Online Marketing Business Ecosystems
What is a Business Ecosystem?
An online business ecosystem is achieved by having 3 core elements;
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providers
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consumers
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a marketplace
Ecosystems thrive by the viability of their products, services, information, marketing, and most importantly, the community. An online marketing business ecosystem can be online, offline, or a combination of both.
What is an Online Marketing Ecosystem?
An online marketing ecosystem represents a network of closely aligned, vetted, and trusted experts, customers, and partners that support a common marketplace’s ongoing success. Your business and the businesses that are a part of your network are the foundation of build a marketing ecosystem.
Businesses that have sustainable revenue growth have done so by building an ecosystem around their advertising, marketing, and customer experience.
Quite simply, they have figured out how to scale their new business generation process while retaining their customer base. This, in essence, is an online marketing ecosystem.
How to Build an Online Marketing Ecosystem for a Business?
There is a symbiotic relationship in the network that is built in an ecosystem. The producers and consumers in this marketplace become your trusted network that is vested in the network’s integrity as consumers and/or providers.
To build the Strategic Architecture (1 – The Field) of the business ecosystem, we capture all the relevant data sources that exist with your business. This data will become one of the most valuable components of your business, your Digital Assets (8 – IP).
Multiple Devices & Touchpoints
The user experience of your prospects is best represented by a Flow vs. a Funnel (2 – Jetstream). Your prospects may have multiple devices in the consideration process that become multiple touchpoints (funnels). The dynamic nature of flows will send the user to the least resistant path where the user experience is frictionless and most meaningful which results in a purchase.
In most cases, this is the mobile phone, but this is not constant for all businesses. This is another area where data is collected and processed for enriching the user experience by the device.
Flows Over Funnels (2) for Campaigns (3) & Landing Pages (4)
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Funnels are Siloed, and Flows are Open Source (Data is Centralized in a Data Lake)
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Funnels are dynamic by nature, allow for milestones, conversions, inflection points, change direction, and continue or stop in the buying process.
Humans to the Rescue
Digital Intelligence tools are a great starting point to reduce cognitive load and give us an initial digital strategy, but human thinking can not be replaced by machines (not yet). This is where we launch Campaigns (3 – Flights) and Landing Pages (4 – Runways) based on Digital Intelligence insights.
Running all data through the Data Layer (5 – The Grid “AI/ML”) on all of your online and offline assets will reveal in the data good ideas, great ideas, and unsubstantiated ideas to vet through a process of failure hacking.
Failure hacking means failing early and often in the learning phase to find truths in the data. Truth Mapping is the process of building blueprints for predictable online marketing success based on the ongoing iterative learning process.
Finding Your Own Way. Tracking Your Every Step.
As the Tools & Technology (6 – Gravity) are added in, the customer acquisition journey will lead in many directions, with some paths resulting in dead ends. In this case, document and move on quickly.
Documenting the learning process maps how we learn from the dead ends (failures) and builds Truth Maps (7), a predictive model for consistently achieving your growth goals.
Intellectual Property – Digital Assets (8)
The fruits of building truth maps with predictable and scalable results are that you are simultaneously building value in your business’s digital assets. In addition to your valuable data, your monetized digital assets’ are aging like a fine wine that becomes more valuable (and tasty) over time.
Digital Assets (8 – IP) can include a business’s tangible and intangible assets and include all of your online and offline media; videos, logos, brochures, presentations, social media profiles, websites, technology, patents, trademarks, and much more.
Digital assets are often understated when a business is valued and/or sold because its value has not been properly documented (and monetized). Wrangling up all of the known digital assets is the best way to determine the most effective options to grow value in your digital assets and intellectual property.