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Advanced Digital Marketing 9932 The Online Customer Experience – ‘HiSmile’

Gabriel Chait U3184082 9932 Words: 1098 (excluding references) Date: 19/12/18

Recent years have seen exponential and unprecedented change in the field of customer relations (Budíková, 2014). Through technological innovations and the information that is now readily available, consumers are able to know everything about a specific product, service or business in an instant (Help and Hope, 2018). Therefore, customer expectations have escalated drastically, causing more concern for businesses to ensure a positive online customer experience. Consequently, businesses have increased their emphasis in understanding how to address these rising customer expectations using innovate and unique marketing trends (Budíková, 2014). HiSmile, a successful entrepreneurial business has understood various current trends in todays society such as the power of less content, video marketing and integrated omni-channel experience, which has seen them develop into one of the biggest companies in their industry (Gilchrist, 2018). This report, through HiSmile will explore and assess various marketing trends in 2018 whilst analysing potential digital marketing tools that HiSmile can implement in response.

HiSmile was launched by Nik Mirkovic and Alex Tomic in December 2014 (DIAS, 10/04/2017). In its short 4-year existence, HiSmile has transformed itself into one of Australia’s most successful companies, generating annual revenue of over $40 million dollars (DIAS, 10/04/2017). HiSmile operates within the dental teeth whitening industry, with most customers interacting with HiSmile through their growing social media base, which boasts over 3 million followers (over 1.7 on Facebook) (Gilchrist, 2018), as well as their website which is accessible on multiple channels such as computers, smartphones and tablets. HiSmile further publicises YouTube content, generally describing new products or a video representation on how to use the products effectively.

Consumers have always craved engaging content (Grubor and Jakša, 2018). However technological advancements and the vast amount of advertisements published have encouraged innovative techniques from businesses (Budíková, 2014) - a notable one being the current trend of multimedia marketing (Chivu et al., 2018). HiSmile have undertaken this marketing technique in a highly effective manner – evident through their 3 million followers that they have acquired across Instagram, Facebook and Snapchat through publishing daily photos and videos, many of which featuring celebrities (Gilchrist, 2018). Thus, HiSmile has effectively responded to the increased customer expectation by making their concise yet highly engaging. This further enables consumers to easily navigate their way around the website, thereby facilitating quick purchases and a positive online customer experience. Moreover, as customers have a world of information at their fingertips (Grubor and Jakša, 2018), it is essential to maintain a positive brand image, specifically though being reliable, trustworthy and sell quality products. A further innovative marketing trend is a customer feedback forum (Liu and Zhang, 2010), which saves potential customers time in searching for reviews on a company whilst promoting trust and loyalty in the brand (provided the feedback forum is positive). Indeed, HiSmile uses this method through providing a review segment on their website which contains over 11,000 reviews (Teeth, 2018). Lastly, in today’s modern era, convenience and accessibility is everything. Indeed, 2.5 billion people own a smartphone (Statista, 2018) and 1.3 billion people own a tablet (Statista, 2018). This has led to the market trend of an integrated omnichannel experience where consumers require consistency and uniformity across all forums and devices (Cook, 2014). HiSmile endeavors to succinctly market unified content on their desktop website, mobile website and social media platforms, instilling trust and reliability in their brand (Gilchrist, 2018).

To be a successful company in 2018 requires an online presence (Grubor and Jakša, 2018). Therefore, to grab consumers attention has become extremely difficult, considering the high quantity of businesses promoting and selling their products online. Hence, an emerging customer expectation (as already mentioned) is the requirement of useful, engaging and clear content that markets a product/service or brand in the least amount of time and space necessary (Hall, 2018). Considering Facebook contains over 80 million other businesses (Cooper, 2018), HiSmile attempts to combat the ‘noise’ and the consequent customer expectation of more engagement and speedier experience through using simplified and succinct content when marketing (Clark, 2018). However, more can always be done. Their website should merely contain only significant information about the products, prices and reviews, allowing consumers to easily navigate the page. Further, to address the customer expectation of readily available important information HiSmile must emphasize their feedback forum on their website. Indeed, this contains over 11,000 reviews and averaging 4.8/5 stars, yet it is almost hidden at the bottom of the website, whilst the menu button lacks a link to a review page. Indeed, these reviews provide anecdotal evidence of HiSmile’s products and it is therefore imperative that it is highlighted, as this would save precious consumer time whilst also providing reassurance on the quality of HiSmile’s products (Liu and Zhang, 2010).

Following this trend of concise and accessible content, HiSmile has the ability to enhance their company success through newly researched digital marketing tools. It is a therefore advantageous for a business like HiSmile to focus large amounts of attention to content curation, specifically on their social media accounts. This would save time and money that is used on research and marketing, as they would be able to handpick credible, concise and suitable content for their social media pages (Cannon, 2015), instead of creating their own. Furthermore, this would directly benefit the trend of ‘less is more’ by enabling content to be shared for example by promoting and sharing succinct studies on the healthiest teeth whitening ingredients, which would give support and credibility to their product. Differently, HiSmile could focus on their existing content through content marketing, which would allow HiSmile to better their ability to sift through erroneous content and appear higher on the Facebook newsfeed (Pikuła-Małachowska, 2017). Additionally, in alignment with ‘less is more’ HiSmile should extinguish written, wordy advertisements and focus more on multimedia advertisements to ensure engagement and satisfy consumer expectations (Chivu et al., 2018). Lastly, big data is an extremely beneficial marketing tool to address customer expectations of concise and succinct content (Golik-Górecka, 2017). Indeed, big data enables companies to pinpoint the patterns in consumer behavior (Golik-Górecka, 2017) and hence would enable HiSmile to more effectively analyse the effectiveness of their marketing methods. However, threatening this marketing trend is the initiation of the General Data Protection Regulation act initiated in May 2018, to protect the privacy of Internet consumers (De Groot, 2018). This is relevant for any company that sells in the EUmaking HiSmile a potential culprit. Nonetheless, the act is yet to take full effect and for now is no major threat.

Clearly, the increasing online presence of businesses has created both opportunities and threats in relation to customer expectations. Technological innovations and increasing competition have contributed to rising expectations, encouraging businesses to identify innovative marketing trends (Budíková, 2014). HiSmile is very much linked with the online industry through their e-commerce website and highly popular social media pages. Through exploring the success of HiSmile, the report identified the impact and benefits of new marketing trends such as multimedia advertisements, which have successfully addressed emerging customer expectations and resulted in a positive online customer experience (Clark, 2018). Nonetheless, as technology is always changing, so too is customer expectations; notably the desire for clear and concise content (Hall, 2018). Hence, it is vital that HiSmile continues to remain up to date with current marketing trends and remain innovative in order to maintain their competitive advantage.

References:

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Chivu, R., Stoica, I., Orzan, M. and Radu, A. (2018). New trends in marketing mix strategies for digital consumer behaviour. New Trends and Issues Proceedings on Humanities and Social Sciences, 5(2), pp.89-95.

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