As 2015 approaches, what should your game plan include?
By any other name, it’s back to basics.
For the first half of 2014 it was a time of ‘infobesity’. There seemed to be an addiction and compulsion to gather, create, disseminate, evaluate, and re-purpose information all the time. Never-ending. Overwhelming. Too much data to gather and too much data to assimilate. Nothing seemed customized or personalized-always missing the mark.
For 2015 it’s probably wise to re-evaluate your target audience and to prioritise your resource allocation and investment accordingly. Go back to basics. Dive deep into the needs, lifestyle and motivations of your customers. Focus on true customer empathy. Review the customer journey and the touch points that they have with your organization. Use your data to create the kind of successful one-to-one conversations that genuinely show you are engaged with your customer; you care about their requirements and you can partner them to success. Focus on more relevance and new inspirations.
How can your marketing team contribute?
Their task should be to bring disparate groups to the table to collaborate across screens, channels and moments of truth to deliver one experience to customers, wherever they are in the lifecycle.
You’ll need to ask them to develop better visual storytelling to help you stand out, of course, but more importantly, to nurture and grow a vibrant and engaged community, inspire emotion and create the moment when your company gets noticed. Understand which digital properties are performing best for you. Build budgets and relationships around content placement, sponsorship opportunities, syndication services, and content recommendation platforms. As you grow investments, optimize the types of content you’re publishing. On social media, lose the cute pictures of the sales guy eating an ice cream and cater to more educational content: short explainer videos, images from whitepapers and infographics that speak directly to your desired audience.
As always, pair posts with strong calls to action and supporting elements. For example, instead of publishing the whitepaper download link in the post, send interested users to a content landing page to extend the conversation. Crunch the data to determine which of your users will watch a video on Facebook but ignore it on LinkedIn, so you can get the right piece, in the right place, at the right time – without wasting precious marketing dollars.
Finally, mobile will dominate, so get to grips with it.
Fine-tune your mobile strategy to encompass the totality of content execution: persona profiling, content theme, design and distribution.
Business users are consumers outside of work and expect the same types of integrated digital experiences that consumer brands like Coca Cola and Red Bull offer.
Your challenge is to create these digital experiences to fit the preferences and needs of your audience. For example, American Express and IBM have successfully walked the path of B2B omnichannel success with highly targeted digital properties that speak to very specific business users. And these efforts aren’t just flashy websites. They fold in mobile-optimized elements, offline activities and dynamic content offers and designs to round out the personalized digital experience.
Time to face 2015.
For further information on how you can build your marketing team to meet these challenges, contact Melvin Day at mday@marketingmoves.com or on +44 (0)1932 253 352.
