Are you going through the Brexit blues?

Multi industries including Banking, Betting, Retail, Insurance, Professional Services and Real Estate to name a few, are facing very similar challenges.

We are living in an increasingly digitally lead economy, with the landscape changing in a dramatic way. Digital has become an obsession and the only way to keep companies in business.

The marketing mix – price, place, product, promotion, process, people and physical evidence have also evolved to match this digital revolution and we have noticed key trends across all sectors whereby companies are now focusing on four key areas:

Proposition 

You can have the best product/service available to customers, but its how you package your product/service that wins over consumers

Price

Pricing is incredibly important and needs to be monitored and reviewed regularly – a number of competitors are trying to win market share through reduction of pricing

Journey

The end to end customer journey has a huge impact on conversion and customer satisfaction – Every single touchpoint needs to be looked at in detail

Marketing and Digital 

Bullseye targeting and providing relevant engaging content through the right channel (Opti channel) is critical to the success of improving key marketing performance indicators e.g website visits, bounce rates, open rates, cost per click, cost per acquisition etc.

Rich data and psychographic insight tie these four key focus areas together in order to be the leading business in your area.

At 3 Realms Digital we take a 360 degree view at your business to transform you into a digital empire.

Contact Craig, Jonathan or Harry on 02039517006 to arrange a consultation

How Efficient is your Marketing Automation?

By now, every marketer knows that marketing automation makes tasks, processes, and campaigns faster and more efficient. And nobody will argue that when marketing channels are integrated and automated, campaigns deliver stronger results.

That’s one reason agencies and marketing teams are looking to attain stronger growth through marketing automation integration. Another driver, at least for US agencies, is that agency revenue is realising modest growth these days, at 1.7%, according to the AdAge Agency Report 2019.

But agencies don’t operate in a vacuum. After all, they wouldn’t exist without clients. As marketing automation moves to the top of the priority list for agencies to better service their clients and boost the bottom line, the real question is whether the effort will pay off, what metrics should be used to gauge success, and when to expect an ROI.

A recent survey by Get Repsonse and Ascend2 took a closer look at the state of marketing automation integration at marketing agencies.

Here are the key takeaways, including how it will impact your 2020 planning, whether you’re at an agency or part of an internal marketing team.

Five Takeaways and Recommended Marketing Actions

1. Marketing automation integration is being embraced by an overwhelming majority of marketers today. Fully 92% of agencies are investing more time, resources, and budget into marketing automation integration. The top 3 objectives behind this shift are to improve campaign effectiveness, improve quality lead generation and build stronger alignment between Marketing and Sales.

Action: Marketers should evaluate their current strategy and progress in marketing automation integration. Whether the effort is run in-house or through an agency, it’s clear that those organisations that aren’t currently embracing marketing automation are at risk of being left behind and overthrown by the competition.

2. These are the three most important factors in choosing a marketing automation system to integrate: analytics and reporting, ease of use/learning curve, and total cost.

Action: These priorities make sense, especially when you consider factors such as the ubiquity of reporting tools and the rise of in-house agencies. Based on the data, one can infer that agencies are striving to master analytics and present more comprehensive, yet simple-to-follow campaign reports and are willing to make the necessary investments to do it.

3. These are the three most important metrics for measuring the benefits of a marketing automation integration effort: revenue generated, customers acquired, and conversion rates. Those metrics are followed by Marketing-qualified leads, Sales-accepted leads, cost per lead generated, open and click rates.

Action: Marketers continue to be driven by numbers and demonstrable ROI for their efforts. Though branding and awareness marketing campaigns still play a critical, strategic role, when it comes to marketing automation, marketers are keenly focused on drilling down into the numbers behind every action. It won’t be a surprise when agencies and marketers that can present and defend their numbers gain a clear advantage when negotiating and planning their 2020 budgets.

4. There is a gap between expectations and reality when it comes to the time it takes to realise the benefits of marketing automation integration. According to the survey, 49% of agency marketers say 6-12 months is a reasonable timeframe for realising the benefits, whereas 42% say they should see results in six months or less.

Action: When you consider that most agency contracts are renewed on an annual basis, one could argue that agencies should be even more driven to accelerate their integration efforts. For marketers working with agencies, now is the time to get a realistic understanding of the automation process and delivery dates. Based on the information and timeline, build in small projects to gauge progress to date and consider incentives and the addition of resources to shorten deadlines without compromising quality.

