Shifting Tides of Digital Campaigns

Times are changing and the types of digital medium are changing with it too. How do we ride the wave to a successful integrated marketing campaign? Read on to find out how.

7 steps to a successful integrated marketing campaign

Step 1: Clear understanding of your target audience

By now you should have identified your target audience for your product/brand. Next is to find out what your target audience is motivated by.

Yes, you have done your research on what your target audience like and what motivates them, but when was the last time you did a check on the relevancy of that result? Times are changing, so are the preferences of your audience. A regular research and survey on your audience/market is crucial to ensuring that your campaigns remain relevant.

Step 2: Picking a channel

Selecting the right channel is the next step. Different mediums reach out to different group of people. For example, if your product is targeted at teenagers aged 15 to 19, ads placed on LinkedIn and Facebook will never reach them because they are not present on these channels.

Knowing the strengths and weaknesses of each channel is as important as choosing the right channel. For example, ads on TikTok should be short, sweet and impactful right from the second the ad starts playing. Due to the usage patterns on TikTok, users tend to swipe away videos that do not catch their attention straight from the start. However a compelling 5min video on Facebook might keep the typical user on Facebook wanting to know more about your brand.

Step 3: Consistent look

Having a consistent feel and look to the visuals of campaigns and social media content will build a strong brand identity. Things like company logo, colour palettes, typography, imagery styles and composition styles form the baseline of your brand’s visual identity.

This is Headspace, a meditation app. They have done an excellent job in creating a strong visual identity by keeping the visuals consistent throughout their website as well as their Instagram page.

Step 4: Clear and consistent content that can be repurposed

Now that you have got your consistent visuals and content, make full use of that content that you have created! Created a video and uploaded it onto your Youtube channel? Get it linked up on your Facebook page, Tweet about it and post a link on your Instagram story. Let your content be seen, heard and shared by your followers.

Another way to repurpose content is by taking an older content (make sure that it is still relevant) and repurpose it into another form of media. Here’s an example repurposing:

Jay Baer: Short Videos into Multiple Content Pieces

Jay Baer, founder of Convince and Convert, creates three-minute informative videos on a range of topics. To maximise the potential and reach of the videos, the company repurposes his videos into several formats and content pieces to publish on his site. These include:

• iTunes audio podcasts
• Blog content for the Convince and Convert website
• Blog content for the Jay Today website
• LinkedIn Pulse posts
• Posts on Medium
• Promotions through various social channels

Step 5: Integrated messaging

Jeremiah Wong

Email: jeremiahlukewong@gmail.com

Address: Shamelessly advertising himself Ave

Tel: 8123 4567

Contact Me Here:

• WordPress
• Instagram
• LinkedIn

Give your customers several avenues to contact you. When there is an issue with the product, people want to complain it to the business and be heard. If they cannot reach the business, they will take it to the public and start complaining about your business. That will lead to a public relations problem. One or two might not be much, but if there are 100 people talking negatively about your brand, that’s going to leave a mark. Which leads us to the next step.

Step 6: Keeping the Marketing & PR teams in sync

Leaving a way for customers to contact you will prevent a public relation issue. However, both marketing and PR have to work in sync to ensure that the messages sent out to the public is consistent. This is to ensure that the brand standard is kept the same throughout the campaign.

As many companies hire an external marketing agency to create and manage marketing campaigns, it is important that both the PR team and external marketing agency are on the same page.

Step 7: Track your campaign results!

It is crucial to know where you did good or bad. Especially if you are running a digital campaign to boost in-store sales, tracking the analytics of the usage of coupons will give you an insight of which campaign is giving you the best return on investments.

What Makes Viral Marketing Viral?

We all know a good and captivating campaign spreads faster than Covid-19, but what makes a viral marketing campaign viral?

There are 6 principles known as STEPPS, Social Currency, Triggers, Emotion, Public, Practical Values and Stories. It is not necessary for all 6 principles to be applied for a campaign to be viral, as long as the few principles applied are executed well.

“Build something 100 people love, not something 1 million people kind of like.”

— Brian Chesky, Co-Founder & CEO, Airbnb

In this post I will be sharing more on the Emotions, Stories and Public principles.

Emotions

Emotions is one of the most powerful tool in the arsenal. There are 6 main primary emotions (surprise, fear, sadness, joy, disgust and anger).

The table above is just a general idea of the categories of the 6 primary emotions and is subjective to individuals as well. These 6 emotions can be categorised in to a matrix, whether it is positive, negative, high or low arousal.

