Putting value first includes the consumer experience

The article ‘Marketers stress importance of offering value in 2012’, does a great job in highlighting a number of the challenges that marketers will face over the coming year. Being the oldest or the cheapest is no longer enough to differentiate you from the competition.

Marketers need to be continually adding value and creating engaging experiences online to capture the customer’s attention.

Changes to the UK’s online landscape will make this particularly challenging for marketers in 2012. Our research shows that in 2011, UK consumers spent 28 billion hours online and we expect this to rise in 2012. But we also believe that average session time will drop this year by an average of nine seconds.

While this might not sound significant, competition online is fierce and nine seconds could be the difference between a customer making a transaction or instead clicking away from your site and on to a competitor’s.

Marketers need to ensure that they are regularly creating ‘sticky’, relevant content to keep their customers engaged on their sites.

People are consuming more content online at an increasingly fast pace and they are growing more and more fickle. If you don’t have what they want, they will go somewhere that does.

Marketers need to look at the data to understand what makes their customers tick across all channels and ensure that they are creating

Jon Buss
Managing director
Experian Hitwise/Digital Advertising Services UK