INDUSTRY GUIDE
MULTICHANNEL MARKETING Define, Design and Deliver Campaigns with Impact Part Three: The Delivery
Multichannel Marketing Part Three: The Delivery
2
Multichannel Marketing Part Three: The Delivery
CONTENTS Introduction 4 Web and mobile 5 Social media
9
Advertising
14
18
Video
20
Offline
22
3
Multichannel Marketing Part Three: The Delivery
INTRODUCTION You have an audience. You have a story. You have a very cool and compelling way to make your point. Now you need to get it to the right individuals, groups or markets in the way they want to receive it. Better yet, you want to get it to them from multiple angles. You want them to see you EVERYWHERE that matters - just when they’re ready to receive the message. This guide provides insight on developing your individual channel strategies, integrating and optimizing those channels as part of a multichannel campaign and taking advantage of new and emerging trends and platforms.
4
Multichannel Marketing Part Three: The Delivery
WEB AND MOBILE Mobile has been the biggest catalyst in recent years in transforming marketing and the way we communicate with audiences online. Last year, online traffic from mobile devices surpassed desktop traffic for the first time – a trend you cannot ignore. Mobile use is so ubiquitous that to not include content and user experience for mobile within the construct of your campaign is to completely miss out on the majority of your potential audience. Particularly since Google’s latest algorithm, launched in April 2015, includes “mobile-friendliness” as an official ranking signal for mobile searches. This change is both a challenge and an opportunity for marketers to jumpstart their mobile user experience. Marketers who make the mobile-friendly updates will increase their organic search ranking while also tapping into the ever-growing mobile community. Marketers cited mobile as the fourth most important channel – after social media, advertising and web – for their multichannel campaigns in our recent multichannel marketing study. Evidently brands do recognize the need to invest in mobile. According to Adweek, 86 per cent of all time spent on mobile devices is spent inside apps. This means marketing messages must reach users in the apps that are relevant to them. Fortunately some of the most common mobile apps are offshoots of long form websites - Google, Twitter, Facebook, CNN, Yahoo, HuffPost.
5
Multichannel Marketing Part Three: The Delivery
Mobile-first approach Adopting a mobile-first approach with campaigns is gradually becoming the norm for many brands. When identifying your key campaign channels, mobile user experience should be front of mind. According to the latest Deloitte Mobile Consumer 2014 report, 72 per cent of smartphone and tablet users expect the same quality of content experience across all digital devices. So it’s now more important than ever to ensure your campaign content is accessible and optimized across all devices and channels. It’s important to consider context and brevity when creating mobile experiences. Mobile content viewing is typically very short, impacting content cadence and format. Adapt your messages to reflect device or app restrictions, and organize your content in ways that can be piped into multiple mediums. This also means ensuring your website delivers personalized experiences for users. The key is to create a content hub (i.e. CMS) and consider the interaction layers – when and where do people want content? Your website’s information architecture (IA) should be tailored according to how and when your visitors want content to be served to them. There are two fundamental elements required for this: comprehensive audience persona mapping (as discussed in Part Two: The Art) and a tailored CMS.
6
Multichannel Marketing Part Three: The Delivery
CMS is the backbone to the business CMS is now the backbone to the business, facilitating communication and engagement across the full spectrum of internal and external stakeholders – media, suppliers, staff and customers. With the need to continually enhance mobile user experience and provide greater personalization, CMS and mobile optimization investment should be a key priority to get the right foundations in place for successful multichannel campaigns. Ask yourself:
• • • • • • •
Are you serving up informed, contextual, mobile-friendly entry point content to maximize search? Is your site responsive and optimized across all devices? Would an app help enhance your mobile strategy? Do you need to review your IA? Is your website easy to navigate and persona driven? Is it interactive enough? Is it fully integrated with your other key campaign channels?
Ultimately, always have the user experience front of mind when thinking about how to evolve your web and mobile strategies and what platforms and tactics to invest in. Mobile also brings a new set of opportunities for direct messaging and sales. Apps like WhatsApp and Snapchat can give can give brands permission to directly communicate with customers in a closed forum.
