editor, Author at Mediastreet

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9 Tips for a Killer Social CRM Strategy

March 4, 2021 No Comments

By Oliver Rist.

Making the most out of your social media interactions with customers has become a key feature in today’s CRMs. Make sure your CRM strategy incorporates this important new capability in 2021.

Customer relationship management (CRM) continues to be a popular solution for helping a swamped sales staff stay ahead of deals and customer issues. But it’s also evolving to become the heartbeat of your business’ marketing and outreach as well as a key source and destination point for sales data. A key factor in that evolution has been social media.

Social media is an important customer touchpoint. It’s where customers talk about what what they care about, how they feel, and their opinions on your business. If a customer has a problem with your product or service, they can now let all of their friends and family know about it instantly. Thus, social customer relationship management (social CRM) is crucial for keeping your enterprise or small to midsize business (SMB) accessible, informed, and proactive in engaging with and learning about your customers.

Get the Most From Both Customer Touchpoints

The combination of social media and CRM spells lots of new opportunities for sales personnel looking to connect or marketing professionals seeking to inform. And all of it can happen through your CRM system as long as your social CRM strategy is on target. It’s a key factor of what’s been fueling CRM’s steady growth over the past half decade as this chart from market research firm Statista clearly shows:

CRM Market Revenue, 2016-2021 (in Billions USD)

Social media should be a core component of your business’s CRM plan, but a successful social CRM strategy is about more than racking up likes and followers to drive site traffic. Once you’ve gotten the audience, these seven tips will help your business make the most of the tools it’s using and the data it’s gathering, while turning the immediacy of social media into an asset rather than a liability.

Invest in the Right Social Tool: Before even incorporating a Social CRM strategy, your business should be managing its social media efforts through a social media analytics tool. The platform you choose will serve as the focal point for scheduling social posts across all active presences, monitoring who’s saying what and to how many people, and interacting with customers. You need a Social CRM tool that can do all of those things (for a price that fits your business) as well as integrate with whatever existing CRM tool you may have. Sprout Social Premium is a great option for advanced analytics capabilities.
Invest in the Right CRM: Your social media management tool should focus on how your marketing campaigns are doing across your social platform engagements. However, your CRM should have not only the appropriate integration hooks to these social media management platforms, but also CRM-specific social media tools as well, including dashboard, reporting, and clean data collection. Many CRMs, even those designed specifically for small businesses, now have easy-to-use, customer-centric social media tools embedded directly into the CRM. Good examples are HubSpot CRM and our Editors’ Choice winner, Salesforce Essentials.
Target Relevant Networks: Don’t waste time churning out posts and engaging with followers on a social media platform that’s not core to your business. An e-commerce site might be well-served to post glossy photos of its products on Instagram or Pinterest and interact with customers there whereas an enterprise software company’s customers are more likely to be localized in the traditional trifecta of Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. If more and more of your customers are gravitating toward a new social network, that network may be worth monitoring. But your social media manager shouldn’t take hours to respond to a Twitter question because he or she was busy messing around with the Snapchat account your business decided to launch.
Monitor Interactions and Mentions: Your Social CRM platform should have the ability to set up feeds and streams for each social network and specific parameters within them. In addition to one tracking customers’ direct tweets, comments, and likes, with your presences, set up streams that can monitor keywords such as your company’s name and the primary words associated with what your business does. The moment your company is mentioned or a social network user asks a question about an area of expertise, your business can quickly respond with a helpful answer that could turn a user into a customer or a lukewarm customer into a loyal one.
Analytics are Your Friend: Once you’ve identified a particular customer, analytics can help you learn more about them. What was the reach of the tweet this user sent out about your product? Have they recently mentioned any competing products and in what context? Send a user’s profile and specific data about them through the CRM pipeline to a marketing or sales representative at your company and analytics could be the key to a customer conversion.
Group Customers Into Target Audiences: A Social CRM strategy should leverage all of the existing capabilities social networks have to offer. For example, Facebook and LinkedIn have groups while Twitter has lists. This functionality can help you group customers into segments naturally and within the context of the social network that is better suited for targeted interactions about a specific product or products. Social CRM is about using the individuality of a customer’s social persona to tailor smarter business interactions with him or her.
Social Media Managers Are Real-Time Customer Service Reps: The team who manages your business’s social media presences is your first line of customer service and the ambassadors of your company’s brand. Representatives should respond to a customer’s question on social media within an hour and the conversation should be a genuine interaction rather than a transaction. Don’t be afraid to give out your first name just as a traditional customer service rep would. Depending on the type of business, integrating your social media and customer service teams into a cohesive department could improve both the speed and quality of responses.
Use Social Incentives to Foster Brand Loyalty: The most loyal, vocal, and active of your company’s social media followers are assets. Building a relationship with these loyal customers and those with the widest social influence can help turn your online presences into communities. Run a hashtag-driven event on Twitter around a particular promotion. Give a @shoutout to the customer who’s been most active in your community this week. Send out discount offers or promotional codes to reward engaged customers. Social media gives businesses more immediate access to a wider array of customers than ever before, and Social CRM is how your business can tap into and make the most out of those connections.
Don’t Delete Negative Comments: Even if your company’s offerings and customer service are both impeccable, there are sure to be times when customers will have nasty things to say on social media. Some complaints may have more merit than others. With that in mind, the optics of deleting a negative comment can be far more harmful than the comment itself (with the exception, of course, of posts that are highly inappropriate or offensive). If your customers see that you are deleting unpleasant feedback, it could be perceived by them that your company cares more about its online image than helping customers. When it comes to combating negative feedback, always maintain a proactive, professional demeanour.

