The Figaro Digital Multichannel Marketing Seminar took place at The Hospital Club in Covent Garden. We heard from speakers at Reed.co.uk, SDL, CAKE, Innometrics and Branded3 about what marketers can do to tackle the eruption of digital channels that are now permeating the market. Before the presentations got started, we caught up with a couple of our delegates to hear about the digital challenges they’re facing at the moment
“For us, email is a big challenge but also social media and content itself. Our customers all have different needs, so we need to get content that fits them all in one. But it’s also about understanding what their journey is, what their needs are and what other noises they’re hearing apart from us.” Nina Bhalla, Marketing Manager at Wilmington Plc
“I work across quite a few digital channels—email, direct mail, press and advertising—so I’m trying to get into this digital world and make sure the channels are aligned, making it really seamless for the guests and the customer journey. Digital evolves at such speed and, coming from the leisure and tourism industry, it’s always about constant development. It’s about talking to guests from an angle we haven’t done before, capturing their imagination and prompting them to discover the company.” Colette Gallagher, Campaign Executive at Butlin’s
Multichannel Marketing: It’s all About the Journey
Kelly Patterson – Marketing Manager, CAKE
“Millennials are everywhere, so advertisers need to be everywhere.”
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Rather than seeing an advert for a product and acting on it, users might now go off and read a review, wait for a bit before clicking on a retargeting ad on social and then finally convert. Millennials are an unfocused generation, says Kelly Patterson at CAKE, so marketers need to have an integrated, multichannel approach to get people engaged. Now that we can track user journeys, we can optimise on them. The data marketers can collect means that we can get insight into our ad spend as well as our customers, meaning that we can make an informed decision about which channels to invest in. Tracking all digital channels means marketers are able to attribute the correct budget to multi-touch conversions and optimise on performance targeting. Kelly’s takeaways: track the journey; act on those converting touch-points; and optimise by personalising your marketing.
Crafting the Next Great Brand Experiences
Andy Walker – MD, Innometrics
“Before you can have a conversation with your customer, you need to make sure your channels talk to each other.”
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From the Guinness ‘Surfer’ ad to the much-loved Oxo family and the John Lewis Christmas ads, the iconic brand experiences of the past have been those that convey the emotion the brand wants to generate. Traditionally seen on TV, these moments have started to evolve and emerge across different channels—Macmillan Cancer Support’s ‘No Make-up Selfie’ and Old Spice’s viral YouTube ads for instance. But the future of great brand experiences, says Andy Walker at Innometrics, will be seamless experiences across multiple channels. Andy offers three tips: bring in data from all touch-points, including behavioural and location data, to try and see customers and prospects in real time. Don’t try to build everything yourself—draw on technology that is already available and integrate with other platforms. Finally, empower marketers to be creative with technology.
Building Brand Reach and Performance Across Multiple Platforms
Mark Rhodes – Marketing Director, Reed.co.uk
“You need to be prepared to stand up and be noticed.”
For a brand that has been around for over 50 years, staying relevant is a matter of continual innovation—especially when your target audience are no longer in one place, they’re on-the-move commuters or digitally-native millennials. In an attempt to satisfy the full spectrum of job seekers, Mark Rhodes at Reed.co.uk tells us how they created the ‘Love Mondays’ campaign, tapping into a feeling that would resonate with “anyone who has ever had a job in their life” and targeting them in the places they’re most likely to be in the right state of mind to respond. Outdoor advertising and underground wifi takeovers meant that they could reach fed-up commuters, and YouTube allowed the brand to push platform-specific creative content to procrastinating workers. Mark offers some tips for success: build for the platform—every channel has its own idiosyncrasies and content needs to reflect this. Integrate your agencies and make them work together. Think channel-agnostic—it’s very important you think broadly about which channels you’re investing in. And take a risk: “You need to be prepared to stand up and be noticed”.
What Does Wearable Tech Mean for Digital Marketing? Search Marketing to the Connected Consumer
Matthew Jackson – Planning Director at Branded3
“Embrace the connected consumer—this is going to happen, it’s inevitable.”
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Customer journeys are utterly different from how they were even a few years ago, says Matthew Jackson at Branded3. Traditionally, the brand sends an offer, and the user responds and then converts. But a new journey is emerging: the user is in the moment, the brand targets them with relevant content, and an experience is created. The proliferation of wearable tech and connected devices means that there are now more opportunities for marketers to create these experiences and integrate them with the user’s lifestyle. Google’s Hummingbird update was part of trying to understand how search queries are evolving to reflect natural speech, and voice search is honing in on this further. Facebook Place Tips, launched last week, is the platform’s attempt to target users with advertisements relevant to their location. Apps are a good way to offer your users an easier solution, although they’re not relevant for everyone. And Google App Indexing means that, if a user has a particular app, it will show up in appropriate search results. Matthew’s advice: embrace the connected consumer. If you don’t know where your audience is, you need to find out—don’t just think of this as an offline piece, you need to be thinking about a digital audience. Ensure your app is visible and accessible. And make the most of it: use push notifications to drive users back to the website.
Taming the Digital Personalisation Avalanche
Alex Simonson – VP SDL Campaign Management & Analytics EMEA, SDL
“As consumers, we don’t really care whether we’re online or offline, we want a consistent, relevant and engaging experience.”
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Our world is connected like never before—from 35 million people online in 1995, there are now nearly three billion. Over five billion people worldwide use a mobile phone. And your market is a lot wider than you think: “Stop thinking about market types, or segments, or even customer segments, and with that connected world deliver a personalised engagement, a personalised experience to everyone who’s going to come and visit your brand”. You need to know your customer as an individual: communicate in their preferred language; be relevant to their location; remember all their past interactions. Your users want a consistent experience, whether online or offline, and they’re willing to pay for it. Alex’s tips for delivering a good digital customer experience: get the language right; use your customer’s preferred channels and, if possible, target them in real time; use advanced data sources to ensure your content is relevant to the user; and personalise—this is not just about getting the salutation or title correct but using data to drive real personalisation based on every experience the user has had with your brand.
Written by Estelle Hakner.