"There is nothing more important than understanding the customer journey and delivering personalized experiences to your customer" Michal Szaniecki, Managing Director SEAT and CUPRA, Volkswagen Group
The future of marketing is personal. Brands are looking to create an in-depth understanding of the customer journey and how they can offer personalized interactions. Knowing your customer and their journey is down to effective use of data, and with more touchpoints and levers available to marketers than ever before the opportunities to engage are ample.
As we get ready for the Brand Marketing Summit Europe, we spoke with three leaders and summit speakers to discuss how to successfully engage your customers and the innovations that will shake the way you work up.
Incite Group has brought together key figures from Aon, Volkswagen and Spark Networks to discuss the key issues affecting brands marketing strategies and where they see the big, exciting opportunities…
A good brief helps to ensure that the finished project is what you envisioned, meaning it is more likely to be an effective part of your marketing campaign
"Great projects start with a great brief. This isn’t one."
"Garbage in, garbage out."
Those are phrases I have heard a lot over the years. Often (whisper it) from the agency team, berating a client contact amongst themselves.
But agencies have a big part to play in the quality of briefing. People in glass houses and all that. Over the last few years, I have seen some great briefs from clients that really helped an agency hit the mark. And I have seen some excellent briefs written (for themselves) by agencies, where the client couldn't articulate what they really wanted. But in amongst that have been some very lame briefs, on both sides, so I wanted to tackle that lack of consistency in the latest …
Singapore proposes a new law to stop fake news, Mark Zuckerberg calls on government internet regulation, Amazon stops aggressively marketing its own brands and the ASA uses tracking technology to assess ads aimed at children
This week has seen Singapore suggest a new law that could ultimately fine tech giants for failing to stop the spread of fake news. If passed, companies could be fined up to SGD$1 million for breaking the regulations.
While Singapore's suggest law has met with criticism, Mark Zuckerberg is calling for more regulation when it comes to the internet. The Facebook founder wants governments to be more involved with updating current rules in four key areas.
Amazon has stopped aggressively marketing its own products following complaints, opting for a softer approach to showcasing its own brand items on its platform.
Finally, the ASA has used tracking technology for the first time to see what ads are being served to…
Progressive e-commerce brands are now rushing to leverage new gen functionality to create a highly visual shopping experience for customers
Image searches may still constitute a fraction of the total search volume on Google. But visual-heavy social media networks are already a "favourite" among avid shoppers.
According to Pinterest – a platform where an estimated 600 million monthly searches are performed through the visual Lens functionality – the majority of users come to the platform in a buying-state-of-mind. Some 87% of users said that the platform helped them make a purchase decision, 93% use Pinterest to plan purchases and an average shopper referred from Pinterest spends $50 per order.
[si_guide_block id="5750" title="Download our Individual Member Resource – Successful SEO guide" description="Our comprehensive guide to Search Engine Optimisation best practices isn't just for SEOs, the clear explanations mean that it can be used by marketers to…
Small businesses can save time and get better results with these handy Twitter marketing apps
Social media provides a great platform to amplify your social media marketing strategies. It can help you establish a community, raise brand awareness and encourage engagement with your audience. However, social media management can be quite time-consuming, as it involves managing multiple social media accounts at the same time, and posting content on a regular basis.
If you find it too time-consuming to be constantly posting updates on Facebook or Twitter, there are some amazing tools and apps out there that can help you save time and increase the effectiveness of your efforts. They help you juggle your social media accounts from your desktop and smartphones to make sure you have a very productive social media marketing campaign.
[si_guide_block id="18501" title="Smarter Twitter marketing guide" description="For a detailed look at Twitter and how you can use it…
Opinion: The rainbow washing of marketing campaigns during Pride may seem like a positive, but are those bright colours really supporting the LGBTQ+ community or just fulfilling a brand purpose?
We’re fast heading toward summer, which to most means sunshine, holidays and ice cream. But to many in the marketing and advertising world, it means incorporating rainbows into campaigns ahead of Pride month in June.
Throughout June, July and August, rainbows seem to appear everywhere as brands show their apparent support for the LGBTQ+ community. While this may seem like a positive thing - after all, supporting a marginalized community can only ever be a good thing, right? - the rainbow washing of everything from fizzy drinks to bank windows doesn’t really tell the whole story.
Support versus brand purpose
For starters, there is a big difference between supporting a community…
Influencers are trusted by millions of consumers, and marketers leverage their persuasiveness to engage customers
For most people, modern life is unimaginable without social media. With brands vying for the maximum number of views, social media has become the go-to platform when it comes to launching and promoting products.
Influencer marketing is a byproduct of this phenomenon, with companies turning to Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter stars to influence their target audience’s purchase decisions.
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To cut a long story short, influencers are trusted by millions of consumers, and marketers leverage their persuasiveness…
A combination of data types allows marketers to identify and build out the segment of ideal and high-value customers
Segmentation helps boost the value that marketing teams bring to an organization. I am a big fan of the trusted segmentation toolkit, but for most companies, it can do with a much-needed upgrade.
Growing your current database with high-value customer acquisition seems just the way to get there. A new form of segmentation and targeting can be found with the use of Customer Data Platforms (CDP). A combination of data types allows marketers to identify and build out the segment of ideal, high-value customers.
Moving away from "blunderbuss marketing" from the start
Look at the Pillars of Segmentation marketing segmentation framework for a minute and you will realize that your data is at the heart of all segmentation efforts. Purchase data is a good starting point to identify interesting groups. What your a good…
The third part of our step-by-step guide will take you through the last five parts to building your website, making it easy for all the non-techies out there
This is the third part of this step-by-step guide taking you through how to build and launch your website. Let me quickly remind you of those things that we learned in part one and part two.
In part one we looked at choosing a domain name and what you should consider when doing so. We also went through buying that domain name and how it could be beneficial to keeping the hosting and domain name separate. This part of the guide also went through some of the most popular CMS options.
[si_guide_block id="5750" title="Download our Individual Member Resource – Successful SEO guide" description="If you get it right, SEO can be a fantastic, relatively low-cost way to drive quality visitors who want to…
When influencer marketing and branded content work together, both sides benefit in the end
Influencer marketing and branded content: They’re useful tools on their own, but they are far more effective within a strategy that treats them as complementary pieces of a stronger whole. Unfortunately, advocates for influencer marketing and branded content tend to see one another as adversaries.
The first group champions influencer marketing’s ability to give a brand street cred with third-party associations. As little as people sometimes trust brands, an endorsement from an influencer can go a long way toward building audience trust, and for niche audiences and micro-influencers, the effect is even more pronounced.
[si_guide_block id="27934" title="Download our Individual Member Resource – Influencer outreach guide for marketing professionals" description="This practical guide shows you how to use tools to find and interact with influencers on the best social media platforms for outreach, that’s Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and more."/]
Lovers of branded content, however, believe that…
