It is no surprise that customer behaviours and purchasing decisions have vastly changed – particularly in their use of technology and their comfort in ‘channel surfing’ and ‘integrated device use’ in their search for interests, entertainment, solutions, products, services etc.
The plethora of data online is growing at a staggering rate of 40% per year*. This in itself is daunting for any business owner and marketer.
How do we make an impact and also decipher the best strategy to optimise our opportunity to meet customers’ new behaviours and expectations, so that we have the greatest chance of customer acquisition and retention?
Here at Visual Strategies, we see 2 sides to this:
- Firstly is the content and marketing activities you do and
- The second is data analysis, to learn more about your target audience (on a micro level) so that you can create better and more relevant interactions in the future
Today I’m focusing more upon point
1. Simply put – I don’t think that any business marketing should be planning their marketing strategies as a series of events or activities. For example running various campaigns… Today your marketing not only needs to be integrated – but ongoing.
Your marketing should be less about projecting a convincing message to instigate sales… and more about creating meaningful, relevant (and some personalised) interactions with customers in addition to 2-way communication. Harder to do – yes but using todays powerful tools that technology puts at our fingertips; it can make this a whole lot easier.
Generating relevant content – that is in line with your brand profile and values is critical. Here at Visual Strategies we cannot stress enough how important valuable content is. We also understand valuable content is often the most difficult for businesses to generate themselves due to lack of time and perhaps ability and insight.
Visual Strategies generated this infographic that highlights the key benefits of long-term branded content marketing vs. the short-term campaign. I hope this is useful for you – perhaps you could print it and make reference to the steps (the opportunities) that you have to create an optimised and effective sales cycle that is ongoing. Over-time it can become self-perpetuating too.
Here are Visual Strategies – integrated Brand Specialists – we can assist your business in generating valuable ongoing branded content across multiple touch-points that your customers can potentially have with your brand!
We are also able to assist with setting up data collection from online marketing, customer profiling and strategies to tweak elements according to data analysis for more effective marketing.