Source: https://movies.stackexchange.com/questions/37345/why-are-two-of-rileys-five-emotions-in-inside-out-male

As humans, we do not like to be instructed to do something. We want to be entertained, we want to feel emotions and be moved.

Not all emotions are good for the outcome of your viral marketing content. Negative emotions might end up bringing your brand name into a bad light. However if done right, negative emotions can also be very impactful and generate a lot of positive publicity for that campaign (e.g. deforestation situation and how the company is helping with restoration works).

With that being said, the king of viral marketing has to be none other than Old Spice. They come up with the most wild commercials and tagline that evokes emotions to their target audience.

Most importantly, will your brand’s name evoke these emotions long after the ads have been aired? A short and impactful ad is a hundredfold better than a long and boring ad. Keep your target audience thinking of your brand with impactful message and visuals.

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Practical Values

When we see something useful, be it an interesting fact or a useful instructional information, we will share it with our friends and family.

By sharing these information, it makes satisfied that it might have helped someone or even strengthen bonds among the community. This sense of satisfaction is good enough to get people to share the content.

Source: https://www.dollarshaveclub.com/content

This can be incorporated in your company’s website or newsletters. For example Dollar Shave Club added articles and posts talking about shaving and other personal hygiene matters. This is highly related to what they are selling to their customers and will come in handy when their customers are new to shaving and starting out with their subscription service.

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Public

Source: https://tenor.com/view/apple-brand-gif-5394587

Design a product that stands out and markets itself. Apple has done an excellent job at this. Have you heard an Apple user that says “I own a laptop” or “I own a smartphone”? Chances are they will say “I own a MacBook” or “I own a iPhone”. Apple has created such a successful job on their product eco-system that users feel that they are part of this community of Apple users.

Source: https://tenor.com/view/nike-gif-8046301?utm_source=share-button&utm_medium=Social&utm_content=pinterest

Another successful brand is Nike, some Nike products don’t even have the word “Nike” on it. The iconic “swoosh” symbol has done a tremendous job at marketing Nike’s brand and image.

Making It Big With Mobile Marketing

“I don’t own a smartphone” said nobody, it is rare to find someone without a smartphone these days. One of the main issues faced by marketers is the physical form of a smartphone screen. It is much smaller than billboards and TV screens, ads have to be design with that in mind.

To be able to adapt to the mobile marketing environment, you must first understand the types of applications created based on the Degree of Consumer Knowledge and Trigger of Communication.

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Mobile Marketing Applications

Strangers & Groupies

The main type of marketing strategy used for these 2 segments is mobile ads.

Mobile ads such as banners, idle screen ad and in-game ads are used, but the real challenge for is to ensure that the ads are well designed for the small screens on smartphones. Another point to take note is the duration of the ads, based on an article from Forbes, the attention span of Millennials is only 12 seconds and for Gen Zs, 8 seconds.

Groupies, Victims and Patrons

To get through to these segments, mobile coupons can be disseminated. These coupons can come in the form of e-mails, text messages or even push notifications from applications

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Mobile Social Media Applications

With the rise of social media, marketers have started using these platforms more frequently to reach their desired target audience.

Four ‘I’s of Mobile Social Media

Individualise

Individualise your activities to account for your consumers user preferences and interests. This will allow you to catch any trends that are up and coming!

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Involve

Involve your consumers by engaging them with conversations. Not only will they feel like a part of a community, through feedbacks and reviews, you will be able to find out points to improve on.

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Initiate

Allow users to generate content, this will make the application more interactive and intuitive. With the creation of user-generated content, you can also analyse the trends that are happening now or about to happen. This enables you to push out relevant marketing campaigns to the users.

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Integrate

Being “around” your consumers’ life enough to not be a nuisance. In order to retain the users of your application, find ways to keep them coming back without begging them. To do that is to integrate multiple purposes into your application. One successful application example will be Strava.

Strava is a multi-sport tracking app, it tracks the distance you’ve cycled, jogged, hiked, etc. This app also allows you to share your workouts with your friends and followers, it also comes with monthly challenges as well.

The best part about these successful applications? They’re FREE!

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Road to Success

TL;DR: The first step to your success in mobile marketing depends on the quality of your app and ability of the app to retain your users.

Search Engine Optimisation, Pay To Win?

Getting Started

Searching for a way to improve your search engine optimisation (SEO) game? Look no further.

What is SEO? This word has been trending for many years and businesses are spending lots of money on SEO.

An example of what a bad and a good website looks like. Less is best, too much clutter on your webpage is never good.

SEO is the process of improving the quality your website to increase its rankings and visibility for relevant searches. The higher the ranking your webpages have in search results, the higher the chance of attracting potential and existing customers to your business.

