Overwhelmed by the rate at which the marketing environment changes? It can be tough to stay in touch with industry trends, but these six steps will ensure your campaigns continue to hit the mark.
- Articulate one clear, unifying idea
Amid a fragmented media landscape, we don’t have the luxury of dispersing multiple concepts across a diverse range of media simultaneously. Instead, treat your message like you only have one chance to impress it upon an audience.
Your idea cannot be disparate or in a network of spread-out messages. You must integrate all your marketing to express one large, concise idea. Develop a clear outline, connect the brand to a compelling, easily digestible insight, and pump it out as a succinct message.
- Deliver that message bespoke but consistently across every relevant channel
Given the breadth of platforms, successful campaigns take one idea and deliver it in a way that is consistent yet bespoke across customer channels. Make sure it fits the format, but don’t alter the concept.
The “rule of seven” may muster an eye roll from a modern marketing audience, but it’s effective in impressing the importance of clarity and frequency in this context. Make sure your message can fit the conventions of all the desired platforms and push it out evenly.
- Know your audience
Just as the internet has fuelled the transformation of regional subcultures into a globalised amalgam, so too has it transformed almost everything we thought we understood about demographics. They don’t amount to much if you don’t take genuine efforts in determining the needs and desires of those societal cross-sections.
Identifiers like age, gender, race and location no longer shape the fence around a particular marketable group. Instead, we have disparate tribes that are defined by their vociferous passion for ritual, habit, language or belief. Behaviour in the online space vary wildly between groups and need to be intimately understood in order to be harnessed.
- Talk to your customers through the things they are passionate about
Today’s consumers are hard to reach at the best of times. However, everyone has things they plan their lives around. Find out what your customer’s passion points are and show up genuinely in that space.
In these spaces, you need to talk to your customers, not at them. Often, they expect to see marketed content at certain times and, through this anticipation, are unlikely to engage with it. By meeting them on their own terms of use, you can subvert this desensitisation. Make your message just as entertaining and engrossing to your target market as the content that sandwiches it.
- Consider the growing Chinese and Indian communities
As some of the fastest growing communities in Australia, these groups can make or break brands and can open up sales channels overseas and yet, most brands either don’t talk to them or simply translate their campaigns.
Besides tuning social media targeting to geographic regions or common interests, you can also target audiences based on their language. Consider China’s social media behemoth WeChat. Quite simply: if you’re not there, your brand’s cultural credit is compromised.
- Engage your staff in the cause
In this world of marketing, staff advocacy is often part of the job. The wins you score for your clients represent your own successes, too. But when trying to harness your employees’ social presence for the advocacy of your own brand, it isn’t always so easy.
Consider offering “ambassador” or “partner” opportunities to loyal staff willing to engage on social on your brand’s behalf. Keep your own social media curated and business-forward to lead as an example.
Jack Watts, CEO, Bastion Collective