By Oliver Rist

Sourced from PC

In News

Anatomy of High Converting Mobile Web Pages: Learn What Makes or Breaks a Responsive Design!

March 4, 2021 No Comments

Sourced from 1WD 1stWebDesigner

In 2020, smartphone sales were 1.57 billion units worldwide, an increase from 1.52 billion units in 2019. Such impressive figures continue when we look at the world’s tablet shipments and deliveries. In the third quarter of 2020, Apple alone shipped 13.9 million units of tablets. These figures, as surprising as they are, make us think about the impact on mobile websites and website owners. The demand for smartphones and other mobile devices have been responsible for connecting 4.66 billion people with the internet. This number has gone up by 7.3 per cent since last year. Out of this, mobile internet traffic has been more than half of all the internet traffic all around the world. As a website owner whose website is not mobile-friendly, this is a matter of great concern and something to help shape our website in the correct direction.

It is now time that website owners understand that mobile users are top priority and should be taken seriously. If you are still backing on the desktop website with a bunch of media queries and letting luck shape your revenue, I will help you decode the importance of responsive design and how to make a high converting mobile web pages.

Responsiveness and Conversion Rates

A lot of the people take the responsiveness and conversion rates as a cause and solution pair in the website world. But converting a mobile web page is a much more complex process than just making your website responsive or mobile-friendly. Sure, responsiveness is an important aspect of conversion and is the first step in the website development but it alone cannot increase your CTR. In 2015, Google started giving more preference to responsive and mobile-friendly websites. Improving for a better experience for their users, Google does not want people to keep searching for that one perfect website which is rendered proportionately on the device. This move gave the website owners a wake-up call to focus on the user experience and mobile-friendliness as much as possible.

So how can we improve our conversion rates once we have the responsive website built? To be fair, responsiveness is more concerned towards scaling your website up and down. If my images are scaled in the proper ratio on a 5.5-inch device, I have got a responsive website. But the user is never concerned about responsiveness. Instead of praising the scalable elements, the user is more concerned about how fast those elements rendered on to the device? My user is more concerned about their own preferences and benefits.

Nearly 8 out of 10 users bounce back when the content is not properly visible on the mobile device. Such anomalies on the mobile website bring down conversion rates and affect the business. In the subsequent sections, we will focus on things that are responsive in nature (no doubt!) but is not enough that can make the user click that CTA of yours or purchase a product from your website. Soon we will realise that responsiveness has much more than what meets the eye. Let’s see how we can put ourselves up to the user’s expectations.

PS – We have used LambdaTest LT Browser to show website view in various device viewports. Know more here – https://www.lambdatest.com/lt-browser

Do you need all the content on the mobile?