5. To accelerate marketing automation integration, agencies are relying on a combination of in-house resources and outside consultants. The survey found that introducing and optimising marketing automation into an overall strategy can be a time-consuming endeavour. Which is why most survey respondents, 64%, say that it’s most effective to use a combination of outsourced specialists and in-house resources to tackle the effort.

Action: Based on the survey results, one can infer that there will be a growing demand for experts that can accelerate the integration of marketing automation solutions. Further, marketing agencies and in-house teams are also more likely to invest in solutions that are fully integrated so they can realise even faster cycles for revenue generation and customer acquisition and conversion.

* * *

It’s clear that marketing automation integration will remain a top priority for marketers, especially as they plan for 2020. Marketers who aren’t already on board can look to their agency partners to accelerate the path yet need to embrace marketing automation integration or risk obsolescence.

Contact Craig, Jonathan and Harry at 3 Realms Digital for further information on how to automate your Marketing Strategy

We can learn a lot from Entertainment Marketing

Lessons From Entertainment Marketing

These principles of entertainment marketing are also a roadmap for non-entertainment marketers looking to navigate changes in the way consumers interact with their brands. If you aspire to build brand love and cultural relevance, thinking of your consumers as fans is a great way to start.

For anyone in advertising, fan obsession is the holy grail — when audiences not only seek out your work, but proudly share it as part of the pop-culture conversation.

Perhaps more than any other industry, entertainment campaigns achieve this level of brand love, with fans regularly tracking the release of advertising, passionately posting about, sharing, and deconstructing it online.

While it doesn’t hurt to have a great movie or TV show to promote, here are some key principles from entertainment marketing that can help elicit this seemingly elusive response for any brand.

1. Make entertainment, not advertising.The best film and TV ads focus on emotion over information, because audiences don’t just want to know something, they want to feel something.

FX makes campaigns on this emotional level, aiming for conversation and shareability over narrative clarity, like this teaser for “Atlanta” season 2.

2. Tease, don’t tell. Great entertainment campaigns practice the art of the tease, with holding information to cause the right amount of curiosity. Tease a key element of the story to its climactic revealand audiences will scour the internet for more.

Netflix’s teaser for “13 Reasons Why” season 2 shows how saying as little as possible can create big buzz, with over 14 million views across social channels.

3. Embrace cinema. In the age of mobile phones, “cinema” doesn’t just mean “big screen.” It’s telling stories through imagery, sound, music, and the artful juxtaposition of all three.

Cinematic stories are the most powerful, as they aren’t told in words, but created in the viewer’s mind. As Alfred Hitchcock said, “I make movies where they don’t have to read the subtitles in Japan.” So should you. HBO’s final “Game Of Thrones” teaser is a prime example.

4. Find strategy in the creative. Strategy is key to reaching the right people, but spending months on it before making anything keeps you from being nimble in today’s lightning-fast media landscape.

Entertainment marketers create relevant work fast without traditional strategists by building creative teams of bingers, gamers, audiophiles, comic-book collectors, sports fans and film nerds.

When a team like this asks “What do I love about this?” instead of “What’s the positioning?,” the strategy naturally emerges. What better way to position a new take on Spider Man than with creatives that grew up on comic books and have the action figures in their edit bays?

5. Think like a fan. To reach today’s media-savvy consumers, you have to listen. That means learning what they like and speaking to them authentically. In essence, brands need to become fans themselves.

For example, Netflix’s social campaigns feel created by a fellow fanatic, sharing the same enthusiasm for its shows as its audience and engaging in conversations via entertaining, UGC-style posts on its Instagram feed that respond to what its community cares about.

The majority of Digital Marketing agencies target customers based on pure demographics. We go beyond and target through psychographics and find people who are like minded who have the same interests or needs, the same passion, to really find commonalities. That transcends demographics.

www.3realmsdigital.com

Luxury Marketing to Millennials

Marketing to Millennials is not like marketing to their parents or grandparents. Millennials are digital natives at heart. Their idea of importance is not shaped by luxurious and exclusive possessions, but by a commitment to freedom of expression, new experiences and technology that balances their busy lifestyles. Luxury alone will not cut it.

With many alternatives to choose from, millennials demand better value for their money and greater real-time curation from their luxury brands. They will not accept a brand’s status at face value, preferring to unearth information for themselves. This means that brands must cater to this digital outlook to have any hope of attracting millennial interest.

