Social media campaigns aimed at increasing leads and sales for brands have recently experienced a shift in ideology. The methodology in which most marketers and agencies were accustomed to operating involved the blind submission of countless one-sided communication adverts (posts) on Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms. But there’s a new, more profitable way to use these platforms; it just requires a bit of effort.
A forty-year veteran in the business of advertising and a true guru in agency-related matters is British-born Johanna McDowell from the Independent Agency Search and Selection Company. Her extensive research has offered agencies a phenomenal forecast for this year as well as for the next five years. — companies have already started following this new way of thinking.
The bottom-line for brands is sales. The bottom-line for agencies representing these brands should be engagement.
Read these six strategies you can use today to start increasing your clients’ bottom-line.
Construct campaigns around customers
Here, the idea is to identify who the customer is—what is the demographic? Once you have discovered these important factors, you can then follow the trends of these customers (potential customers) and begin adapting your campaigns to mirror consumer behaviour.
In 2017, it is suggested to start building campaigns around customers and not brands.
Young talent has been moving ship
There has been a noticeable change in the young talent of the advertising industry in which years ago they preferred the tech side. Now, however, there seems to be a flood-in to the digital side.This sort of trend only highlights the emergence of a new thinking for advertising as well as a demand from agencies for more digitally-inclined talent.
Sponsored brands do not diminish value
Although PR agencies tend to shy away from placing a brand’s name directly in the middle of an advert
or advertorial, the trends predicted for this year as well as for the years to come are that consumers online do not necessarily favour unbranded content. Surveys shown in McDowel’s research and her recent convention in Los Angeles at AdWorks have indicated that there is no noticeable change in the attitude of customers based on brand-sponsored content.
With internet video to account for almost 80% of global traffic by 2020, more than half of top marketers have already named video as the type of content to produce the highest ROI in the future.
Virtual reality is becoming reality
With real-estate already having a solid footing in the market for virtual reality, brands may also follow this trend so that customers can truly have an engaging experience with their products or services.
Investment in this technology should start taking foot in agencies as well.
Convergence and integrated service offering
Agencies have already fallen short when it comes to offering a full-service to their clients. This could be because of ignorance, but more likely, it’s because expanding the services of an agency costs money. New employees, new office space, new expertise.
We strongly suggest that to produce the optimal ROI for your clients, you should either expand your agency offering or outsource to a wholesale, white label digital agency so that your clients’ brands stay with the times, and the times to come.
Simplify customer experience
The Australian and New Zealand Banking Group Ltd. (ANZ) has gone a long way in focusing on the customer, and with great success. With the introduction of the goMoney App, ANZ can now see if a customer is struggling with a time-consuming transaction, and then send a notification to them, offering them a simpler and faster approach.
With all of these great points and insights from experts and leaders in digital marketing and advertising, we offer an “umbrella” approach to you, to make it simpler. It is simple: engage with the customer. But how?
There are a number of ways to skin that cat, but we would suggest starting off by simply ensuring that you have a dedicated social media management reseller on your team dealing instantly with complaints or queries on behalf of your client’s brands.
This human interaction is what is missing in the age of digital, but customers will forever remain human, which means we need to focus on the human element and engage with them on that level, just on a different platform.
