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Tag: content-marketing

  • Brands: Stop having one-night stands and grow up

    Brands: Stop having one-night stands and grow up

    Marketing has long clung to the notion that a brand is mostly composed of the communications it puts out into the world. We do our due diligence and develop these lovely brand strategies. We sit and work out our brand DNA, or our brand eggs, or our brand onions, or our brand keys.

    These multi-levelled multi-faceted documents filled with jargon and acronyms that the consumer never sees and the brand team barely touches after the initial presentation.

    These things are necessary, of course. When you’re crafting the next big campaign, referring back to the original brand documents is an important starting point.

    Customer experience is the brand

    However, the consumer doesn’t care.

    Your latest omni-channel masterpiece slips right through their awareness. They don’t see the connection between the billboard and the Facebook page. They don’t care about your metrics, your reach, your engagement, your conversions.

    What they care about is their customer experience. In short, customer experience is the brand.

    This changes things dramatically because first and foremost it’s a space that many agencies don’t play in.

    Most agencies are pretty good at the big campaign, some even fairly good at collecting the all important first-party data. Those campaigns certainly do contribute to customer experience, so their role is not negated. But still, there’s a bigger picture.

    There are some agencies that are beginning to test the waters of customer experience. They do the big campaigns, but they also look beyond that, at the entire journey.

    The relationship with a brand may begin on Google, but what about the rest? Marketing often stops at that moment. We got them to notice you, maybe even smile at you. Maybe we even got them to go a bit further. Our job is done.

    Where the real magic takes place

    But the real magic of the relationship doesn’t live in the first kiss, it’s much more and much longer than that. What happens in-store? What happens during purchase? How did the sales clerk treat you? Did you get the item in a nice box? What happens if it breaks?

    A brand like Apple doesn’t have to do a lot of marketing because it has nailed down customer experience.

    Say what you will about the hardware, the experience of purchasing a Mac is really cool. The reason is simple, Apple has mapped out the entire journey with the customer at the centre of it. Sounds a bit obvious doesn’t it? Well, for a lot of brands, it isn’t.

    Number one priority: customer’s objectives

    Marketing conversations usually focus on two different, but overlapping things, the brand objectives and the marketing objectives.

    Our number one priority should be the customer’s objectives. Once we start talking about those experiences, then questions like what we do with all this first-party data answers itself.

    A new type of agency requires their clients to think about their brand differently and to open themselves to conversations not just about that first kiss, but how big should the wedding be, and how many kids you’re going to have.

    Stop having one-night stands and grow up.

  • Digital Marketers don’t forget to look up

    Digital Marketers don’t forget to look up

    In 2021 we released our very first Township CX Report. It went well. It wasn’t a spectacular success, but it was good enough to motivate us to do it again in 2022. This time around, we wanted it to be bigger and better.

    An injection of authenticity

    We decided that part of the bigger and better was an injection of authenticity. It’s one thing to see some data on a spreadsheet, but it’s quite another to go to where the people are. To sit with them, to talk about their experiences, to connect. We chose three townships, Alexandra, Soweto, and Katlehong, and we planned our expedition.

    I call it an expedition because, for me, it was. If you can’t tell by my profile picture, I’m white. I’m suburban in every sense of the word. A trip to a township is not an everyday occurrence for me. It’s a thing. It’s an expedition. It’s new and alien and daunting. What is every day for most of South Africa, is not every day for me. In many ways, I’m a tourist in my own country. And that’s not okay.

    2021 was not a great year for South Africa. Covid-19, the riots, and a bunch of other things led me to believe that this country was in dire straits. I didn’t hold much hope. I expected our township visits to be depressing. I expected to see economic hardship, strife, and suffering. Sure, some of that was there. But there was also something else.

    A masterclass in entrepreneurship
    In Soweto we saw spaza shops and restaurants rebranding to their own unique look-and-feel. A shift away from the branded cold-drink signs we’ve seen so often. No, they had their own brand identities. We saw entrepreneurs coming up with new and innovative ideas, from bespoke food delivery services to unheard of financial services.

