In a digital training course held by the
wonderfully insightful and charismatic Heather
Albrecht in Sydney last year, I enjoyed my first real delve into
digital marketing and its driving forces.
The key questions on everyone's lips are where is
it going, and how do we participate in a way that is going to drive the success
of our business? The "it" here of course refers to broader social and
media trends that are driving consumer choices; creating new contexts in which
we must interact in order to engage with potential consumers.
Reflecting on previous consumer trends reveals
four distinct phases or models of engagement:
1. Advertising led
2. Through-the-line integration
3. Media neutral (big idea)
4. Participation
It is this most recent 'participation' phase
which represents new models of engagement and is largely influenced by the
types of devices we are interacting with. Participation
branding is defined as:
"How
a brand engages and behaves with consumers across channels and over time to
earn their attention and participation
through motivating experiences.
How
consumers engage and behave with each other
across channels and over time to influence each other and create motivating brand stories."
In the training session, Heather identifies four
screens; represented by the television, laptop, iPad and iPhone. The specific
motivations and uses for each may vary but often media is also consumed across
each of these platforms, the new accompanying trend here of course being
mobile.
It is crucial to understand the technological
driving forces behind media consumption and shifting consumer habits, however,
it is also important to understand the social behavioural trends being formed
from these.
Significant trends in how consumers participate
with media:
1. Self-expression/sharing
2. On demand
3. Personal
Audiences are no longer relatively-passive
consumers of media. They are active authors and publishers of their own content
(blogs, tweets, wikis), enabled by new platforms and fuelled by this social
trend of self-expression and sharing. New technologies have also made on demand
programming more accessible, including through mobile web/gaming, multiple
screen-viewing, tivo and more. Audiences are now able to select their viewing
material and largely control this experience, choosing what to include and
importantly, exclude. Alongside these two trends is also that of
personalisation, which has the potential to fragment your audience
significantly when going out with a broad communication message. With the
growth of self-expression and on demand in this online media space, there is
also a greater yearning for personalisation of content and applications.
In order to connect with consumers, to create
engagement and interactivity, brands must find a way to add value.
Audiences must find you appealing in order to choose to include you as part of
their online experience. We must find a way to personalise their experience and
invite them to engage with us in order to earn their attention.
From a strategic point-of-view, digital channels
have a role to play at every phase of the purchase funnel (awareness,
consideration, research, trial, purchase, post-purchase experience, repeat
purchase, advocate). Digital is an important part of every marketing strategy, a
realisation currently being made by most companies, large and small. The real
value for advertisers lies in earned media;
all the word-of-mouth the brand earns through user-generated content, comment
and sharing. In order to earn this we need to create both bought (paid for
advertising) and owned (content assets the brand owns) media and a great idea
to bring it all to life.
This is our challenge and it's an exciting one.
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