7
Multichannel Marketing Part Three: The Delivery
Mobile advertising According to eMarketer, Mobile advertising in the US will jump to more than 60 per cent of all US digital ad spend by 2016, surpassing desktop digital ad spend. Advertisers can finally reach almost anybody, anywhere and everywhere, simply by targeting their mobile phone. Typical mobile ad types include text ads, image ads, app promotion ads, video app promotion ads, rich media ads, and HTML5 ads.
8
Multichannel Marketing Part Three: The Delivery
SOCIAL MEDIA In December 2014, the top eight social networks collectively drove more than 31 per cent of overall traffic to websites, proving social’s value as a traffic and revenue driver. If you’re not leveraging social as an essential layer of wider multichannel storytelling efforts, then you’re already behind your competitors. Social media was cited as the primary channel for investment – and the channel considered most important as part of multichannel campaigns – in our recent multichannel marketing study. But there are a lot of questions when it comes to social networks and multichannel marketing: what social media networks should you use? How should you tailor campaign messaging and assets across social networks? How often do you promote content? Should you opt for paid or organic social media marketing? How should you target industry influencers? The truth is that there are no one-size fits all answers to these questions. Each market, and business, is different and will require different approaches. A strategic, data-driven approach to social media is vital. Identifying the social channels most relevant to your brand, industry, campaign and target audience will help maximize social media ROI. You’ll achieve much more effective results by focusing efforts on core channels rather than using every available channel for the sake of it. Reach is irrelevant if you’re not getting in front of the right people and driving quality engagements and, ultimately, conversions.
9
Multichannel Marketing Part Three: The Delivery
Know your goals and find what works The key is knowing what you want to achieve with your social campaign from the outset. While your overall goal may be to increase sales or brand awareness, it’s important to set smaller, albeit significant, KPIs to help you realize these larger ambitions and better direct your campaigns. These specific, tailored KPIs will allow you to monitor referral sites and discover whether a relationship between platforms and conversions exists. For more on using measurement and analysis to track and optimize campaigns, see Part 4: The Results. Tailored content is crucial Identifying the content formats that generate higher engagement amongst your target audience across social media channels is essential. As is packaging that content in a way that appeals most to them. Does your audience respond best to stat-based, image-heavy or quote-based posts? What tone of voice and length of messaging resonates best with your audience? Equally, think about the use of imagery. This, of course, must align with your central campaign theme, but it must also be aesthetically engaging enough to stand out in your audiences’ news feed and capture their attention. Above all though, content should be short and succinct. Your readers should have a firm grasp of what your content is and what it discusses from the headline alone.
10
Multichannel Marketing Part Three: The Delivery
Choosing the right channels Maintaining a strong social presence across the ‘big four’ – Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google Plus – is essential for long-term brand awareness for most brands. Since these channels will likely have your largest follower bases they should be leveraged as your primary campaign social channels. However, layering activity across secondary social media channels tailored to your specific campaign goals, audience and content, is also important. For instance, image-centric platforms, such as Instagram, Pintrest and Tumblr are useful at events, for infographics and for businesses selling products directly to consumers. Leveraging newer video-based platforms such as Vine and Periscope, alongside YouTube and Vimeo, can help inject more creativity and innovation into campaigns and reach more niche audiences. Professional and business-based platforms, such as Slideshare, can help target specific B2B and more niche industry-based audiences. It’s important to get the right mix of social channels and cater your content to emphasize that network’s natural strength in a way that promotes your goals. Cross-promotion across platforms Tools like Hootsuite, Buffer and IFTTT help streamline the process of cross-promotion, allowing you to promote and monitor a single piece of content across multiple channels. Although remember to tailor the promoted content’s rhetoric to better resonate with a given audience.
