Tackling digital for many brands hasn’t always been a priority. But 2020 is the year many brands face a ‘digital dilemma’. Ignoring digital trends and being content with lacklustre strategies can cause detrimental consequences to your brand, business and eventually its survival.
‘Getting with the times’ is no longer a suggestion but a necessity. Considering our current socio-economic climate audiences are turning towards digital media for their entertainment and education. Converting customers into sales is essential for profitability; this is why we’ve come up with a conversion strategy planned specifically for 2020 and its unique hurdles.
Our approach is based on three main pillars:
- Positivity
- Conversation
- Conversions
Our pillar of ‘positivity’ focuses on providing consumers with messaging that strives to inspire and uplift. It is no secret that we are experiencing unprecedented levels of uncertainty and negativity looms ahead for all businesses and brands. Consumers are constantly being bombarded with negativity; whether it is through the harsh actualities of current affairs or future predictions, many are sick of the bleak reality that awaits us all.
As a brand, enforcing a theme of overall positivity through your content can capture the interest of many consumers. Turning toward positive, practical messaging is sure to benefit you in the long run. There are many ways in which you can tackle this. For example, changing your tone in the short-run, boosting creative content and attempting to have a more active social media presence are a few changes that can have a lasting impact on your audience.
A conversational tone, filled with empathy and understanding, can highlight how your brand cares more about your audience than about merely making a sale. A savvy consumer is bound to take note of this and is more likely to opt for your brand in the future simply since you have now positioned yourself as a more personalised brand. Genuine human connection is more powerful than any marketing campaign.
Social media is being used as a source of communication but also as a means of ‘news’. Since offline behaviour will begin online, using social media as a network to convey relevant and accurate information is in your best interest. Bring your business to them, inform them of the latest product updates, offers and keep them continuously involved. Keep in mind that creating hype around information is key. Think of weekly news bulletins, FB events, online product launches and even virtual showrooms!
Conversations are another pillar of importance. How many times have you made a spontaneous decision on a big purchase? You’ve likely asked opinions, researched, read reviews and questioned the value and necessity of your purchase. By opening dialogue as a brand, your customer can directly reach out to you for the most accurate information. Most decisions are made online; our advice is to be ready for an online conversation with a potential customer. Whether this is as a helpful online assistant, a chatbot ready to direct your customer to necessary resources or a forum for open dialogue is up to you.
The last pillar of our strategy relates to conversions. Conversions are the final part of your sales funnel and are very important as finding more ways to improve business conversions means positive cashflow for your business! You need to be at the top of your game in terms of organic and paid search traffic as searches are a sure-fire way for you to convert customers into business as the intent to buy or the last moment of truth can be captured quite accurately here. Amplifying search marketing activities and thinking about expanding your market beyond your immediate locality will serve you well in the long run.
2020 is the year that digital has become the norm; our offline behaviour is now dictated with what we do online. Following our strategy is sure to position your brand at the forefront of digital marketing. Get ahead of the curve by getting yourself digital-ready today!
The market never sleeps.
Clichéd as it sounds, it is the truth
Ever-changing market conditions require a new generation of marketers. They also require strategies that are agile and adaptable to the world around them. It is only through this agile approach to advertising that brands and businesses can hope to prosper. Digital marketing transformation is essential for survival and relying on purely creative solutions is simply not enough for an agency to grow,especially in this new normal climate .
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We are part of a society that keeps evolving and with Moore’s law speeding up faster than ever before, we can expect major changes in the way we learn and consume. This has a massive impact on the way we market our products as well as services. The modern consumer does not want to be ‘sold to’. Instead they would like it to be a consultative learning process.
Gathering what everyone has to say is an effective way to reach out to a target audience by delivering them what they want. Hence, the way forward for businesses will be to adopt a collaborative and participative approach to story making and storytelling which makes everyone a storyteller across multiple platforms. This process is called transmedia storytelling.
Year 2010: Connected Chaos
We are part of a society that keeps evolving and with Moore’s law speeding up faster than ever before, we can expect major changes in the way we learn and consume. This has a massive impact on the way we market our products as well as services. The modern consumer does not want to be ‘sold to’. Instead they would like it to be a consultative learning process.
