IKEA is Increasing its Investment in Digital Marketing and why you should too
IKEA made some big news earlier this month when it announced it was changing its approach to marketing. IKEA is looking to do more in the digital marketing arena and to invest in more experiential marketing, reducing the investment in print catalogs.
Whether your company is brand new or has been around for twenty-five years, digital marketing is a space that every brand is focusing on. It’s one of the most effective marketing channels with higher returns than traditional, offline methods. Combine the digital with the experiential, and that’s a combination that is going to lead a lot of people to success in the present and future.
Experiential marketing is about delivering experiences that consumers can fully immerse themselves in. To some degree, experiential marketing is about creating moments. From there, those moments can be shared on social media and can be exploited to the media to generate buzz for your company. Take IKEA, as an example. Celebrating their 75th anniversary, they’re creating ‘IKEA Inspiration Experience’ events in New York and Chicago, giving users the chance to walk inside room setups from IKEA’s upcoming 2019 catalogue and win prizes. For anyone who has walked into an IKEA, they may have already seen room setups and experiential-based displays that further play into this marketing channel, albeit somewhat unintentionally.
We know digital marketing and experiential marketing is not inexpensive. Though it can be, in our experience, the results can be so addicting that many brands want to invest more and more. That investment needs to come from somewhere. Even IKEA is beginning to withdraw in other marketing channels to re-invest in digital. IKEA will now sell fewer paper catalogues, re-directing its investment into digital channels. This, combined with experiential marketing, is happening because this is where the audience has gone. If you want to reach millennials, digital marketing is where they are at. For brands that refuse to participate, they are likely losing out on a tremendous amount of business and inevitably, they’ll be forgotten about altogether.
According to a recent study, more than seventy-five percent of millennials prefer shopping online because of the convenience. At the same time, when shopping in-person, millennials along with other demographics are extremely responsive to experiential-based displays and product demonstrations. Think of the ways that your brand may be able to create experiential marketing relevant to the products or services it sells. There are also a number of opportunities to engage in digital marketing, from starting a website to beginning a monthly email newsletter, to creating social media marketing channels, to engaging in search engine optimization practices to get ranked on Google.
There is certainly still a lot of mileage in traditional offline marketing so we’re not saying to pull out the entire budget. Like IKEA has done however, when putting together a quarterly or annual budget, you may identify some areas that could use more capital. If revenues do not justify investing more, cutting funding on lesser marketing channels might be the way forward.
Speak with a representative today at Unlimited Exposure for more information on the results up for grabs in the digital marketing arena. When it comes to marketing, it’s about making smart investments in the future. See your brand succeed beyond the limitations of offline channels!
