It’s no longer news that traditional marketing channels are rapidly losing value—I’m certainly not the first to note that 30-second commercials are out, full-page newspaper ads are dead, and that it was actually digital that killed the radio star. Instead, we’re now living in a world where Facebook is worth $100 billion, Twitter is going public, and people spend more time on their mobile devices with social media than watching TV.
Our digital world is complex, and it has created a whole new set of problems for marketers. But they’re problems that have created their own solutions. The key to success now is having the insight to find the solutions amid all the clutter of digital disruption.
Digital: From tactic to a way of life.
Digital technology is both feeding and feeding upon exploding engagement and multi-directional communications from online audiences, an enormously complex environment for brands and marketers to get their messages across. Consumers interact through clicks, likes, comments, and check-ins, which have taken away marketers’ ability to blast one-way messages. But in place, we have been given enormous amounts of information about who we’re talking to. We just have to learn how to use it.
This shift is showing us that it’s not about sending messages anymore. It’s about creating brilliant, meaningful experiences for people to interact with.
And when this is done right, people don’t just listen—they engage.
To do this, we need a new type of insight.
Traditional creative, technology, and business services-in-silo no longer cut muster. To help clients achieve this engagement with consumers, agencies have to offer a much broader set of capabilities than ever before. Clients need capabilities that span from business and technology expertise to cutting-edge creative all under the same roof. They need their brand marketing to be truly integrated into every part of their organization.
And they need a deeper level of insight than ever before to bring the necessary business, creative, and technology pieces together to achieve results.
We need to be audience-inspired.
These shifts are quickly turning social marketing into the holy grail. Over the last 10 years, social has evolved from just another platform for messages to a foundational element in what it means to be digital. With the nearly ubiquitous adoption of online networks in the marketplace and a growing number of outlets, social has become much more than just a medium for sharing or a place for businesses to advertise. Social is now a medium for one-on-one engagement between businesses and their customers and a source of information about what people want, need, and respond to. With skilled qualitative analysis, this data can utterly upend our processes for everything from R&D and product design to discovering new markets.
It provides answers we never had in marketing before.
The future is social integration.
Businesses that learn to integrate and leverage social capabilities will be able to better plan their sales pipeline and provide more authentic customer support. They’ll also be able to respond quickly to any spikes in conversation that focus on competitors or the industry in general.
And this is what we’re helping our clients do. Over the next few months, Deloitte Digital will be taking leaps to expand our social capabilities in a way that reflects its foundational place in digital strategy today. We’ll make key moves to knit together our strengths in technology and creative, so that we can offer clients the services they need to succeed in our digital world.
In the end, these moves will bring Deloitte Digital closer to our digital marketing vision that will offer clients full-service:
- Strategy, to interpret our complex world and understand how to engage with audiences in an agile way.
- Technology, to create meaningful experiences and products that work.
- Creative, to imagine beautiful new ways to engage and use technology.
Stay tuned. It’s going to be an exciting ride.
Mike Brinker leads Deloitte Digital U.S. His experience delivering solutions to clients in a variety of industries and applications provides him with a balanced perspective across the complex technology landscape.