the strategies and keep these consultants active. HourlyNerd focuses on circle marketing, letting consultants who have become seed customers make the recommendation; on the contrary, they go to business schools where they source their consultants to woo. They automatically match projects with the areas and the expertise of the consultants. Project givers will receive a structured list of evaluation for each consultant so as to quantify the capabilities of these professionals. HourlyNerd also sends e-mails to reinforce ties with consultants so that a continued trading relationship could be established even if such trading does not happen very often (Figure 1.15).
Figure 1.15. Income of Hourlynerd.
Source: KMG Research.
1.4 Auditing the Maturity of the Corporate Digitalization
1.4.1 Auditing of the corporate digitalization maturity
To establish a complete digital marketing strategy, the first step is for a company to have a clear understanding of where it stands in terms of the digital content of its original marketing. This requires an auditing of the maturity of digital marketing to reassess current marketing. KMG recommends four steps to complete this process (shown as follows), which represent the four types of enterprises that we come into contact with during our digital consulting services: companies in the starting or trialing period, which account for 70% of the total; enterprises that have started system and strategy building belong to phase two, who, despite imperfection, have already formed their system of operation and account for 15%; there are very few enterprises that belong to the third and fourth phases, which require that they establish mature digital marketing platforms and utilize digital technologies in marketing, turning customer assets into bits while further managing and activating them on a strategic level (Figures 1.16 and 1.17).
1.4.1.1 Phase one: Start and trial
Start
At the beginning, several questions may need attention: what ads would be on a website? Who are viewing our websites? What is the conversion rate? Can user participation be quantified? Can digital marketing channels be applied easily? All these questions will give rise to measures related to visits.
But at this phase, we could lay complex key performance indicators (KPIs) aside while focusing on how to increase the web traffic. At the moment, the content of digital marketing is yet to be established, while we may only need masses of distribution and dissemination of information. But this is crucial for overall digital marketing.
Dissemination
Dissemination refers to content placement through digital channels to maximize visits. Attention should now be paid to how to realize effective content creation and duplication, while we push them via multiple digital channels for the best results. At the moment, it is not necessary to design different content for different channels, while it is permissible to duplicate contents on different channels. Another focus at this stage is the introduction and integration of basic socializing, for example, by adding the sharing function, allowing visitors to share or like to help further disseminate information.
Figure 1.16. Digital maturity.
Source: KMG Research.
Figure 1.17. Auditing list of the maturity of digital marketing.
Source: KMG Research.
Giga Circle from Taiwan learns from their direct sales, allowing users to make profits while posting contents on the website and sharing them on other social media. This whole population-based strategy prompted by profits helps realize an explosive increase in traffic.
1.4.1.2 Phase two: System and strategy building
At this stage, we need to combine and synergize the target of digital marketing, KPIs and the strategic goals of the organization, as real value can only be created when all the members in digital marketing are precisely trained with a clearly set goal. Hence, at this stage we ought to have established a good digital analysis system while we begin focusing on qualitative instead of quantitative results, which could allow us to identify which flows are actually paying off.
At the same time, all efforts should be made to improve, enhance and reinforce. Constant consideration should be given to what attributes or elements can help realize higher user participation in daily operations.
Besides, another crucial element of success is the establishment of user communities. We need to know who our users are, ensure the connection between the community and the marketing organization and that among the community and eventually use observations of user community trends as feedback to improve the strategy of the organization.
Sometimes we should use the best opportunity in a short period of time to realize customized contents, for example: categorizing users by keywords through data analysis and provide customized services based on these keywords, like customized recommendation of music on Pandora, news on toutiao.com and books on BookLamp.
When this period is over, marketing organizations ought to have had a better understanding of user behaviors as well as what testing environment/elements could lead to the best conversion rate.
1.4.1.3 Phase three: Automatic marketing
The application of social media will become crucial — as we have begun to understand the behavioral patterns of users. Organizations and enterprises can monitor social media via certain channels and connect to and interact with clients.
Every chain of the digital marketing maturity model essentially serves clients, whereas such features reach the peak at the automatic phase, with enterprises directly communicating with customers and having distinct opinions.
At this time, content customization will gradually evolve to set behaviors, which allows the power hidden in customer behaviors to be turned into the driving force for digital marketing. What is more important is that we will set the automatic triggering of different customer behaviors, just like dominoes — for example, when our clients add products in the cart but do not pay, the domino will fall — automated mail will send a timely reminder.
1.4.1.4 Phase four: Management of clients as digital assets
Transformation
At this stage, the organization will build up its advantageous assets to win a competition; interaction between the organization and customers will become more direct and customized, while customer behaviors are being monitored online and offline. The online part being rather familiar, the offline part will allow more inclusive understanding of customers. Changba has accumulated massive fans and users through the mobile terminal and is now starting to develop offline KTVs with Cashbox Party and TV Changba with televisions. Their aim is to connect online with offline. Shopify used to be a company providing solutions for e-merchants
