The Intersection of Branding and Digital Communications

Blogger: Laura Kern, APR, Orlando Area Chapter

Ensuring your brand is relevant in digital communications happens when you shift your consumers’ mindset, own your funnel, and enter the future of customer experience.

David began his talk by asking the audience to identify their target audience in three words. What are your three words?

Our brands have multiple audiences, which makes this so hard and the complexity of audiences continues to grow in the more diverse our organizations become.

Digital communications allows brands to target their audiences to such a sophisticated degree that the spend in digital will overtake television spending within the next few years.

Shifting your customers mindset

The top three consumer mindset shifts your brand is looking for:

1. From grabbing attention to holding attention

Use attention grabbing headlines & photos, then hold their attention with a longer (2 minutes max) video.

2. From multi-channel to integration
   PRO TIP: Don’t copy & paste your post to all your social media platforms. Fuse your channels together and lead your customers down the pathway to your brand experience.

3. From customer messaging to customer experience
   The process to develop your position and value proposition messaging needs to be faster, because you need to quickly move to the experience your brand offers your customers.
   
   

If you ignore one piece of this marketing pie your brand will not deliver the customer experience you’d want.

Owning the funnel

“Marketing is not a function, it is the whole business seen from the customer’s point of view” – Peter Drucker

The digital funnel looks similar to the traditional marketing customer funnel, with a few new tactics and messaging goals.

Attract customers to your message & brand

• Engaging Content
• Pay-Per-Click
• Search Engine Optimization
• Social Media

Convert customers

• Social Media & Video
• Retarget Customers – deliver digital ads directly to people who have visited your site

PRO TIP: One of the most efficient and least expensive ways to advertise. The ability to target digital ads to your customer database on social media (via Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn) and then create lookalike audiences to target similar customers on these platforms is exponentially more effective.

• Reviews
• Thought Leadership

Close the deal with your customer (who is easily distracted)

• Engaging Content – see more below
• Email Marketing
  • Database/CRM marketing is becoming more sophisticated and allows you to know where your customers are in the funnel so you can speak to them at the right time in the right way.
  • Software to help:
    • Basic: MailChimp & Constant Contact
    • Better: Hubspot
    • Best: Marketo, Salesforce, Pardot & Eloqua
• Website Experience/E-Commerce

Inspire your customers

Your brand has an opportunity with your customers at this phase to retain and turn them into brand advocates.

• Customer Service
• Email Marketing (yes more!)
• Loyalty Programs
• Reputation Management

Content, Content, Content

Parody content is necessary. Be efficient in this content.

Designate more of your time and effort to create 10x Content that will truly make your brand stand out.

Utilize the data social media offers to understand what content speaks to your audience and how to optimize that content.

Future of Customer Experience

Think of the best customer experience brands, like Starbucks and Amazon. They understand who their customers are and surround them with technology that is not over complicated to deliver great customer experiences.

Secret Sauce for Customer Experience:
1. personal & unforgettable content
2. simplify
3. be brave to experiment #FPRAAC @sparxoo

— Katarina Dos Santos (@katarina_813) August 8, 2017

Action Items:

• Harness customer’s’ unique data and prove to them you understand their exact needs
• Prove less can be more
• Experiment

Data needs to be on your agenda. The more you can capture data the more you can do with it.

David Capece