Creative Design Agency Yakima aren’t one of those agencies who says that digital has reinvented branding. But, it most certainly has changed the way brands are delivered and ultimately developed in the mind of a customer. No longer built on fleeting encounters with advertising, packaging or single sales experiences, brands are now the sum total of what we think, what we do and how we do it. Not a few short above-the-line headlines. But a long-term structured delivery of content from a number of angles – opinions, sale pitches, entertainment, and education. And, in a variety of formats – static, interactive and experiential across e-mail, web, video, viral, and ambient. Today, brands are sought out, they are researched and they are interrogated on a much deeper level.
To compete in this environment, strong brands need to be saying the right things, very often and very well. This about constant, creative content distributed across multiple channels, including those where someone else takes your message and makes it what they want it to be.
Some are calling this content marketing. It’s the dream of a well-oiled creative content generating machine which includes both clients and agencies, all supported by flexible, adaptable, yet stable and secure web technology that ensures the right messages are getting out at the right time, to the right people, with little fuss. But it rarely works this way, if ever.
Herein lies the challenge, but also the opportunity for the digital industry. Digital is sold as fast, flexible and targeted. In fact, in a great many large organizations, digital is slow, painful and one dimensional. Getting one version of your story out in the public domain is hard enough, but tweaking it to be specific for niche audiences is a rare achievement. Also, digital is meant to be experiential, but many brands are struggling to define what they are in the current environment, let alone build meaningful experiences that resonate with customers to the extent that they change perceptions and influence decision making.
To progress digital as a discipline and get it doing what it’s intended to do, some work must be done on both client and agency side. Here’s where we focus.
1. Understand how brands are built today and instil this ruthlessly in those around you. It’s deeper than it used to be and it’s much harder to get to those that you want to speak to – and often, by the time you’ve reached them they’ve already made some decisions about you. Know that the best way to make people change their perceptions of you is to help them form opinions about things that are important to them. How can you impact them as a person? Can you make their lives better? Can you make their job easier? If yes, do that in your marketing.
2. Commit to commitment. Fight ad-hoc planning. You cannot change opinions over the long term if you are only ever planning (or, more likely reacting) to what you are doing next week. Invest in digging deep. Deep enough into your business and into the lives of your customers to build personas, filled with lots of actionable insights. Use these to build brand messaging platforms that have legs beyond a one-off campaign. And then plan to work this with a structured communications program. Again, and again but with constant creativity.
3. Develop a long-attention span. Building brands and making substantial changes to customer perceptions takes time. However, the traditional lessons of frequency and repetition are getting lost. Brands are impatient these days. Run with something for six months, and yes internally, it feels like a long time. But to customers, they’ve hardly noticed.
4. Act like a publisher. Short-term is bad. But stale is worse. Publishers develop themes. Then they create editorial schedules that find as many creative ways of talking about that theme as possible. Then they fight to meet their schedules. Agencies and clients need to learn this craft and then apply creative thinking around the wide variety of digital mechanics that can be employed. Some strategic, some tactical. Some online, and yes some offline. And, all focused on what you are trying to achieve.
5. Look at business structures. Working this way is partly about instilling discipline into the marketing process. However, it’s also a structural question. Agency staff and client-side marketing and sales staff must be either recruited or trained to facilitate insight and content generation. It must be in their job descriptions and the business structure and incentives must be put in place so that they are given the best opportunity to do so. The fact is that right now, the responsibility for this task is limited to a few – and almost no one else has a vested interest in supporting these people.
6. Understand the range of technology available and the role each plays. There isn’t any one solution for everything online and you are very definitely going to need a few approaches. Don’t buy an enterprise content management system if you need to make substantial structural changes to your website frequently. But equally, don’t use WordPress if your goal is managing brand and content consistency across multiple countries. This is not easy. In fact, it’s a minefield. What is easier though is instilling a clear and unbreakable rule that governs the relationship between marketing and IT. Decide what you want to put in front of your customers, in what format. Then make sure everyone agrees. Then sort the technology platform. Do it in that order and never back to front, and you will always be better off.
Without question, digital marketing has increased in sophistication and credibility over the last decade. But, it also has a long way to go. In terms of development as a discipline, it is a baby. And, in terms of the industry’s ability to deliver, we are still very fragmented. What we must keep in mind from the very beginning is that we are communicating with a busy public, fighting to be noticed and to maintain a clear point of difference. And that means we must think strategically. When digital channels become an afterthought or corners are cut, then they lose everything that makes them great.
Meeting the potential that digital promises will require continued restructuring on both agency and client side, education by both sides about using the right technology at the right time, and the incorporation of traditional marketing skills that are still lacking to a large degree in digital thinking. This is what we do here at Evasive so let us help your company move forward with the times. Evasive Media
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