    If you want to attend a master class in entrepreneurship, downtown Alex is where it’s at. In Katlehong we met a man that has managed to connect spaza shops together through his distribution network, all while inventing a cold drink that’s just as healthy as it is delicious.

    In a way, 2021 was a blazing inferno, burning through the lives of South Africans, leaving ruin in its wake. But entrepreneurship and innovation were birthed in that fire, and they rose like the proverbial phoenix, carrying the township economy upward with it.

  • CX moments of truth

    CX moments of truth

    How many businesses actually go through the exercise of determining where their customer’s pain points are? I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to work on a very interesting pitch for a popular automotive brand. Part of the task was to map out the entire customer experience. The point of the process was to determine where the brand should focus their efforts (and their budget) in the coming months.

    We conducted some interviews, including those in the market for new cars, and salespeople on the dealer floor, and built personas. We then broke down the journey into five key milestones, mapping out what each persona would be thinking, doing, and feeling. We determined the tools and experiences that would address any pain points, and then looked at whether those tools and experiences already existed. If they didn’t, these became the recommendations. The results it yielded were clear and gave the potential client some deep insights into where they could improve. Like many brands today, some areas of the customer experience were second to none, and some were almost non-existent.

    Content and marketing are not everything

    Many brands are obsessed with content. Visit any brand site or social page, and you’ll find content galore. Videos, infographics, long-form and short-form. Yet, time and time again, the consumer has made it abundantly clear that they’re not particularly interested in hearing from brands. In fact, recent research shows that on a scale of impact, reviews and recommendations from friends and family far outweigh brand messaging.

    Back to our CX audit. As I mentioned, there were gaps and drops in the customer experience, but none of those gaps were content issues. They were all to do with dropped balls and poor experiences at a multitude of real world and digital touchpoints. Boots CMO, Pete Markey, was recently quoted as saying: “Your customer experience is your brand, so focus on getting it right consistently.”

    Marketing moments of truth that matter

    Therein lies the real challenge – being consistent across the board. How much effort are you putting into your marketing vs. your customer’s experience? In a recent CX report published by Rogerwilco, we took a look at the moments that mattered, ranking them by importance to the customer. These moments of ‘truth’, when done well, act as marketing channels all on their own, earning positive reviews that count more than a brand’s self-praise. Surprisingly, moments like unboxing and delivery (in the ecommerce space), were far more important than the search and purchase phases. Many ecommerce brands tend to focus on the search and purchase phase, while neglecting these final phases.

    Ask the right questions

    The questions you need to ask yourself are, which phases in my customer’s  journey am I ignoring? Have I mapped my customer’s moments of truth? Have I taken time to strategise and understand my customer, or am I simply ploughing ahead with creating content and marketing that has no value? I would also implore you to stop using the term ‘audience’. You don’t have one. You have a customer. Start focusing on the things that matter to your customer.

  • Relook at marketing strat going forward

    Relook at marketing strat going forward

    If you’re predicting trends, I say good luck to you. I don’t want to play. I wish you well, I hope you enjoy yourself. I’m going to take the financial investors approach to predictions this year… “there’s just not enough data”.

    With trends articles usually, we tend to see the same things repeated over and over again, year in and year out. Things like mobile and user-generated content will continue to rise, and so on. It’s all very predictable, it’s all quite boring. I’m not against looking back though, and after the year we’ve just had, I think it’s important to interrogate and re-evaluate marketing efforts.

    Do you know your audience?

    Honestly, if all you know about your audience is their age, gender, and monthly income, you don’t know your audience. But, if you have some psychographic data generated by some good conversations with them, then good for you, you know your audience a little bit better. No matter where you sit with your audience knowledge, I have some bad news; you may have to go back to the drawing board.

    During 2020, the sale of luxury goods dipped dramatically while consumer electronics shot through the roof. People have become far more focused on simplifying their everyday lives than they are with wearing trendy fashion items. The luxury brands that are weathering this storm are the ones that actually did focus on sustainability as opposed to paying lip-service to it. If your brand doesn’t make everyday life easier or makes some kind of positive and tangible difference to the world, you might be in trouble.