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“Effective Search Engine Optimization Requires a Commitment, Not a Campaign.”

– James Reynolds, SEO Sherpa

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Getting Noticed

Sure, spamming the word “Search engine optimisation” a million times on your website is going to increase your keyword density of your website. Is the keyword being used in quality content or is it just a bunch of white texts on white background?

Google knows if you are using Black Hat techniques to boost your site rankings, and “punishes” these sites by deindexing them. This means that these websites will not appear on search results until they are properly formatted and go through the whole process of indexing again.

The Dos

These are White Hat techniques that businesses can adopt to boost their website, the right way.

• Quality Content
  • Nothing screams louder than good ol’ quality content.
• Appropriate Use of Metadata Tags
  • These tags are hidden in the code of your website, use them wisely and avoid spamming it.
• Keyword Research
  • Using the right keyword is crucial to reaching your target market. Selecting the right keyword will boost your rankings to the right target market!
• Quality Inbound Links
  • Link up all your business’s social media accounts to your website for genuine connections from your potential and existing customers.

• Instagram
• LinkedIn

The Don’ts

These are Black Hat techniques that many businesses have used to boost their site rankings. Many have been penalised or even removed from the search engine index.

• Hidden Content
  • Filling your page with tiny keywords or using the same colour as the background.
• Meta Tag Keyword Stuffing
  • Meta Tag Keyword Stuffing, also known as spamdexing, is done by spamming keywords in your webpage that makes it look unnatural.
• Doorway Pages
  • A doorway page is plain HTML code flooded with text filled with intended keywords. These doorway pages are not visible to the visitors of the site as they are redirected instantly to the intended page that has actual content.
• Link Farming
  • Link farming is done by creating multiple websites with the sole purpose of boosting another website’s search rankings. This is against the guidelines of search engines.

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You’re all set!

All it takes is genuine and good quality content paired with appropriate links to your website and you are good to go. Social media is one of the best and cheapest option to gain exposure. Click here to read more on social media marketing!

Sliding into the DM (Digital Marketing)

Digital Marketing Proposal

Let’s start from square one. To get your ideas approved by the management, you will need a solid proposal to convince them. So let’s jump right in to the key features of a digital marketing strategy.

A digital marketing strategy consists of 3 key features: Value proposition, target marketing strategy and positioning.

Source: https://medium.com/@joneswaddell/where-bxp-values-collide-581290d20e90

Value Proposition

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What benefits or values does your brand or product bring to your customers?

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Source: https://www.educba.com/target-market-strategy/

Target Market Strategy

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We keep hearing the same phrase “You need to get your brand/products heard and seen by your target market”. However, how do we select a target market?

Having a large and generic target market will be detrimental to your marketing campaigns. As it will reach customers that are not interested in your product at all.

“You need to differentiate your target audience between those who could be a customer and aren’t ready to buy from those who are ready to buy.”

The image on the left shows an easy way to narrow down your target market.

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Source: https://beloved-brands.com/2012/05/06/brand-positioning/

Positioning

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In order to have a successful brand positioning, you have to:

1. Understand what your consumers want
2. Understand what your company’s and brand capabilities are
3. Understand how each competitor is positioning their brand

Once you have got that down, the next step is to come up with a positioning statement that will resonate with your target market and something that is different from your competitors. However, make sure you are able to deliver what is said in your statement.

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Selecting A Strategic Approach

After defining the 3 key features of the strategy, next phase is to select a strategic approach.

Source: https://www.davechaffey.com/digital-marketing-glossary/race-marketing-planning-model/

It’s a RACE

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Once the plan has been finalised, next up is to decide on how to Reach, Act, Convert and Engage (RACE). Here are some important questions to consider…

Reach: How are you going to build awareness through online and offline channels?
Act: How can you engage the audience online?
Convert: How can you achieve higher conversion rates (from marketing campaigns to a successful sale)?
Engage: How can you build customer relationships in the long-run? What keeps them loyalty your brand?

While planning each section of the RACE framework, it is important to have a good mixture of online and offline communication tools to ensure that the right customers receive your marketing campaigns.

Tada! You have yourself a solid proposal now!

Do let me know your thoughts on building your digital marketing proposal and if you would do anything different. Can’t wait to connect with you in the comments!

Market segmentation, dig deeper.

We all know the 4 basic market segmentations, demographic, psychographic, behavioural and geographic. But what if I tell you there is more when it comes to digital marketing?

“The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.”