The first thing to ask in developing a website for mobile is the content you are about to show on the device. A device’s screen is small, which means you have to show less but relevant content on the small space provided to you. The content should be able to communicate to the user without using too many words. A user is not going to read everything just to find if he gets anything pleasing for himself. That is your job to show him what he needs to see. The content analysis can be boiled down to three major categories: the headline, the font size and the content.

What’s a perfect headline?

A web page starts with a headline which is probably the first thing a user sees. This is your chance, the moment that decides whether the user will increase the session duration or will bounce back. The following two website ranks on the first page of Google for “real estate solutions”:

The above landing page is from RESGroup while the below screenshot is from Getrealestatesolution.

Apart from a weird header which is taking 25% of your valuable screen space, the headline is concise and easy to read. The RESGroup have focussed on a long heading (if that what it is) and forces users to scroll the entire page to find something meaningful for them. A good point to note is that although building up trust on the user is important by embellishing the web page with your achievements, a user needs to find something which they can use. They rarely care about what you have to offer but more about how they can be benefitted. Remember, a user makes up his mind about the website in just 50 milliseconds.

Scrolling from up to bottom and reading about your achievements will result in an increased bounce rate. Getrealestatesolution is building up trust and showing their achievement both cleverly into a single line: “We make realtors and brokers more successful”. This more or less would translate to “We are capable enough to make you successful” and “You will be successful if you join us”.

Font-Size: Should my user zoom in?

Font-size is an extremely important part of a landing page (or any other page) to determine the conversion rate of your website. A font-size of 16 px or 1 em is considered perfect for good readability of the content. Although one might argue that they can still read properly on 14 px, there are a large percentage of visually impaired people to be taken into account. The main target audience of the majority of businesses lies in the range of 15-49 years which is 28% visually impaired, as per WHO data. The following screenshot shows a blog on CSS Subgrids with 12 px font and the original font below it.

Although text can be enlarged by zooming into the mobile device, it moves the content out of the screen and makes the screen scrollable which is not liked by the users.

The relevance of Keywords- Which words to choose?

The final thing to remember while presenting content to the user is to use specific keywords which are relevant to the user. Mobile screens are very small with 5.5 inches being the most popular among the users as per a 2019 study. With a little time and smaller space in our hands, we want to gain a user’s trust as soon as possible so that he sticks on the website and does not bounce back.

The specific keywords process first starts by eliminating all the redundancy and loose words. Words such as “very”, “extremely”, “best” etc are considered fillers in the content. “We are very professional and provide the best services” could be transformed to “We are professional in providing real-estate services”. The second sentence is more effective and uses 1 less word than the first.

After elimination comes the relevant keywords to pitch to help you convert through the web page. These keywords will work as something your user can trust upon. At least, the user should be well convinced that you are the best and believe me, writing “best” does no charm in conversions. So, instead of being verbose and explicitly pitching your projects, choose minimal but effective words that show your confidence, experience and professionalism. In my analysis, I found two interior design services websites that portray this point quite clearly.

This is the landing page of Woodenstreet

In addition to proving our point of small font-size, the only effective sentence in this segment is “Customize them to your liking!” which makes me feel the fact that I will have control over customizations but not a strong one. The words are loose to build trust over to the service company.

Another competitor of this website is Livespace. The same section on their website looks like this:

The segment focuses on keywords and experience by the lines of sophisticated keywords that will lure the user. I too want someone who knows a bohemian bedroom!! (Just Kidding!)

Also, notice the transformation of the same sentence in these two websites. Where Woodenstreet says, “Customize them to your liking!”, Livespace says, “Your wish is our command!”.

Which one do you think has more weight to convert your page?

For the enhancements of the content, you do not need to remove the white spaces and fill every gap on the web page. White spaces are good! They let the elements breath in the congested space and every element can get proper attention from the user. For larger content, you can also use bullets that can deliver more information in lesser sentences.

To ensure yourselves of the appearance of your website on mobile devices, you can use tools which can help you emulate the experience. A developer-friendly browser such as LT browser is also a great choice since it provides a complete solution with loads of features (including a debugger) and performance reports to analyze. LT browser can show you your website on any mobile device of your choice in a couple of clicks.

