McKinsey on digital marketing (excellent paper!)

This is one of the best papers I've seen on where digital marketing is today in its evolution. My favorite quote: "Consumers (customers) expect you to engage with them, not dictate to them." This paper addresses very well the issue of engaging prospects with content that gets them to say "tell me more", advising readers that companies of all sizes and stripes are turning themselves into publishing companies as well. Here's an excerpt:

"Supporting the consumer’s decision journey requires a vast and growing range of content— well beyond advertisements. As companies chase digital opportunities, most have slowly but steadily begun publishing everything from static content, such as product descriptions, to games and other multimedia. Marketers are syndicating content and applications to flow across the sites and mobile platforms of other organizations and people. Content is increasingly being pulled on demand by consumers (who, for example, subscribe to alerts or become “fans” on Facebook) or is tailored to their preferences (determined through their past behavior), the context of an interaction, or the time of day. Most companies have now essentially become publishers, with a more complex set of cost and quality concerns, yet continue to behave like simple advertisers (Exhibit 2)."

 

"Most marketers, failing to adopt the discipline of a multimedia publisher, don’t realize that deep within their operations, they are facing rapidly escalating production costs, unnecessary duplication, inconsistent quality of content, and second-rate interactions with customers. One global B2B software provider, for example, produced a growing amount of content—from advertising to cost-of-ownership analytic tools to sales support materials to instruction manuals—for each of its products in every geography, all tailored to different types of audiences and for different online placements. Obsolete content persisted across the Web. Much useful content was poorly tagged or not well linked to related content, making it hard for consumers to find. Product descriptions on the company’s own Web site, for instance, were often different from descriptions of the same products on a distributor’s site. Finally, budgets for content creation were buried across business units, and no one had a clear sense of how to pare down the amount of content or raise it to a consistent standard."