In part two of our New Year’s Marketing Resolutions special, nine more experts share their insights on where they think the industry should be heading in 2017…
Sophie Rayers, Director of Marketing, EMEA &LATAM, Brightcove
It’s clear from 2016 that social video is now leading across all platforms. Previously Facebook had been a place for friends to connect, share news and make plans. But Facebook has become the place people go to watch video. Newsfeeds are now dominated by video, auto-playing as you scroll. And, as Facebook video viewership grew, so too did views on YouTube, Twitter, Snapchat and others. Social video is what people want, and businesses would be wise to focus their marketing efforts on delivering excellent social video experiences. Nearly three quarters of all consumers who watch social video make a purchasing decision based on it. They are also more likely to recommend a company when they have a positive social video experience and more likely to discourage interacting with a company when they have a negative social video experience. The success of a business’ social video impacts brand perception, so it’s important to get it right. As social video rapidly becomes a brand differentiator for consumers, it is imperative that companies are serving relevant and engaging content to maintain brand loyalty and drive sales.
Stephen Kenwright, Director of Search, Branded3
The trend in search this year should be alignment between SEO and PPC agencies and teams. We’re getting less k
eyword data all the time but our audience data is improving and that benefits everyone, so we’re making more effort to involve both SEO and PPC stakeholders in conversations where possible. This doesn’t mean we think brands have to employ the same agency for paid and organic search (it does help) – it means we’re promising to play nicely and share what we learn with all of our clients’ agencies as well as the client themselves.
David Schulhof, Digital Marketing Director, Red Hot Penny
For Red Hot Penny 2017 our focus is to integrate the different marketing channels more closely through data. We run many siloed campaigns but we need to do more cross-channel analysis of that activity. For example, does a targeted social campaign on Instagram have an impact on Organic search volumes? And what data can we use to validate that? Red Hot Penny will be investing heavily in both advanced tools but also in our Data Insights team, which will allow us to provide our clients much wider data and understanding of campaign reach and performance.
Skip Fidura, Client Services Director, dotmailer
‘Batch and blast’ is dead: There are three factors that are coming together and which will drive us to finally kill off batch and blast. We have been talking about the need for greater relevance for nearly twenty years but irrelevant emails worked so there was no real incentive to spend the extra money on significant segmentation. Consumers are getting tired – 61 per cent of UK consumers get more than 21 emails per week from brands, 85 per cent of UK consumers say that more than half of the emails they get are irrelevant, and 50 per cent of all consumers have or would consider deleting an email address to control the marketing email they receive. UK consumers prefer email as the way to maintain relationships with brands by more than 2:1 over every other channel, across all age groups. But that will quickly wane if we continue to deliver content about which they could just not care less.
Jennifer Watkiss, Head of Marketing Communications, Adestra
For 2017 my team and I are continuing down the path of becoming First-Person Marketers. That means leveraging the technology available in our marketing stack to centre our communications on the recipient. In 2017 we’ll see more tailoring of our messages so the right person always gets the right content at the right time for them, in a context that’s meaningful and helpful. And of course around Adestra as a whole, we’re trying to help our clients do the same. Along with the part of our mission that states we want to bring clarity to marketing complexity, our resolution is to cut through the noise, rather than being a part of it.
Garry Lee, CEO, RedEye
My New Year’s Resolution is to make this the year we truly let the customer control the journey, giving our clients more say and involvement in the direction of RedEye. We will run more events to get client feedback and aim to launch a client advisory board as well. I want to encourage our clients to do the same for their customers. How? Use what they know about them (the data) to tailor the customer experience. Get away from the generic email blasts, the blanket social media banners. Start to target people in their preferred channel, with a message relevant to them. We all have the tools and the data to personalise the experience – use them and give the customer what they want, not what you want them to have. In 2017 the companies that give the customer what they want will be the companies that thrive.
Ben Tomlinson, Product Marketing & Partnerships Manager, Communicator
Modernising Your Data Capture: For the benefit of increased consumer engagement, collecting useful, necessary data from customers and presenting them with valuable, relevant communications will add true value to the customer journey. We’re doing this with our Sophistication Scale – it’s fun, it’s interactive, you get something out of it (by finding out what stage you’re at) and it’s that type of engagement that’s often lost with a simple data capture approach. Taking this perspective is supportive in your preparations for the GDPR by making permission clear and explicit, and makes your prospects actually want to give you their information, like in this example. It’s essentially an idea taken from the likes of Buzzfeed with their ‘personality type’ quizzes, except we’re using it in a business context to collect data. An engaging approach to data capture in 2017, one which is much more compelling than a simple ‘join our newsletter’ etc, is what will ensure you stand out. This style of approach will enable brands to collect more useful data about their customers and prospects, whilst remaining linked to business goals.
Simon Douglass, Founder, Curated Digital
In 2017, one of the biggest New Year’s resolutions for me is focusing a bit more on what I can do for the community. I would like to continue to increase the work I am doing with not-for-profit organisations and really help them with their digital marketing strategies as and where I can. It’s important to give back to the community so this is definitely an area where I would like to focus more of my efforts. In terms of other new year’s resolutions I have, I would like to be able to share my experiences with others and help to mentor those who are setting up their own businesses. There is so much to learn and the landscape is constantly changing so I would like to provide help and insight where I can.
Adam Shallcross, Joint CEO and Founder of The Cogworks
Image credit – Percipient Studios.
Amplify social media: As our company reaches its ten year milestone and we continue to grow and expand, our resolution for 2017 is to amplify our engagement rate across social media, to increase brand awareness and highlight our position as the leading Umbraco agency in the UK. Strategy wise, we will be increasing our content to give added value to our audience, and in doing so, attract potential new clients and a larger social audience from the developer community. From a content perspective, we want to utilise and promote the talent we have by creating ‘thought pieces’ that provoke interest and can be repurposed across platforms such as: video, blogs and LinkedIn as well as used for workshop material. We are also launching a new website for The Cogworks. The website will highlight our client list, including: Reckitt Benckiser brands such as Vanish, Dettol, Durex, Airwick and Scholl, through to Storm Models, The Trainline and Cobham Plc, Paddington The Movie and Days Out Guide. In turn, these will showcase The Cogworks as a leading authority with invaluable resources for the Umbraco community, from developers to end users.