Test Responsiveness on LT Browser

Emulators and simulators have been long used to test the website on different devices. But today, for a specific tester’s need, we can take advantage of a mobile-specific testing browser that provides a complete environment for the tester. A developer-oriented browser such as LT browser can provide additional features highlights of which are given below:

A large list of in-built tools: A list of 40+ in-built screens can render the website in a couple of clicks.
Comparison Grid: A comparison grid shows two mobile devices side by side for the testers to compare. The tester can also use scroll-sync to mirror his actions on both the devices simultaneously.
Screenshot capture and Session recording: The tester can take screenshots of the device screen and mark a bug and send the video/image to the team.
Third-Party Integrations: The third-party integrations allow the developer to share the bugs or issues with their teammates with a single click.
Network Throttling: A very important feature to check user experience is how the website performs under various network bandwidth. This can be achieved with network throttling in LT browser.
Local Testing: Local testing allows the developer to test their website even before publishing it on a domain service. With the local tunnel, they can view the website on any device from the local system.
Performance Report: To analyse the final performance, developers and testers can view the performance report and share it or save it for future use.

The thumb zone and its importance in conversion

The thumb zone has been a conclusive argument for some time now and a strong foundation to many pieces of research in mobile designs and mobile web implementation. The thumb zone is the area on the mobile screen determining how hard or easy it is for our thumb to reach a certain point. A research study by Hoober concluded that 49% of people operate their mobile phones with one hand and only a 15% with two hands. Among those who do, 67% are operating through their right thumb with two major positions:

Note: The second image is placed slightly above as compared to the first image.

The color that you see in the above image: is our thumb zone. A thumb zone in general for a person using their phone with one-hand can be magnified as follows:

The green zone is the easiest to achieve: hence the most important for our conversion goals. The yellow zone is a bit hard to reach but manageable: something we can put less important things in such as headings and other content, things which are not clickable. Finally, the red zone is the toughest to reach and is the worst place to put our CTA.

Another worst position to put our CTA is at the bottom of the page or deep down below. No user would want to scroll down 4 5 times and search your CTA on the webpage. A lot of them probably don’t even know about CTA buttons and if it exists on that website or not.

The best way is to put CTA in the thumb zone and on above-fold in the first web page view. Amazon has put similar thought into their CTA and the following is their landing page:

The Sign In button is exactly where our green zone lies with the width being enough that we do not touch anything accidentally.

From the above page, we observe two interesting things: first the Sign In is also available at the top right (the hardest) position too and our green zone has another CTA “Create Account”.

Having two sign-in options reminds the user about signing in two times. You would see the button anyway even if you do not click that. LiveSpace uses the same approach on its website in a little different way:

The bottom button is fixed and is a constant reminder to “book design consultation”. The second approach is interesting. There are two possibilities of an unknown user: either he signs in (given that he has already registered) or he creates a new account.

Deciding among the two is important for an owner to come to a final conclusion of primary CTA and secondary CTA. Having two CTAs is generally not considered a good approach as it confuses the user but even if you do, one of them should stand out in comparison to another, as in Amazon.

What CTA to use?

As a website owner, you might have a lot of services to provide: a consultation booking form, you want to showcase your cheap pricing too! And you want them to call you by a single click from the home page itself!! A CTA can increase your revenue with high conversions but a CTA cannot be the developer’s wish. It has to be what the audience wants. To increase your mobile conversions through CTAs, you need to analyse what your visitors are more interested in.

Google Analytics is a great way to start here. Google Analytics provides the keywords your visitor is most interested in. Mailchimp has a lot of good features which can be used as CTAs for example, “Start Campaign”. But their website on mobile uses the CTA linked to pricing:

CTAs are something to ponder upon and it is also a good idea to include a good input from the marketing and sales team which can suggest to you the user’s inclination quite well.

With keywords in hand, the next step is to think about the CTA text that can bring out more conversions through a responsive mobile web design. In the above screenshot, Mailchimp could have used, “See pricing” but they went with “Pick a plan” even though the page links to the pricing page.

Similarly, Youneedabudget provides the user with “Try YNAB Free For 34 Days” instead of Sign Up or Try YNAB Free.

Research these words and find out why your user visits your website. Show them exactly what they are looking for through the CTAs and the conversion rates would see an increase.