Gathering what everyone has to say is an effective way to reach out to a target audience by delivering them what they want. Hence, the way forward for businesses will be to adopt a collaborative and participative approach to story making and storytelling which makes everyone a storyteller across multiple platforms. This process is called transmedia storytelling.
Responsive vs adaptive design vs Transmedia StoryTelling
The world of advertising was dominated by responsive designs which basically meant that content moved dynamically in a single layout that resized based on the screen size. However, adaptive design on the other hand uses a set of fixed designs that changes from the server side itself.
Transmedia storytelling is not too difficult to understand. In simple terms, it is a technique where a central narrative is told across multiple platforms. Each part of the story is complete, thus, satisfies the end user. At the end of the day, transmedia storytelling delivers rich content after a cumulative process. George Lucas from the likes of Star Wars is a major proponent of this technique. The success of this franchises was based on transmedia storytelling.
How does it help?
Transmedia storytelling is not a standalone campaign. It is fully participatory and has the ability to create a social trigger. The target audience to which the story is told will be actively involved as they become storytellers themselves. Everyone has a story and it is a story worth telling. This eventually makes us a facilitator for storytelling than being a storyteller.
Why does it work?
People enjoyed telling stories and listening to stories since the dawn of time. If such a habit has not died over time, it is obvious that people share a common undying interest in stories. However, in order to ensure that transmedia storytelling works, you need to make sure that the storytelling process is collaborative and that your audience has a chance to contribute, participate and immerse themselves.
A practical use case from Sri Lanka
Our story is about small and medium scale businesses and how it was delivered across multiple channels and how the influencer became the storyteller. We were able to create a platform called #SMBFriday, for Citizens Development Business (CDB), that allowed various small business owners to tell their stories to a wider audience. The idea was to create content about these SMB’s and in order to amplify the content, CDB threw in a free digital promo budget too, for the chosen SMB’s every friday. These business owners were able to create a social trigger where other small and medium scale businesses wanted to tell their story as well. Ultimately, this approach is helping CDB to gain the trust of this audience and to position themselves as ‘a true friend’ of the business community.
The approach taken was ‘non salesy’ and the idea was to help the ecosystem grow by getting them to become storytellers through the SMBFriday platform.
To further amplify this, CDB created a microsite that enabled to collate all the video content and encouraged anyone to recommend an SMB that they thought would deserve to be part of this programme.
A mix of digital channels including Facebook, Google and YouTube were chosen to take this message even further. The conversations, shares and mentions have started to roll in with ease and user engagement is at an all time high and CDB is clearly changing the way digital storytelling is done!
The headline might sound like potential click bait but the context is very much true! We are a bunch of marketers working for a company called Enfection– yes the name’s a bit funky but we try to crack the word ‘viral’ quite a bit, hence the name.
Toyota is part of our belief network (yes we don’t call them clients or customers) and we have been helping them achieve some short term lead gen goals recently by running some tactical digital marketing campaigns within certain segments. They were so impressed (that’s what we think anyway) with the results, they offered us a chance to help them manage their day to day social media activities too.
Like I mentioned earlier, we are a bunch of nutters and I don’t say it lightly. Some of the ideas we brainstorm on a day to day basis are actually stuff that might put even Putin and Trump to shame. However, we usually don’t discourage anyone in the team from coming up with any idea at anytime. If you put a software connotation to us, we are the open source version of a digital ad agency.
Anyway, getting back to the story. During one of our weekly catch ups with team #Toyota, we learnt that they wanted to get the word out there about a bus that they were planning on launching. Yes a bus! Toyota Coaster to be exact. The target audience was a typical Sec B to B+ bus owner, fleet owner or even a corporate user. We then looked at ways of making this bus a bit more interesting and creating a bit of awareness about it.
A major event in the local calendar was around the corner and usually during this time, most brands tend to create interesting gifs, spend heavy on ads or create online games pertaining to that event in order to get some engagement going. However, we wanted to do something different and looked at some of the things that was intertwined with this event. What we realised was that certain folk tunes called ‘Raban Sural’ played through a unique drum known as the Rabana got top recall amongst this audience. It was an age old tradition that stemmed from the ancient times of the kings in Sri lanka or even before.
