Marketing’s gotten a lot more complicated in the digital era. It’s constantly changing, with more devices and platforms. Digiday asked publisher, agency and brand attendees of the ANA Masters of Marketing event in Orlando, Fla., what worries them the most.
Lynn Huang, senior director of marketing, Asia Pacific at Motorola Solutions
There are lots of challenges for us because we are B2B. The key challenge for B2B in digital is that you can engage customers through digital tactics like social media and ads and such. But the problem is, how do you translate that into actual sales? We are not targeting individual consumers. We are targeting businesses, huge organizations. So we could grow our Facebook followers, but that doesn’t mean anything because, again, B2B isn’t an individual; it is an organization. For B2C, I follow you, and I buy from you. The sales cycle is longer in B2B. It takes so long to close the deal. How can digital help shorten the sales cycle? How can we turn awareness and preference into sales?
Curt Pahl, retail marketing and consumer insight manager at Rawling Sporting Goods
A lot of the team dealers are not up to speed yet in digital, and that obviously has an effect on us. There is a lot of progress to be made there so that we can tie what they are doing in digital to our digital presence.
Christine Osekoski, publisher at Fast Company
With the fragmented audiences, it’s really about wanting to make sure the right audience sees our content. It becomes incumbent on us to make sure we are on every platform possible. We need to be on Tumblr, Twitter, everywhere so that we are staying current.
Janet Northen, partner and evp at McKinney
I’m from an agency, so I would say what worries me is that too many agencies are still trying to figure out digital when in fact digital should have been figured out long ago. It should already be a seamless, un-siloed part of your agency. Everyone in the agency should touch digital everyday.
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Paul Venn, evp at Team Detroit
What frustrates me is the way that people have tended to see digital as the whole solution. And it’s not. It is about the way we use that channel along with other channels. The challenge is how we optimize the channel mix on any given program.
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