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Mediaworks

GUEST BLOG: Why high-end brands need digital

If you’re a luxury brand, it’s important to know that 80% of your sales are influenced by online activity. This figure shouldn’t come as a surprise in 2019, as this is the year where many businesses across industries have implemented a digital marketing strategy that ensures conversions.

Marketers of luxury brands have notably changed their ways. At one time, such companies would capitalise on exclusivity, mystery and the curiosity of the consumer. While this may still be true for some high-end names, understanding that your customers of tomorrow are hungry for digital is crucial in your next steps to future-proofing your business.

Mediaworks takes a look at the key areas that your brand should be focusing on this year…

Making your brand engaging through visual content

You need to ask yourself what makes your brand engaging online. If you don’t have a solid answer, that becomes a huge problem. Whether it’s through search or social media, your brand has the ability to reach customers more frequently. This means you must understand the user journey and intentions from their initial interaction.

Once you have identified customer touchpoints, you’ll be able to tailor visual content that they want to see from your company. This should range from strategic content marketing campaigns that drive your brand message while ensuring the promotion of specific product or services, to assets that can be produced with a quick turnaround and pushed out publicly to capitalise on emerging trends.

Using your insights to drive ideas

Taking advantage of the digital landscape allows luxury brands to gain a better idea of who their customers are. Using analytical tools, you can build an effective data strategy that will allow you to create a detailed picture of your customers’ personas — using their online behaviour, for example — which can feed into your business strategy.

The goal is to turn data into information, and information into insight. The output of this data can be used to create a trend analysis, which can then determine your marketing strategy and how you can tailor specific content and products to them.

Having sales or survey data can be a great way of creating an angle for a content piece, to be pushed out to local/national media outlets. Analysing the data into a news hook can be a effective way of gaining online exposure for your brand, especially if the news hook/article is tailed to a specific publication where your target market are hanging out and interacting with.

Influencer marketing

If you’re a luxury fashion brand, consider reaching out to influencers in your space to see if they’d be willing to work with you on on-going campaigns. The best thing about influencer marketing is that the audience is already there, all you need to do is build a strong relationship where both parties are getting something out of it, whether it be a product or coverage. In fact, influencer marketing should be an active tactic in your social media marketing to increase brand awareness, get your content in front of fresh eyeballs, and generate new leads for your sales funnel.

GUEST BLOG: Digital marketing in the automotive sector – 2018 trends

By Mediaworks

Despite the roll-out of an entirely online car-buying process from manufacturers like Hyundai, research shows that 98% of car purchases take place offline. However, 86% of pre-purchase research is done digitally.

Over half of car buyers start their research online, with 41% taking to search engines like Google to source the information they are looking for. 50% find their car dealer online and for 42% of buyers, it’s a dealer they have had no prior relationship with.

Clearly, a strong digital strategy is crucial now if automotive brands are to secure their place at the forefront of potential customers’ minds. And this digital dependence is only set to grow in the future, with more than half of customers admitting they would consider a fully online car-buying process.

So how do they do it? Digital marketing agency, Mediaworks, has released a new white paper specifically aimed at the automotive sector and outlining what their digital focus should be over the coming year. The Driving Digital: Digital Forecast 2018 white paper is available to download for free, but here we’ve summarised its key takeaways:

Mobile first

Mobile is a huge area of opportunity for those in the automotive sector, with 65% of potential car buyers actively researching on their smartphones — whether that’s while watching TV, during a commute, or in-between tasks.

To capitalise on this mobile-centric audience, automotive brands need to have a mobile-friendly site. You should already have this in place by now, so you should turn your attention to refining its functionality to give a superior user experience. An app could be a wise investment too, to differentiate your brand from its competitors and better support the sales process before, during and after.

Journey personalisation

It’s predicted that by 2020, customers will prioritise the overall experience offered when deciding between brands, outweighing both cost and product. With journey personalisation, you can bridge the gap between online and the dealership to deliver a superior customer experience.

How well you adapt to technological advances like AR, VR and MR will be intrinsic to this. Consider using this technology to enable virtual showrooms for customers or AR scans of unreleased vehicles. Harness artificial intelligence to improve the timing and location accuracy of promotions and discounts.

Voice search

Fuelled by improving error rates, voice search currently accounts for 40% of searches. It’s predicted that by 2020, half of searches will be delivered through voice — making it a clear priority for automotive brands.

Start by optimising your content to capture more conversational, long-tail and local searches and make sure its style, format and flow matches the new search shift. Visual search is also on the rise, so consider how you could implement it.

Customer profiling

Every digital marketing campaign’s success hinges on how well you understand your customer. As customers become more comfortable with sharing their data, it’s up to you to build a comprehensive data model.

Use the data you collect around purchase history and customer feedback to target others within the demographic with relevant offers. Harness local inventory ads to promote the most popular vehicles to potential customers near to your physical dealerships.

Data

May 2018 will see the rollout of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which will impact how automotive brands collect and store data. As you transition from segment-based to signal-based data, you should prioritise contextual marketing using data from each digital touchpoint.

Attribution

Fewer than 27% of marketers use multi-touch attribution models, despite 90% believing attribution is important for online success. Multi-touch attribution is beneficial in that it helps you assign value to each of your marketing efforts.

Review your existing model to see how well it’s currently giving value to the different channels and stages of the purchasing funnel.

By conquering the above trends, automotive brands can strengthen their digital position and grow their success through 2018 and beyond.