    Community has also become a prioritised topic. Absence makes the heart grow fonder and isolation has definitely highlighted that community is essential to wellbeing. Brands that are focused on the single individual, using terms such as  ‘individuality’ as part of their brand promise will find that they no longer resonate with their audiences like they used to. So, relook at your audience. They might be different people.

    Social channels

    A couple of things have happened here that are noteworthy. Firstly, social has become a very solid sales channel. It’s something that Facebook has been trying to push for a while now and many brands are starting to see very tangible results from Facebook. Tools like Facebook marketplace have come into their own, but another factor is all-round better content and targeting from brands.

    The biggest external contributor to sales across multiple social channels is lockdown. As I mentioned earlier, people have become isolated and they’ve turned to social media to fill those emotional gaps.

    But, and here’s the thing, maybe you don’t need ALL those social channels.

    I know, I know, you’ve been told you need a presence… but really? Do you? Is it a solid strategy to just exist on a platform without getting tangible results? The trend is moving towards optimisation, culling the under-performing channels and focusing on creating better content for the platforms that remain. It’s a big step to take and it requires a shift from a reach/engagement mindset to a conversion mindset. As I said, I don’t want to be the trends guy, but it’s worth considering.

    Mindset

    While looking at trend reports does have some uses, and can sometimes be quite inspiring and insightful, remember that each brand ecosystem is different. The thing is, you need to keep your ear close to the ground and an eye on the value your marketing efforts generate. This is a rule of thumb. If you only remember one thing from this article, let it be this: throw away your checklists because you’re not in Kansas anymore. I am certain that 2021 will be a harsh master and if you’re not paying attention, it will decimate you.

  • The pitfalls of targeting digital audiences

    The pitfalls of targeting digital audiences

    I was looking at some data from a client’s ecommerce platform, and I noticed something rather shocking. The segment that all of their budget and creative was aimed at (the millennial) was only responsible for 50% of sales. The other 50% came from a range of age groups who seemed to be returning to the platform simply because they liked the product. A sample of one is hardly compelling, but it did take me on a journey of seriously considering how we set up our target audiences, especially when it comes to using these broad labels like ‘millennial’ or ‘Gen Z’.

    I’ve sat in countless agency presentations where the word millennial is taken out and paraded around like it has some kind of meaning. As I delved deeper into the topic, I realised that any sort of generational classification is actually quite meaningless. My starting point was looking at how people’s attitudes shift as they move through different stages of their lives. While most of my research centred around the physiology of the human brain and how it ages, I will spare you the science and get to the point. As we age, our brain changes. As our brain changes, our priorities change, our abilities change, and how we make decisions changes.

    Younger people will be more open-minded. Older people will be more set in their ways. It has nothing to do with your generational label and more to do with how old your brain is. As you get older, you’ll move from being like a millennial to being like a Gen X’er to being more like a baby boomer. The labels and descriptions should change as you do, but they don’t. If you’ve been labelled a millennial, you’ll be one until the day you die. All the descriptions that go with it will be yours forever. And I think it’s plain wrong.

    The labels are wrong, but what has that got to do with my ecommerce example? It goes beyond labels. Not only is your generational label irrelevant, so is the year you were born. Looking at adoption rates for new technology, it takes older people as little as four years to catch up and use the technology adopted by younger people. While you could say that younger people are technology-centric, we’re almost on a level playing field, all things considered. If you are using age-based targeting, you need to very carefully examine whether you’re not losing out on a much broader audience. If your sales are coming from other age groups despite your marketing efforts to a single group, you might be sitting on a goldmine. A shift to more inclusive audience targeting should be on the cards.

    In the ideal world, you’d want to leave all this third-party audience nonsense behind you. Third-party data (like Facebook and Google) should only really be used to generate first-party data (stuff that you own). Constantly using other platforms to drive your sales means that you’ll always be at the mercy of the tech giants. Once you have your dataset, you can break free of their rules, regulations, and generally poor quality of the data provided to you. You can move into a world where you can grow and segment your data where and when you please.

    Back to the ecommerce data I first mentioned, 15% of the sales came from owned data. That dataset is not a priority, and yet it is generating sales for a far smaller budget than the social budget. Social generated just 1% of the sales. Leave generational and age targeting behind. Build your own audience database. Get rich.