How to be a Great Digital Marketer

On the 7th of December, I got the chance from 4P square to visit the Marketing Congress of BAM – Belgian Association of Marketing in Brussels.

4P square is one of the founding architects of BAM and is proud and happy to be a part of the greatest marketing platform in Belgium. In this article you find a recap of Karl Gilis’s presentation.

Why you fail as a digital marketer and what to do about it

First of all, Karl Gilis got the attendees excited with a small quiz about the marketing communication of Carglass.

By comparing two different website landing pages, he set the tone of his presentation. He shared his idea about sticking to the basic principles, which is often forgotten.

One of the examples is that people like to build content with an image in the left corner and the text to the right. Your gut feeling says this looks the best?

No! Stop trusting your gut feeling, hope is not a strategy! Follow the facts and stick to the basic principles.

Secondly, he stated that a background video on your website may look pretty cool, but it’s actually distracting.

If your organisation is a financial institute and you show a video on your website of a lovely couple riding on a Vespa and using a selfie stick, you are doing wrong!

It gives no added value for the visitor.

In addition of that, he showed another random landing page with a video at the top of the screen.

What do the statistics say? The most clicked button on this landing page is actually the pause-button to stop the video, resulting in people bouncing from the website.

But hey, you have a cool video, right?

Furthermore, how can you bring this to the next level? With customer-centricity!

Karl tells us, or rather yells at us, that 80% of the companies think that they are customer-centric while only 8% (!) of their customers agree.

So, 4 things organisations have to do:

1) Start with the customer needs

Visit a travel booking website and you’ll mostly find a clear website, with 2 fields to fill in: the destination and the date you want to go.

Seems perfectly normal, no? However, research tells us that 43% of the visitors have no destination in mind when they start browsing.

50% of these visitors don’t even have a clue about which date they want to know.

2) Don’t impress with your product

Karl showed us a funny advertisement for a carport, a list of bullets about quality and guarantee.

This is a perfect example of trying to impress with your product, instead of knowing what customers are looking for.

People buy a carport for different reasons, such as not having to visit a carwash often, having an ice-free window in winter, avoiding a smoking hot car in summer or even for escaping a few seconds of rain.

3) Be precise

Take away the fears and barriers. A website is not something to look at, it’s something that needs to be used: usability.

4) Stop being egocentric

BP shows a header with an award that they won. And cool, there’s coffee at Texaco! A sandwich at Shell!

Esso with an ever bigger (and different) logo. There goes your branding! Don’t think about the goal for your website.

Think about the needs of your customers. Make your visitors happy! Give them what they want and they will give you want you want.

In other words: Don’t sell stuff, sell why people would buy your stuff.