11
Multichannel Marketing Part Three: The Delivery
Forward planning Populating and maintaining editorial calendars may feel like an arduous task, but mapping out key activity, messaging, target audiences and timings is crucial. Not only does it ensure that your social media activity and messaging is in line with wider campaign planning to maintain a cohesive and consistent approach, but it also helps streamline social media publishing in the long-term. Paid or organic? Ultimately, you should aim to use both. The increasing monetization of social platforms means networks are trending towards paid content. It’s becoming increasingly more difficult for brands to make an impact via organic activity alone. With social networks investing more and more heavily in platform upgrades, social advertising capabilities are becoming much more sophisticated, allowing brands to target audiences more effectively than ever before. Paid campaigns, however, are still intrusive to the end consumer. To overcome this perception, brands need to add value through targeted thought leadership content, offers and invitations. Today’s savvy consumer will not fall for the obvious or ‘hard sell’. The best course of action is to develop a strategy for both paid and organic activity as part of your campaign. By monitoring interactions, and testing multiple ads, you can hone in on the most successful content and deliver value to your audience. You can also get a better idea of what content will
12
Multichannel Marketing Part Three: The Delivery
work by simply asking your audience. After all: no one wants to see useless content. Influencer marketing Brands are investing more in influencer marketing programs to leverage key influencers to help drive targeted social engagement as part of wider multichannel campaigns. Key influencers can help amplify your campaign message and add credibility by sharing your content with their highly engaged, targeted networks. Effective influencer marketing requires investment and a strategic long-term approach. Influencer management tools can help you identify and map relevant target influencers but building and nurturing those relationships takes time. For more best practice advice on developing an effective influencer relations program, read our Influencer Relations eBook.
13
Multichannel Marketing Part Three: The Delivery
ADVERTISING Marketers cited advertising as the second most important channel – after social media – for their multichannel marketing campaigns, in our multichannel marketing study. Since multichannel marketing relies on delivering a consistent message to an audience as efficiently and effectively as possible, it makes sense that targeted advertising is central to multichannel marketing. In today’s highly fragmented and fast-moving digital media landscape, it’s important to stay up-to-date on the latest trends and innovations that can help benefit the content and message by distributing them to the most relevant people, in the most compelling ways. Media Tactical media plans should start from a strong strategic vision. What is the ultimate campaign goal or objective? What does the consumer or buyer look like? What is their path to purchase, and what are the key barriers from awareness through to consideration and ultimately purchase? How can you best overcome those barriers? Once those primary drivers are understood, you need to refer back to your audience persona research to identify media consumption patterns. Is your target audience heavily involved in social? How much video do they consume – what do they like to watch, and what is their device of choice? What media channels are they heavily using? The media channels utilized should take into account not only consumer habits, but also your working media budget. You want to be able to create enough impact in the marketplace with your messaging, and some channels such as television or print can sometimes require substantial budget in order to achieve that.
14
Multichannel Marketing Part Three: The Delivery
Within digital, there is a broad mix of tactics and targeting that can be used to reach consumers. This includes video, display, paid search, and native advertising. Some of the benefits of each are:
• •
•
•
Video: Video is great for sight/sound/motion and one of the higher-impact tactics online for awareness. It is also one of the more premium media placements online. Display: The backbone of digital advertising, display banner advertising can take many forms. Rich media has widened the canvas for creative storytelling, and targeting capabilities mean we can put our message directly in front of the right person, at the right time, in the right place. Paid search: Many people start and end their online research with search. Using paid search can help get in front of people actively searching for terms related to your brand. It is best used to fulfill demand versus generate demand. Native: Native can be a great tool in content distribution, and follows the form and function of the user experience in which it is placed, like a news feed, video player or webpage.
15
Multichannel Marketing Part Three: The Delivery
When deciding on which partners to work with, there are some primary criteria to review. While there can be some custom/unique variables for each client or campaign, the following are broadly utilized as a baseline:
• • • • • •
Targeting and data capabilities. How specific can we be with targeting within interests? What first, second and third party data is available to segment consumers further? Transparency. How transparent are they with pricing and inventory sources? Cost models. Are they offering competitive pricing to others in their category? Do they use a fixed or dynamic pricing model? Proprietary technology. What is unique about the company compared to others in the space? What can we achieve with them, that we cannot with others? Proven Success. Have we seen success with similar programs or objectives? What is their reputation in the marketplace? Analytics. How easily can they plug into analytics resources, and/or how granular can they get with data?
