Professional Documents
Culture Documents
4. Digital tools strengths and weaknesses
4. Digital tools strengths and weaknesses
In this lesson we learnt about digital tools in more detail, and how they can support and enhance your
marketing strategy with their strengths and weaknesses. We also looked at how digital hardware can be
co-ordinated.
Live chat
Strengths:
Oversea call centres now mean that we can overcome language barriers, and improve the
customer experience
Often chat ‘handlers’ are able to multi-task and help 2-3 customers at once
Chat bots allow you to send relevant and useful links to customers in need of information
Weaknesses:
Software hitches or technical difficulties has potential to result in a bad customer experience if
the line gets cut off
Video
Strengths:
HubSpot found that 55% of people watch video content thoroughly, appose to skimming. As for
blogs where it is more common for people to skim.
YouTube is the second largest search engine, proving there is a high demand for video content
Video is widely used for learning and entertainment, educational videos make great shareable
content
Weaknesses:
People won’t always opt for video over text content if they are in an open area with others
around them
Social media
Strengths:
It’s Free!
Humanises your brand and gives the opportunity to represent brand values and voice
Most social media users will log into their account at least once a day, proving that people
are regularly using these platforms
Weaknesses:
Time consuming
The Edelman Trust Barometer has revealed that media is the least trusted source of all markets
Podcasts
Strengths:
Helps to build relationships, your audience is listening because the content is relevant, and they
are interested
Can be used as live content and then re-purposed as a downloadable offer afterwards
Weaknesses:
File sizes are often large, which could make it hard for people who have a slow internet
connection to access (an audio only podcast would save file size)
Unlike a webinar or conference call, there is no way for your audience to interact, get involved
and ask questions
Applications
Strengths:
Apps are more than just social, they can be used for news, games, sports etc.
Apps give brand an opportunity to provide their customers with an app that provide them with
something of value, your app could help customers solve a particular issue, or be transactional
More opportunity within apps if you integrate advertising onto the platform
Weaknesses:
Expensive
Email
Strengths:
Weaknesses:
Bounces and undelivered emails, there are lots of things that have an impact on whether your
email will bounce or not (e.g. keywords, html, or out of date marketing lists)
Resources and skills – it’s sometimes easier to outsource if you don’t have the right time or
skills in-house as email campaigns often take a lot of preparation and content
Mobile devices are now used more often than desktops are for traditional browsing, and that’s why it’s
important to adapt to this change and integrate marketing with mobiles. Mobile marketing interacts
directly with the consumer and has great tracking benefits; Tracking is almost instantaneously and helps
us to better understand user behaviour.
Wearables
This market is fairly new and has lots of potential, wearables are widely used and predicted to keep
growing. Wearable devices provide marketers with more opportunity to give users a more personalised
experience, geo-ads are an example of a personalised marketing approach.
Internet of things
The IoT will continue to grow as more and more devices will be connected via the internet. For
marketers this means they can give a more tailored and relevant experience to the user that could be
based on location, and demographics.