Consumer disruption and how it impacts your marketing strategy
Consumers make decisions based on their personal preferences across multiple channels. Understand that process and ensure that you offer a consistent cross-channel brand experience. What are the 3 biggest challenges facing brands today? Tune in.
Consumer Disruption and How it Impacts Your Marketing Strategy
Good afternoon, I’m Michael Winn Chief Digital Officer of Digital Opps, a division of RB Oppenheim Associates. Thanks for joining me today on the digital lunch-and-learn where we learn about digital marketing strategies to grow your business.
Today I came across a very interesting article in Ad Age and it prompted me to think about many of the things that we talked about on the video podcast series when it comes to digital marketing, the consumer journey, your marketing funnel and how all that works together. Today we’re going to talk about the consumer disruption that’s happening in our industry and in our society today. At the end of the day we as consumers are deciding how we want to buy products and services. For instance we may see an ad on a website or in social media, we click on it then go to the website. You look around, we check out the product and we may then decide “hey I see that that available at a store near me”. So I go to the store and touch it, feel it, decide I like it and buy it. The problem I think this disruption of I got all the way there online and then ultimately I went in and bought it. Now the truth is to be said if your business does not offer a brick-and-mortar, let’s say you have no products that are drop shift and your business is strictly online. Then that disruption model doesn’t look quite like it does for a brand that has a brick-and-mortar store where ultimately the consumer has to come in and make that purchase decision. But here are the three challenges that are facing your companies and brands right now because of this consumer disruption when it comes to the social web and the internet of today.
What is a Cross-Channel Brand Experience?
Number one is really understanding what it means to create a cross-channel brand experience. Because many of us have all types of different platforms that we go on. You might have a 24-year-old who is active on Snapchat and Instagram but has never even created a Facebook account. Or you might have a 39-year-old that has email and Facebook and likes Instagram but never goes on Snapchat. You can have a 55-year-old male or female who has Facebook, who is on YouTube constantly and also checks out LinkedIn. Again it’s different ages and it doesn’t mean that all 20-somethings are off Facebook now, not the case. I was just using those for an example. What you need to understand is, I think it’s ironic that brands think “oh well we’re not on Twitter because we’re not a sports company or not an entertainment company so it doesn’t really fit our mix”. I really think that’s short-sighted because whether the company likes it or not their users, their clients, their prospects, they use all of the platforms. There’s been a lot of discussion about should I be on this platform or should I not be on this platform and the fact of the matter is you should be aware of cross-channel brand experience. What that means is you need to work together to make sure that your messaging is consistent. It needs to have that same value proposition but the way you present that material needs to be contextual. The creative needs to be contextual, it needs to speak to the 24-year-old or the 39-year-old for the 55-year-old the male vs female. All the different buying motivations have to be contextual and then have to understand the channel. You may only have 15 to 20 seconds YouTube pre-roll ad to tell me your story, to meet me the 48-year-old male who you’re trying to get me to buy your own button-up dress shirt. You may only have a certain amount of characters on a tweet, obviously they have expanded the number of characters on a tweet. The point is we consume content, no matter what the platform is, visually -you watch it, we listen to it -audio, and we read it -written word. You have to have multi-format contextual creative that’s mapped out with a consistent message where you are presenting your value proposition to that prospect.
Get a 360-View of Your Client
Number two would be you’re going to need to have a 360 view of your client, of the people who do business with you. What I mean by that is a combination of your own data which is thought of as first-party data and you might have a CRM system. A customer relationship management system, where you have that information of what they purchase, when they became a customer, where they are, how much money they’ve spent, that’s your own data. But then you need to have and be able to lay over the top of that, any advertising interaction. Your digital interaction that you might have been able to track through those tools. As well as online and offline information, plus third-party data. You need to have all of that and be able to look through it. The problem is right now as pointed out in the article for the most part those data groups have been separated, they’ve been siloed. So you got your CRM information over here, your ad platform information over here, your third-party information with those companies (it could be banking and financial or could be social media). The idea is how can you layer those ideas and information on top of each other and then be able to look at that information. Because when you do that what you’re able to gain insight from and have that 360 view is really understand who your customer is, what they’re buying and decision traits are, and then what is their buying behavior on the web, online, offline. Understanding those behaviors so to be able to do that it is going to be something that’s going to be a challenge for us as we as marketers and brands have to respond to this consumer disruption.
Map Out Your Consumer Journey
Now number three is mapping that consumer journey. We talked about in previous articles if you haven’t listened to the series we did on the digital marketing funnel, I definitely want to encourage you to go check that episode out and couple episodes that build on that. And really understanding that process because when you can gain insight from all of this information, from what’s happening in the digital ad space as we move as that client moves through the education phase and the awareness stage and then into consideration stage and then into the conversion stage and then into loyalty and then advocacy. So they’re going to have content that they’re going to just going to have data behind it and you can match that to the profile within your data. That really allows you to see the big picture. So if they open an email or if they respond to an ad, we know. We have all kinds of an incredible data from IP addresses so we can have geotags and markers where we can see that you the person go the ad and then came into the store.That technology is available, the problem is that many times that information is separated. Now it’s interesting the writer of this article in Ad Age was Oracle, so no wonder that they’re creating this sort of picture of all of this data that’s disconnected and of course they have a product. But I think right now for businesses who think Oracle is too big for me, I don’t know if I can afford that. The issue of affordability is not the problem. The issue that brands, companies, and marketers need to understand is this is the world we live in, the consumer world we live in has changed in just the last five years and we need to understand that.
Guys, thank you so much for tuning in. My name is Michael Winn, Chief Digital Officer of Digital Opps, see you guys tomorrow!