Once your media is in market, it is important to continuously monitor the performance of the campaign relative to your campaign goals or objectives. You should not ‘set and forget’ a media program. Optimizing your in-market campaigns by re-allocating budgets to top tactics, adding/removing publishers, and testing new tactics or placements will ensure that your media is working the hardest it can for you and your brand. This should be done at least weekly for any performance or direct-response campaigns, and monthly for awareness or reach-based campaigns that don’t have an immediate sale or action tied to them.
16
Multichannel Marketing Part Three: The Delivery
Analytics also plays a key role in your media planning. It’s important to ensure you have all of your KPIs aligned and that your media tracking is properly set up so that performance is being accurately measured, and receiving the proper attribution. This will allow you to gain valuable insights to carry over to your next campaign or initiative. For more on effective measurement and reporting read Part Four: The Results.
17
Multichannel Marketing Part Three: The Delivery
EMAIL While spam filters have become a pesky barrier to delivery, email continues to be an important means of communication for reaching target audiences. In the Salesforce Marketing Cloud 2015 State of Marketing Report 74 per cent of the 5000 plus global marketers surveyed said that they “believe email produces or will produce ROI in the future”. There’s no doubt about it, email is here to stay - for both business and consumer audiences. Email is a cost-effective channel for delivering your campaign message and can serve as a key driver to other channels to guide the user through the campaign journey. Email marketing platforms are continually evolving to facilitate integration and syncing with other platforms, such as your CRM, CMS and social channels, to make it as simple as possible for marketers to influence the user journey, acquire new data to grow marketing lists and track results in real-time. However, effective email marketing requires that you follow the rules and adhere to best practices so that you don’t frustrate your targets, get lost in the noise, and – worst of all – break the law. In the Salesforce Marketing Cloud 2015 State of Marketing Report, marketers ranked ‘email content and design’ as “the most effective aspect of an email”. As discussed in Part Two: The Art, developing compelling messaging and visualizing your story creatively is critical. You need to engage your audience from the second they open your email,
18
Multichannel Marketing Part Three: The Delivery
yet also deliver your message succinctly, guiding the reader easily to the next step in the campaign journey. Key points to remember:
• • • • • • • •
•
Effective subject lines: Avoid words or phrases that might trigger spam filters and use A/B testing to optimize subject lines for higher open rates. Segment and personalize: As with any marketing channel, tailored versions of your message should be created for target audience segments and personalization used wherever possible. Be brief: Your email is much more likely to be opened or responded to if it doesn’t require more than 30 seconds to read through. Integrate: Leverage video, social sharing, and other forms of content packaging and distribution to get your message across and guide the user to other campaign channels. Don’t forget text versions: Text based messages are less likely to get caught in spam filters. Keep data clean: Pay attention to list hygiene and cleanse your data regularly. Abide by the rules: Know your spam laws and follow them. Invest in a suitable platform: Use a reputable email distribution or marketing automation software package that will maintain your opt-outs, provide you with deliverability metrics, and help you report on the overall success of your campaigns. Monitor results and optimize: Track results in real-time to identify what works and what doesn’t and optimize email marketing efforts throughout the campaign.
Above all, the key is to ensure your email content, subject lines, design and targeting tie in with your overarching campaign story. It’s essential to maintain a cohesive message across all channels for more effective results.
