Highlights and insight from the Figaro Digital July 2015 Marketing Conference. In this fourth and final instalment, we hear from Unified Solutions, Silverpop, an IBM Company, Freesat, Great British Chefs, Celebrity Cruises, PRWD and Branded3
Digital Print to Make You Think
Tim Chalklen – Managing Director, Unified Solutions
“Everything you do is visible.”
Has the fear of missing out on something happening online stifled our ability to enjoy what’s occurring around us? Is social media the life source of our generation, or daily nourishment to feed our egos? Tim Chalklen at Unified Solutions takes a look at the artwork of satirist Pawel Kuczynski and illustrator John Holcroft to consider some of these anxieties, which are intrinsically linked to the rise of digital media. Kuczynski playfully blends the Facebook and Twitter logos into familiar everyday scenes to remind us that everything we post online could be seen by anyone, anywhere, and that we have an increasing lack of control over what people (particularly children) are doing online. Holcroft’s 1950s poster-style images show how we’re unable detach ourselves from our devices, physically rooted to the spot as we scroll through our Newsfeeds.
The Creation of a Connected Customer
Jennifer Jacobs – Customer Marketing Manager, Freesat, and Tamta Gamezardashvili – Relationship Manager, Silverpop, an IBM Company
“Don’t just rely on those explicit things your customers have told you—think about the implicit behaviours they’re demonstrating at different points of communication.”
Whether your industry is B2B or B2C, achieving a one-to-one personal communication with your customer is the ultimate goal. In order to get a 360 view, marketers need to look at data that’s coming in from an abundance of channels. But are we really listening to what the customer’s telling us? Tamta Gamezardashvili at Silverpop explains, “With every click, every opened email, every purchase on your website, and every call to your call centre, they’re giving you a very crucial message about what they’re really interested in—the product or the service.”
It’s this implicit behaviour that offers vital insight into your customer, and for that reason marketers need to look beyond just what the customer is highlighting in a preference centre, for example. “If we were just to respond to the web forms or the information the customer gave us two years ago, we would eventually lose them as a customer.”
For Jennifer Jacobs at Freesat, getting the user to connect to the brand on multiple platforms (pairing their devices and downloading the app) means that the brand can gather valuable behavioural data that can go towards creating a Single Customer View. Subsequently, they are able to produce timely and bespoke communications to engage their customers on a more personal level.
Digital Partnership Marketing
Ollie Lloyd – CEO, Great British Chefs, and Michael English – Head of Business Development, Celebrity Cruises
“One thing that Celebrity Cruises is particularly strong on is the culinary proposition, so this really was an incredible partnership.”
Ollie Lloyd at Great British Chefs and Michael English at Celebrity Cruises explain how they worked in partnership to produce great content and deliver innovative digital campaigns. Working with cinema group Everyman, the companies created an immersive campaign centred on a screening of The Hundred Foot Journey, a 2014 film from Stockholm-born director Lasse Hallstrom. During the screening at Everyman’s Screen on the Green cinema in Islington, Michelin-starred chefs Alfred Prasad and Pascal Aussignac cooked up dishes inspired by the Indian and French flavours in the film. Great British Chefs, Celebrity Cruises and Everyman amplified the event on their digital and social channels before, during and after. To bring the concept to life, Great British Chefs produced a 60-second trailer which ran across all the three brands’ sites, as well as before every Everyman screening for four weeks.
Forget About Conversion Rates, It’s all About Growth
Paul Rouke – Founder & Director of Optimisation, PRWD
“If you’re not already progressing and seeing optimisation as a core area for growth for your business, then be very wary—your competitors could already be going down this path.”
Conversion rate optimisation, or A/B testing, is the biggest growth lever opportunity for businesses in 2015, but also the one that’s given the least amount of focus, says Paul Rouke at PRWD. According to a recent report in the Guardian, half of all ad spend in the UK is on digital media, but less than one per cent of this is put into optimisation. Fifty-three per cent of businesses plan to increase their budget for conversion optimisation in 2016.
For simple, quick testing, altering features such as the copy on call-to-action buttons can be effective. But in order to achieve real growth through optimisation, brands need to truly understand user behaviour and the psychological insights that impact it. In terms of metrics, focus on quality, not quantity (or ‘sanity not vanity’). Rather than looking at how many tests are run each month, look at the percentage of these which deliver an uplift, for example.
What is the Future of SEO?
Stephen Kenwright – Head of Search, Branded3
“Google wants to rank brands because people want to see brands.”
SEO is no longer a case of spinning articles or uploading articles under a fake name. Marketers have lost a lot of data that they once had access to, and links are getting a lot harder to get: “The number of links that we can potentially deliver as an agency (or industry) can no longer be the 30 or 40 a month that it once was.” Mobile search is rapidly growing and every website needs to be responsive. In short, SEO is getting much harder.
User experience is going to be a huge part of SEO moving forwards, says Stephen at Branded3. “A conversion is not just selling something; a conversion is inspiring a user to take an action of some sort. So, we need to be optimising websites to get users to click through—anything to stop them going back to Google”. PR is important for getting the website mentioned in a positive light (not just mentioned for the sake of it). Soon, Google won’t need links to judge accuracy and popularity – “It will just look at what people are already saying about the brand. I think links are going to become a significantly less important part of the algorithm than they currently are”.
Read the Figaro Digital July 2015 Marketing Conference Round-up Part 1
Read the Figaro Digital July 2015 Marketing Conference Round-up Part 2
Read the Figaro Digital July 2015 Marketing Conference Round-up Part 3
Written by Estelle Hakner.