Learn how Connected Experience differs from traditional marketing and why it will empower brands to engage their customers better.

Old fashion doesn’t equal redundancy, and that holds true for marketing as well. Cold calls, for instance, may seem like a relic from the past, but they remain one of the most effective ways to generate leads and make sales today.

So, it might still be too easy to pronounce the end of traditional marketing—which primarily employs offline media such as newspapers, magazines, and billboards as well as TV and radio advertisements. While its decline has been hard to miss, traditional marketing is still capturing eyeballs and directing foot traffic into stores, online or not.

What we cannot deny is that brands are really interested in digital. Viral gambits and digital campaigns have pushed countless products to the forefront of so many categories. The savvier ones among them are even thinking about reinventing the whole customer experience by bridging offline and online worlds. In our view, this is reflective of a shift in customer engagement approaches, one that does not have omnichannel as its ultimate stage of evolution.

What brands are embracing, then, is a framework best characterized as Connected Experiences (CE).

In this blog, we help brands understand the differences between traditional marketing tactics and Connected Experience—and why the latter is necessary and essential in meeting the evolving needs of their customers in today's digital world.

Going Back to Basics: Traditional Marketing Tactics

Traditional marketing refers to using conventional methods to promote products or services to a broad audience through mass media channels including television, radio, print, billboards, and direct mail. It often involves one-way communication from the company to the consumer with little to no interaction or engagement.

Three Key Characteristics of Traditional Marketing:

Mass targeting: Traditional marketing campaigns are typically designed to reach a large, broadly defined group of people.

Linear communication: Messages are delivered in a linear manner, without much flexibility in the content, timing, and delivery channel of its communications.

Limited data and insights: Traditional marketing relies on market research and demographics to understand the target audience but lacks real-time data and insights.

Connected Experience: Putting Customers at the Forefront

CE, however, is the practice of crafting a cohesive and unified experience for individual customers across all the touchpoints where they might interact with a product, service, or brand. It's about designing the entire customer journey, not just one-off interactions. It is centered around unifying data from all possible sources to deliver consistently contextual, individually meaningful experiences for the customer, online and offline, at all times.

This means a significant expansion in the offline and online channels covered, more attention to customer experience at the segment of one, and far fewer CX delays. Let’s take a closer look at why we call CE a paradigm shift and the wide-ranging transformation it will bring forth.

Why Connected Experience is Superior to Traditional Marketing

    1. More Touch Points, More Cohesive Audience Journeys

The CE paradigm encompasses a broader array of channels, incorporating both physical and digital touchpoints, while traditional marketing is confined to a very limited set of channels (e.g., mobile, SMS, website, email), with offline and online touchpoints isolated from each other.

This limitation of traditional marketing therefore leads brands that rely on it to miss out on opportunities to harness data from interactions and touchpoints that are simply too difficult to monitor at once. This unenviable combo of siloed data and resource-intensive monitoring will prevent brands from accessing a holistic view of the individual customer—the key to more accurate ROI insights and personalized engagement that drives sustained growth.

    2. Personalize More Relevant Audience Journeys

CE enables real-time personalization that adapts to the evolving context of each individual customer across various channels. This means that brands can deliver tailored experiences to customers based on their preferences, behaviors, and specific needs at any given moment.

On the other hand, traditional marketing often lacks sufficient continuity of personalization across channels. This means that the level of personalization provided may vary or even get lost as customers move from one channel to another. The lack of integration and connectivity between different marketing channels can lead to a disjointed and inconsistent customer experience.

    3. Establish More Comprehensive Customer Understanding

While brands can struggle to gain valuable insights on their audience, CE empowers it with data that is deeper and more varied.

Bringing together data from digital channels and signals from offline touchpoints, CE allows the brand to identify customer pain points, preferences, and behavioral patterns with less effort—giving them the assurance to optimize their marketing strategies. The focus of CE is on designing interactions that are not just functional, but also engaging, meaningful, and even delightful for the customer.

    4. Gain More Insight into Revenue Sources

CE provides a unique advantage when it comes to attribution, allowing for more thorough offline-online ROI tracking. This helps brands track customer engagement more effectively, enabling them to measure precise ROI and tweak their marketing efforts accordingly to minimize ineffective marketing activities.

Traditional marketing approaches, however, often struggle to definitively link offline and online conversions. This weakness tends to make accurate attribution difficult, because brands are forced to allocate significant resources towards ROI tracking while operating in an incomplete attribution framework—one that cannot take all touchpoints into consideration in a cost-effective, timely manner.

    5. Leverage Potential of IoT

CE enables the integration of Internet of Things devices to deliver, analyze, and enhance customer experiences. Brands can leverage technologies such as beacons, smart sensors, and other IoT devices to enrich customer experiences, create new openings for cross and up-selling, and further expand their understanding of different target bases.

Traditional marketing, in contrast, does not encompass IoT devices at all. While there are occasional transactional use cases, they mostly add little to no additional experiential value for the customer experience. Brands are unlikely to keep up with the latest developments in data-driven customer engagement by continuing to rely on traditional marketing.

Conclusion

CE has emerged as a natural response to the evolving consumer landscape. Marketing professionals must recognize the potential benefits and capabilities that CE offers. By embracing this shift, brands will be a step ahead of their peers. They can delineate a transformation map, one that combines the right mix of technology, skill development, and strategy to deliver seamless, individualized CE at unprecedented speed and scale.