19
Multichannel Marketing Part Three: The Delivery
VIDEO Video is becoming more and more influential in both the B2C and B2B path to purchase, so should be integral to your campaign delivery strategy. More than 1 billion unique users visit YouTube each month, spending more than 4 billion hours watching videos and, according to Google, 70 per cent of B2B buyers watch online video when conducting research for business purchases. However, video was cited as the least important channel for investment in our multichannel marketing research. Video is continually evolving – both in terms of format and how it is distributed and consumed. It’s important to stay on top of key video trends and platforms and explore how they can be used to produce more creative, impactful video content as part of your campaigns. With the mass volume of video content available to audiences across a plethora of channels, making sure yours stands out and resonates with your target audience is vital. Half of all YouTube views are via mobile devices. This trend extends across other video platforms, websites and streaming services. This statistic further reinforces our earlier point that brands now need to think mobile-first across all channels and platforms. Native cross-device authentication, where users switch between devices whilst watching longer videos, is becoming more and more common. Social media integration for video is becoming a lot easier for brands. Facebook is continually evolving its platform to facilitate seamless video viewing via the News Feed – and, of course, capitalize on boosting ad revenue – and Twitter recently launched native video, amongst a host of other upgrades to the platform. Vine has also recently upgraded its platform to improve sharing options via Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr. Instagram has also rolled out recent upgrades to improve the quality of video content via the platform to allow brands to easily
20
Multichannel Marketing Part Three: The Delivery
create shorter, bite-sized micro-video clips to appeal to audiences’ shorter attention spans. Closed social platforms, such as Snapchat and WhatsApp, also present opportunities for brands to target specific communities by narrowcasting niche content for higher relevancy. One of the latest trends gradually becoming more mainstream is interactive video. Videos with sharing options, enhanced calls to action, surveys or those that incorporate gamification, provide more personalized, engaging experiences for viewers and allow you to guide the user from one channel to another more seamlessly. Live streaming is another major new trend thanks to the recent launch of competing apps, Periscope and Meerkat. This is a simple, cost-effective way of integrating offline with online to amplify reach and maximize opportunities to create online buzz around big events. However, as brands experiment with live streaming, it’s important to factor in legal restrictions in terms of copyright infringement, for instance at concerts or sporting events. As with any marketing channel and tactic, tracking results to gauge how engaging your video content is and how effective it is in driving users to complete your desired call to action, as part of your campaign journey, is essential. Traditional metrics such as views, shares and click-throughs should be supplemented by ‘dwell time’ and ‘completes’ to effectively track attention. Video is becoming much more integrated into user experiences, rather than existing as a standalone medium, so it’s crucial that you’re maximizing the opportunities available to take your campaign to the next level.
21
Multichannel Marketing Part Three: The Delivery
OFFLINE Our multichannel marketing study revealed that marketers allocate approximately 63 per cent of their marketing spend on online channels versus 37 per cent in offline activity. Arguably, there is no such thing as pure ‘offline’ marketing anymore. Events, direct mail and print advertising all require an online aspect that must be considered for your campaign to achieve your goals. Events provide great opportunities to integrate online with offline to maximize investment across channels. For example, if you’re going to a trade show or conference, you can use digital means to drive attendees to your stand. More local or exclusive events will benefit from the integration of digital promotion and more traditional outreach such as telemarketing. Plus, as mentioned previously, incorporating live streaming at the event will help amplify reach online. At the event itself, there are various tactics you can use to enhance the space and bridge the gap between physical and digital. Tweetwalls, online polling apps, facilitating a presentation from your CEO via hologram are just a few examples. Be focused though. You want to leverage and integrate channels that your targets consider important or appealing. If your targets feel a certain conference is important and tend to congregate there year after year, then you need to factor that into your campaign. Whether that’s having a presence on the show floor, running an after-hours hospitality event, or storming the conference’s social channels, you need to be present. If your story requires more education to get the point across, you might want to consider local seminars or novelty events to create the opportunity for in-person discussion and evaluation. Or, if your audience largely works within a regulated industry that prohibits access to social media or has
22
Multichannel Marketing Part Three: The Delivery
firewall policies stricter than most, perhaps a direct mail campaign is the right way to reach them. Again, it goes back to the audience – understanding their habits, their routines, their preferences, and business drivers will help you determine the right delivery vehicles for getting your story across. So, now that you’ve developed your campaign plan and delivery strategy, it’s not merely a case of executing your campaign and evaluating results postcampaign to present to the board. Read Part 4: The Results to learn how to develop an effective measurement strategy and framework to gain a holistic view of cross-channel results, and create actionable insight to optimize your campaign throughout the campaign cycle.
23
Multichannel Marketing Part Three: The Delivery
With contributions from:
About us LEWIS Pulse is the digital marketing team of LEWIS PR, a full service global integrated communications agency. LEWIS Pulse specializes in social media marketing, search engine marketing, advertising, web design and development, analytics, content and mobile marketing. LEWIS Pulse serves a full range of client industries including technology, financial services, automotive, consumer, travel, sports and healthcare. Find out more at www.lewispulse.com or contact us at hello@lewispr.com Š Copyright LEWIS Pulse. 2015 all rights reserved.
25