Unfortunately, in marketing luxury towards Millennials, mistakes are abundant, the most common challenges that keep brand owners up at night is that there is not enough differentiation. This is incredible because luxury is by definition extreme value creation. E extreme value can only be created and maintained if a brand has distinct brand proposition. If a brand is replaceable, then it does not create a defendable extreme value. High price points and customer love won’t be sustainable. There is a real need for luxury brands to become much more distinct, differentiated, and relevant.

Millennials are not passive consumers. They are curators and creators, appreciating personalisation and the ability to share their voice. A seamless digital experience must recognise and incorporate these desires to reach this active audience.

A common mistake in all brand sectors, is not perfectly executing the consumer journey. Most brands plan for the best case, few have contingencies in place on how to build brand equity when things go wrong.

Bad experience happens all the time across all brands and categories, A sales person in a luxury fashion store who’s having a bad day and is snappy at the customer, a telephone support staff wrongly tells the person wanting to amend a booking at a luxury hotel that reservations are wrong . The list goes on and on and on. For the Millennials, every-touch point counts. Every negative interaction can make Added Luxury Value experience collapse, even if the interaction initially seems small. Luxuries are not normal products! They’re the ones creating the highest perceived consumer value, and when things go wrong, they feel cheated. And rightly so!

More platforms offer purchase buttons, and many brands release their own mobile applications. These are both tools valued by millennial consumers, and those businesses that neglect the effect of a poor user experience are setting themselves up for failure.

Luxury Brands need to rethink their approach. Starting with a rigorous assessment of how well-positioned and differentiated their brand is. Because (internal) perception is not reality, this should be done utilising data-driven insight tools. If the brand is not strong enough, it must be repositioned and strengthened. We hear from teams of teams, that they can’t change anything, as the brand is defined in the head office in an other country. If there are gaps, they need to be addressed ASAP! Competition is too strong; Millennial consumers are too impatient and weak brands will not survive.

So how can brands ensure that they avoid some of the problems and offer delight at every touch point?

Millennial consumers do not take brand messages for granted, so heritage brands must take their stories out of the usual luxury format and refresh their image. The best way to do this is to embrace and leverage the millennial drive for creation.

Mercedes-Benz’s “Take the Wheel” campaign offers a great example of this approach.

Five Instagram photographers were given the latest luxury vehicle to test-drive for five days. Each photographer posted pictures on his or her account, and the photographer with the most likes was gifted the car.

The campaign delivered 87 million organic impressions on Instagram alone, as well as more than a half-million mentions on Facebook and Twitter.

Without deviating from their values, companies can perform a brand audit among millennials, analyse the results and find new angles of the brand story to empower and engage millennial consumers. By losing the “old luxury” tag, they can find and embrace a new one.

Not everybody can afford to buy luxury products, so luxury brands need to speak directly to the subset actively seeking them out.

Burberry adopted this approach with its 2014 London Fashion Week and 2016 Chinese New Year WeChat campaigns. The company identified Chinese fashionistas as a key demographic for growth, and it sought the best possible platform to engage with them. With 93 percent of the population of China’s largest cities on WeChat, there could only ever be one winner here.

Brands cannot adopt an “if you build it, they will come” mentality. Experiences must be targeted at key demographics to have the greatest impact, and they need to use that demographics’ preferred platform.

Luxury brands often enjoy the admiration of aspirational fans, but that does not always translate into sales. To get the most from a social media relationship, luxury brands need to go beyond that one-way admiration and start acknowledging the fans. Partnering with users to create content is a great way to do this, and Burberry’s “Art of the Trench” platform is a great example.

Instead of simply overwhelming users with airbrushed photos of celebrities and models, Burberry gave its customers the chance to showcase their own style by uploading pictures of themselves in their Burberry trench coats. Brands can also benefit from reposting and tagging user handles on social platforms. All of these options give consumers a feeling of ownership over the brand story, ensuring luxury brands are aspirational and accessible.

The customer journey needs to be scrutinised, audited, and optimised. Luxury is not just an excellent customer journey. It’s something that has to be maximally differentiated from the journeys of all competitors, so that a customer bonds emotionally with the brand.

Brands should not be afraid to challenge the industry status quo. They should always be searching for new approaches and cutting-edge social experiences, they can appeal to savvy Millennials, offering a real substantive experience to back up the luxury name.

The time for complacency is over.

3 Realms Digital is a digital and creative agency that offers a full suite of digital services through a mix of behavioural and psychographic storytelling, to increase sales.

We simplify complex marketing noise through physchographical data mining customer behaviour, journey, Insight and execute through creative concepts to help clients exceed their sales goals.

Making Data Creative to Increase Sales

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