— Peter Drucker

Consumer types

From an article by Hodis and colleagues, there are 4 market segments on Facebook:

The first step to a successful marketing campaign is to create a customer persona followed by selecting the right target market segment. Being able to select and harness the potential of the right segment is crucial to an effective marketing campaign.

Attention Seekers

The first segment is “Attention seekers”, this segment consists of celebrities including social media influencers. These are people who generate a lot of content but do not consume much in return. They are all about posting and updating on their lives and events around them. They are usually engaged by bigger and global companies to create brand awareness and endorsements. Here’s an example of a brand endorsement by a celebrity (totally not biased :))

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by ROSÉ (@roses_are_rosie)

Devotees

The second segment is “Devotees”, these are your hardcore social media users. They are almost online 24/7, posting, sharing and just spending time on social media in general. They are the ones posting about everything that they do #lunchtime #sohungry #IWokeUpLikeThis. Smaller businesses usually engage this segment as it will give them the most exposure as the brand ambassadors will be constantly generating content.

Entertainment Chasers

The third segment is “Entertainment Chasers”. This group of people are best described as passersby. They scroll through their feeds to be entertained by cat videos or people arguing over toilet rolls during the panic buying phase #CoronaTime. The best way to market to them is through contests, quizzes and giveaways, here’s one from a local business in Singapore.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Hook Coffee (@hook_coffee)

Connection Seekers

The fourth segment is “Connection Seekers”. These are people who don’t generate much content but consume the most. The typical connection seeker is one that wants to be kept updated on the social lives of their friends and idols. They are found in Facebook groups liking and commenting on community posts.

1 – 2 – HIT!

Is it possible to target multiple segments at once you say? Definitely! Here is an excellent example of a marketing campaign that targets multiple segments mentioned above.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by apple (@apple)

Apple’s #ShotoniPhone campaign is still on going and one of the most prominent marketing campaigns out there. It encourages iPhone users to post photos taken using their iPhones and hashtag #ShotoniPhone to stand a chance to be featured on Apple’s official Instagram page. This increases exposure for Apple as well as engaging the community to submit user generated content.

Can you think of any other campaigns that are successful at capturing multiple segments?

Social Media Marketing, will it stay for good?

As said by the world’s wealthiest man and CEO of Amazon, “It’s hard to find things that won’t sell online”. The ever growing market place of e-commerce leads to tougher competition and new challenges for marketers. The COVID-19 pandemic has cause a great shift in shopping patterns. Consumers are turning to online shopping due to lockdowns all over the world, an increase of 15-30% was observed in most categories.

“The Internet is becoming the town square for the global village of tomorrow.”

— Bill Gates

PARIS, FRANCE – DECEMBER 12: Bill Gates arrives for a meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron (Photo by Aurelien Meunier/Getty Images)

Social media marketing is no doubt one of the fastest way to reach your target audience in this age of e-commerce. The demographics of social media users consists of a vast variety of people. It is hard to find someone that doesn’t have any sort of social media account, even my grandmother has a Facebook account.

With the various social media platforms available to marketers, it is important to know the demographics of users using that particular platform. For instance, Facebook is used by 84% of 25 – 30 year olds but only 51% of 13-17 year olds (Sproutsocial, 2020). Knowing the user demographics of a social media platform will allow marketers to increase the cost effectiveness of their ad campaigns by ensuring that their message is seen and heard by the targeted audience. 

Social media is one of the most popular channel for businesses of different sizes to advertise and promote themselves. From small and medium enterprises to multinational corporations, social media is the best way to tailor marketing campaigns to reach a very specific target audience group.

Source: https://digitalagencynetwork.com/burger-king-makes-it-to-the-duct-tape-trend-and-makes-fun-of-maurizio-cattelans-120000-banana/

Ever wondered why coffee advertisements keep popping up on your timeline after you’ve bought a coffee machine online? This is one of the many reasons why social media marketing has become one of the most powerful tool to the marketing industry. Just by having access to your ‘cookies’ advertisers can view your recent purchases or search history and direct related advertisements to your social media feed.

source: https://cheezburger.com/7649071104/give-me-the-computer-grandma%23

Impacts of COVID-19 on social media marketing

Social media usage has risen tremendously due to the pandemic. As working or studying from home has become a new normal to us, we have been reliant on social media to connect with one another. As marketers, should we continue to push the advancements in technologies of social media marketing? Should we rise above the noise and clutter by making a bold move to a different medium?

COVID-19 Digital marketing E-commerce Google Integrated Marketing Marketing Campaign Market segment Mobile marketing Plan Search Engine Optimisation Segmentation SEO Social Media Social Media Marketing Strategy Target Market Value Viral marketing