Using lotteries as a marketing tool
Suppose you’re the new director of customer experience at British Airways looking to build a stronger emotional connection with your brand. How do you do it?
If you’ve been told once, you’ve been told a thousand times: Consistently offer a fun and enjoyable experience. Easier said than done, right? What’s new, unique, and appealing that’s low cost, drives traffic, and improves sales conversions and relationships…and hasn’t been done already by your competitors?
The advantages of lotteries
Believe it or not, some marketers are starting to think about offering entry into official nationally run lotteries. When it conforms to rules and legalities, giving away lottery tickets as promotional gifts can make a lot of sense. In fact, it’s surprising that more marketers haven’t figured out their potential to make an emotional connection with customers and prospects, and incorporated…
By
September 11, 2015
Is Customer Experience the New Branding?
Something I've been thinking about for some time is the relationship between brand and user experience. I've come to realise that for me, when it comes to exposure in an online world, there really is little distinction and it's hard to determine when one process starts and the other ends - or even if there are start or end points... Working as Digital Director for a brand consultancy, more often than I and my team are tasked with making a brand "come alive" or "get their story across" online. For me these client driven terms have some weight and value, but for me the key challenge for our digital team is making their "brand values, promises and customer expectations, clearly and appropriately experienced online".
Branding Before Jesus
To help explore this new shift in branding, it's important to explore the origins of brand. Staring in 2,000 BC there was branding, farmers' cattle and livestock were branded…
Stop whining and start winning with the power of integrated digital brand experiences
Aren’t marketers often a bunch of whiners? I listen to myself sometimes, comparing how complex marketing is now, the speed of change... I can make it sound negative, and it isn’t, in a post-digital world brands have never had opportunity like this. Honestly, I believe that.
Post-digital? It makes me smile when I hear that, only because I agree with the term. We have watched ‘digital’ be both the underdog to above the line advertising and, from a channel perspective, have seen how it’s come to dominate through search and social. And now I feel it’s totally irrelevant to even talk about digital. It’s risky, dangerous and misleading. We are post-digital for one simple reason…
Everything is digital
It really is. We know of course that mobile and social media have changed the ‘how’ and ‘where’ in people learning more about…
Five Rules for integrating a contact centre effectively
Once the preserve of the contact centre, customer experience has become the focus of the modern marketer.
In 2013 a Forrester Report called on brands to ‘Build Seamless Experiences Now’. It argued that, by failing to deliver a seamless dialogue across multiple access points, brands are degrading their value and eroding customer loyalty.
This need to deliver a seamless dialogue has ensured that marketers’ priorities have changed and increasingly they are looking to technology to help; Gartner predicts that by 2017, the CMO will spend more on technology than the CIO.
Yet marketing technology alone will not address the shift to multichannel customer communications.
By rights, the contact centre should be the axis of the customer centric business model. It is the most common two-way touch point customers have with most businesses. Yet, in most organisations it is disjointed with the rest of the business, sitting…
The power of branding in the multi-channel retail world
Victor Hugo once said that “no army can withstand the strength of an idea whose time has come”. In many ways brands can be equally as powerful, inspiring loyalty, love and of course sales! However it’s easy for companies to overlook the power and value of their brands in the frantic search for smarter technology and smarter ways of doing business.
Good branding holds the key to cutting through an increasingly fragmented media landscape to ensure a product is front of mind at the moment a consumer decides it is time to buy.
Outlined below are a few tips on branding in today’s more complex and fast moving world.
Enough with the complexity already!
In Scott Brinkers Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic below we see a bewildering array of different marketing technology vendors but what’s striking here is that each of these companies represent a technology…
Optimise your content by understanding the power of the brain
Sharing long-form content across social media channels in formats including video, infographics, blogs and other media is becoming more of an 'art', as companies are understanding the importance of 'humanising the brand' to reach higher levels of engagement.
This art or skill is through 'storytelling' and it's been around for years. Only last year, Hubspot announced that it 'would be the biggest business skill over the next 5 years'.
Creating content is becoming more of a 'science', taking into consideration how the brain processes information - did you know that 'the brain processing images 60% faster than words'?
Expert members can learn more in our new guide to Brand Storytelling which will give you a structure and examples for creating brand stories.
[si_guide_block id="50995" title="Resource download – Brand Storytelling" description="Our new resource from Brand Psychologist Jonathan Gabay."/]
Take a look at Onespot's infographic which explores this…
Making the Internet human again
By 2020, the amount of digital data detailing just about every aspect of our lives will exceed 40 zettabytes. To put that figure into perspective, 40 zettabytes is 40 trillion gigabytes. (Estimated to be the equivalent of all the grains of sand on all the beaches on earth.)
Little wonder therefore, that a child will grow up finding the notion of total privacy as foreign as blue bags of salt in crisp packets, or bottles of Tipp-Ex. People from all stratas of society in our high-tech dystopian world are resigned to the fact that details of their personal lives are increasingly being left to the stewardship of an ever-decreasing circle of power-brands.
In this pseudo-Orwellian world, Data Scientists have reassigned the 20th Century title of ‘Mad Men’ to ‘Maths Men’ (poignantly pointing to the fine-line between intellect and insanity).
Former giants of creative advertising like David Ogilvy would, no doubt find…
They say when opposites attract, they create intense chemistry. Remember when Romeo met Juliet, when Harry met Sally, Beauty fell for a Beast, and how Tom and Jerry always went after each other? They are good apart but when they are together, they create magic.
When online stores and services began revolutionizing the way people do business, it is but expected from traditional businesses to sound the alarm. Come to think of it, why would anyone bother to brave traffic just to get a new pair of pants when it can be ordered online and delivered in the comfort of their homes? But as it turned out, tradition and technology should not be on different sides of the spectrum. They are opposites that when meshed together will create new trends and opportunities.
It seems more and more traditional business owners…
Updated Webcertain 2015 Global Search and Social Report
Value: [rating=4]
The international search and social findings report from Webcertain spans 32 countries and measures social media engagement in terms of account ownership, visitation and usage. It has a snapshot of each market and shows which platforms are important, which you certainly won't know unless you're a specialist in these areas.
Did you know that the Japanese are the least socially active - on average they spend 30 minutes a day on social networking sites? Or that Baidu is not the sole search engine in China, as Qihoo 360 degree (Haosou) search engine accounts for 30% of the market.
2015 report Findings on Global Search & Social Report
Our commentary: This well-established report will be of particular interest for marketers responsible for international marketing since it helps puts some key data surrounding…
Optimising and connecting customer touch points
Marketing expert Dr. Jeffrey Lant, says that in order to penetrate a consumer’s consciousness with your brand, and to make significant penetration in a given market, you have to make contact with the prospect a minimum of seven times. These seven “touch points” don’t have to be dedicated sales outreach, but refer to the different ways consumers interact with your brand: browsing your mobile site, for example is a touch point, as is receiving a flyer or trawling through your social channels.
Although this “Rule of Seven” is not absolute, it gives marketers an idea of the kind of effort and variety it takes to make an impression on a potential customer.
With the dawn of the digital age, the numerous channels and devices available for interaction mean that optimising each consumer touch point is more important than ever. It has…
