Thriving in the Audience Age
Here are a our top 5 ‘to dos’ for thriving in the age, when the end-user is now in control of what he sees, likes and shares:
1. PUT THE CONSUMER’S NEEDS FIRST
Yep that’s right, don’t think sales first and foremost; put the consumer first and the product second. Consumers, and I include myself in this, no longer accept being sold to. We want products and services to serve either a need or to be enjoyable, and ideally both. This is why experiential marketing and social media are a match made in heaven. The era of advertising for advertising’s sake has well and truly passed.
2. BE AUTHENTIC. BE RELEVANT
And this brings me on to our second point, if your campaign has no purpose other than to market your product, the end user won’t buy into it. Full stop. So, listen to your consumer. Find out what they want and give it to them!
3. THINK THROUGH-THE-LINE, NOT ABOVE OR BELOW
Campaigns need to be both promotional and advertising-led. To achieve this, in a culture where many businesses are still divided into traditional marketing departments and sales and merchandising teams, ensure every aspect of your brand is connected to the campaign and, more importantly, every team member and stake holder is connected to your campaign! Collaboration is the name of the game.
4. CONTENT, CONTENT, CONTENT
The decade known as the Twenty-Tens is all about content, so use as many different content formats as exist (or better still create a new one) – article, images, illustrations, films, animated GIFs, cinemagraphs, boomerangs, Instastories, Snapchat and Facebook Live etc. – and disseminated them across all channels. The next big thing is creating campaigns for WhatsApp… so watch this space.
5. TAKE ANOTHER LOOK AT YOUR BUDGETS
In the past, implementing change meant spending additional money, but one benefit of the advance in digital technology, is that you can produce more quality for less. Instead of blowing 80% of your budget on three key campaigns a year, look at pooling comms budget from across different departments and keeping individual budgets low by working with agencies that can optimise on production and post-production costs. By working this way, you can create more campaigns a year, which is essential at a time when brands have gone from needing 20 key brand images annually to content 365 days a year.