to specific places to learn about and buy products, retailers should use the same images and rich descriptions as the manufacturer, shifting of budgets from mass media spending to areas that influence a consumer's evaluation process (presence in stores and online, search engine positioning, content for retailer's web sites, and cultivating recommendations online influencers like bloggers).
2. Inspire customers to help you stretch your marketing budget
Harness interest in brands by syndicating content that empowers the consumer to build his or her own marketing identity and, in the process, to serve as a brand ambassador. Traditional marketing budgets focus heavily on paid placements of ads and less so on content creation. Online marketing flips this model on its head. Instead, marketers can focus primarily on content creation and less on paid placements. With all of this content, brand loyalists can modify and re-package your content in creative ways to spread your message and increase brand awareness.
A recent example of this that I came across was Digg Ads. Content created and provided by advertisers appears on the Digg site like any other media content and can be "dugg" or "buried" by users. Apparently users of the site responded quite well to the model.
3. Adopt a publisher’s discipline to curb costs
Recognize the need to think like a large-scale multimedia publisher as they manage a staggering increase in the content they create to support products, segments, channels, and promotions. As discussed in the last section, much of the marketer's role shifts from placing ads to generating content that can easily syndicated. Most organizations are not at all organized for this nor have the in-house discipline and systems to manage it. Organizations need to have an increased focus on content management by coordinating the creation, editing, and deployment of content.
4. Use intelligence wisely to drive performance
Strategically plot how to gather and use the plethora of digital data now available. There is a tremendous amount of data becoming available to marketers on what customers are seeing, doing, and saying. Marketers can both actively probe for this data or can passively track the results. Either way, there are major strategic and organizational implications for this amount of data - basically, are they prepared to do anything with this data?
When I was up in Boulder this past summer for TechStars, we stopped by to meet with one of Flywheel's portfolio companies called Filtrbox. The company does real-time social media monitoring. Marketers can monitor keywords related to their brands and products in real-time from social media sources (blogs, Twitter, etc.) to see what people are saying about them. I've been using the service for quite a while to monitor what's being said about the Duke Start-Up Challenge and about entrepreneurship in the broader Duke community. I was amazed on a daily basis to see how far the conversation about those topics was spreading online - and equally amazed at how I had no chance of following that conversation without a tool like Filtrbox. The company has since been acquired by Jive Software, a company trying to help businesses become more "social" in their internal and external interactions.
But once you have this data, are you organized appropriately to take action on it? You need a cross-functional response to most customer insights. It takes some re-organization.
Implications & Opportunities
Some implications that come to mind based on the above lessons:
  • Enabling content syndication could be equally lucrative as ad placement - Banner and video ads might be good for brand awareness and initial stages of consumer choice, but not necessarily for the remaining stages where deeper content would be relevant to influence consumer trial, purchase, and recommendation. Marketers will be looking for ways to syndicate their content across the web (and will be willing to pay for that syndication in lieu of traditional ads). Web properties will need to enable this type of syndication ... and will need to come up with a way to monetize it as well.
  • Content management systems that centralize assets to support syndication will be important - Marketers will need systems that easily allow all brand supporters (retailers, customers, etc.) to leverage common, consistent assets (images, wording, reports). It's unclear whether current CMS solutions provide this adequately or not. It also raises issue around tracking compliance to those assets (i.e. are retailers using them?, are customers changing the assets for the better or worse?, can those modified assets be brought back into the CMS to be syndicated again?). There will be lots of problems to solve here.
  • Expect more intelligence and workflow solutions to manage taking action on customer insights - I'd expect to see more companies like CoTweet to pop up, followed by consolidation into more holistic solutions. Email marketing companies might be best positioned to step into this market actually as they already have relationships and usage established with Fortune 100 marketers. No surprise that CoTweet was acquired by ExactTarget, an email marketing solution. [UPDATE: May 24, 2010] Another deal combining email marketing and social networking sites, Constant Contact acquired NutshellMail.
Digital marketing will certainly be bringing lots of changes to businesses. Let me know your thoughts!
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