putting digital at the centre of brand planning and strategy
TRANSCRIPT
Why digital (and content) needs to be central in brand planning and strategy.
June 23rd, 2010
We are Bourne. A digital agency not satisfied being called a digital agency.
New York/London/GlasgowChad Butz: Planning [email protected]@chadatbourne
Introductions/Background
A digital agency not satisfied being called a digital agency
• 3 offices: New York, London, Glasgow
• 40 planners, marketers, creatives, technical developers, writers, and project managers
• Delivering work in over 25 languages
• Providing strategic planning guidance and operational excellence across all digital channels
• www.wearebourne.com
• @wearebourne
• Planning and Strategy
• Content/Editorial Planning and Development
• Demand Generation
• Campaign Localization
• Marketing Technology
• Social Applications
• Interactive Customer Experience
A digital agency not satisfied being called a digital agency
Experience building brands and increasing sales for national and international brands
State of the market: Brands are not keeping pace with customers
• The way brands are researched and selected by customers has changed dramatically
• Customers seek out information, they ask hard questions and they want to know as much about why and how you do what you do, as what you do.
• To compete in this environment, strong brands need to be saying the right things, very often and very well. This is about constant, creative content and experience, distributed across multiple channels, including those where someone else takes your message and makes it what they want it to be.
The marketing landscape has changed faster than many realise.
• Digital is meant to fast and flexible but a great many businesses find it slow and painful
• Digital is meant to be personalised and targeted - CRM, Lead Nurturing, Micro-segmentation, 1-to-1 Marketing etc – but most businesses struggle to get one version of their story out effectively
• Digital is meant to be experiential, but many business don’t know how to carry their brand strategy across deep and meaningful customer interactions.
• Digital is meant to be results driven, but driving digital through a customer lifecycle is rarely accomplished
Digital has come a long way, but it’s still has a long way to go
Imperatives for moving forward
Marketing must ruthlessly instil the reality of today’s customers into their businesses
• Brands are no longer built on fleeting encounters with advertising, packaging or single sales experiences or promotions
• They 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
• Requires a long-term structured delivery of content and experience 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.
• Marketing planning models are still rooted in traditional cycles, that were driven by rules that don’t exist online
• Digital has actually fostered a culture of ad-hoc planning
• Brands cannot change opinions over the long term if they are only ever planning (or, more likely reacting) to what they are doing next week
• Brands are impatient these days and the traditional lessons of frequency and repetition are getting lost. Run with something for six months, and yes internally, it feels like a long time. But to customers, they’ve hardly noticed.
Digital demands commitment to commitment
• Business must dig deep. Deep enough into their own businesses and into the lives of their customers to build in-depth personas, filled with lots of actionable insights
• Brands must 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 programme that combines useful and relevant content experience with sales and marketing messages
Brand must invest in insight generation
• Brands that are online are publishers and they must act like it
• Publishers develop themes and create stories. 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
• Staff must be either recruited or trained to facilitate insight and content generation. It must be in their job descriptions.
• 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.
Digital demands that business change their behaviour and their structure
• Some of the greatest opportunities in marketing, and in digital involve integration with offline marketing
• Digital experiential and event integration
• Marketing and sales automation for lead nurturing and customer relationship development
• Data planning and integration with online marketing systems
• Content strategy and social media are a natural fit, but this is not being leveraged
Integrated marketing planning must become a reality
• Marketing has so far failed to take control of digital technology strategy
• For large organisations, the technology decisions that IT departments make can limit the capabilities of marketing and sales for up to a decade if the wrong decision are made
• There are two types of technology: 1) That which enforces consistency and control; and 2) that which enables flexibility and speed. They mustn't be confused.
• It is always better to get to market first with lightweight technology and backfill once you are know what everyone wants
Businesses must do strategy first. Then Technology
The opportunity to embed digital into brand strategy and planning
• Standard brand guidelines are not enough
• Brand strategy and development must extend to:
- PR and sales strategy
- Content and editorial strategy
- Customer experience objectives
- Social media themes
- Customer lifecycle messages
- Rules of engagement for handling two-way customer communication
Brand strategy must extend much deeper
• Audit: Expand brand audit and project scoping to include all digital assets
• Research: Ensure the initial research and discovery process captures internal and external insights relevant to digital campaigns
• Creative Concepts: Expand creative concepts to a wider range of online executions to ensure they work in an online environment
• Messaging: Expand messaging concepts to social media, virals, blogs, website architecture, and e-mail campaigns to show that messaging strategy legs to work over the long-term and with the volume of content demanded online
Five areas to integrate digital into the brand planning process
• Businesses need help in educating and structuring their organisations for digital delivery
• Changing behaviour around business and marketing planning
• They need to develop a resource pool to facilitate content and experience generation
• They need guidance in choosing technology that enables marketing and sales
Strategy must address marketing capabilities, behaviour and business structure