The CTA should also look like a “CTA” and work like one. If the CTA gets blended into the background and looks like a ghost button, it loses its purpose. CTAs should be a contrast in colour speaking out loud and demanding attention from the user; that is what they are there for.

Mailchimp does that perfectly with a little darker shade of yellow in the background and CTA with blue; a complete contrast.

For business providers looking for direct leads, forms work as fine as a button since they cannot provide all the information in concise segments and users have a lot of other doubts. For example, interior designing. Interior designing has different requirements for different users and personal contact is necessary. A responsive form works as a great CTA here:

The number of fields is important to understand the conversion rates. A user is not interested in filling too many fields and will bounce back too easily. Quicksprout shows how the number of fields leads to a lower conversion rate on the mobile:

More than 5 fields in a form is intimidating for the user and the user is unlikely to complete the form. If you cannot manage to lower down the fields below 6 or 7, use the autocomplete feature of the browser in your HTML code so that the user can quickly fill out the form in one tap. Autocomplete is available in major browsers today and is helpful for the user.

If your CTA is a call button, it should be a one-click button instead of plain text. Do not expect your user to take the burden of copying the number and moving onto his dial pad, paste it and then call you.

Remember the 2-second rule!

Google aims at 0.5 second load time when it comes to loading any Google’s product. But don’t worry, we still have not touched such a high-performance statistic practically although we have come a long way in the last decade. Google states that 2 second is the user’s “acceptability” for the website load time. So how is it affecting our conversion rates?

As it turns out, the bounce rate depends heavily on the website loading time:

Gone are the days of 2G connection when people could wait a hundred seconds for the website to load. With the increase in elements on the website leading to a lower load time, the conversion rate drops by a whopping 95%!!

What can we do to increase loading speed?

The question drops to the mind as to what we can do as web developers to decrease the web page load time when the network plays a vital role which we have no idea about. As a developer, we can follow a series of checks on our responsive mobile design to ensure higher conversion rate and simultaneously lower bounce rates:

Content Display Improvement

A good way to start is to code the web page to display something (if not all) to the user as early as possible. For example, AJAX queries are a great way to show a partial content to the user on the first view.

Server Improvement

Use a good server!! Servers play an important role as they are responsible for not only communicating with requests but also sending the first byte to the user. Google recommends a time of 1.3 seconds for the mobile server to communicate with the first byte. The lower the better.

The figure shows recommended average response time of the mobile server in various categories:

Request Count Optimization

Lowering the number of requests to the server also decreases the overall page load time. The lesser number of requests would generally mean lesser elements to fetch. While Google recommends less than 50, today’s average lies somewhere between 120-170.

Weight of Elements

An extremely important factor in determining the loading speed of the website is the weight of elements present in the mobile web page. The study found out that websites use too many elements in order to lure the users which slows down the loading speed even on the 4G connection (which is the most popular). 70% of the pages took 5 seconds for any visual element to first appear on the web page. This has made the average loading time to 15 seconds as compared to the recommended 2 seconds.

The main culprit; images. Providing an extremely high-quality image will just decrease the conversion rates especially the ones which are nowhere related to the product such as background or achievement thumbnails. Applying very high-quality images without compression can load up the page to as high as 4MB which is more than the average.

The analysis is done in the study also found an image worth 16 MB of size on a web page which is a simple blunder, an invitation to decrease the conversion rates. What can we do? Compress these images and use proper image formats.

By simply compressing the images on the web page, the developers can save up to 250 KB of size on as high as 25% of the website analysed. Image format can help you in decreasing the load time too. Out of all the mobile-friendly websites, 46% use JPEG and 28% use PNG. The reason behind the success of JPEG is that it is a lossy compression losing bits in the process. JPEG is a great format to use when too much focus is not on the extreme detail of the image like nature images, landscapes or background color shades etc. PNG on the other hand is lossless and saves the bits in the process. PNG images are great when sharpness, details and observations are required in the image.

The following image is a JPEG image:

This image is of a natural scene and hence does not demand very small details for the user. Your user will not zoom into the Taj dome to check out the colour shade. This image makes about 127 KB in size.

The same image in PNG consumes 714 KB of the web page which is extremely unnecessary.

To determine your website’s performance, you can use a trusted tool PageSpeedInsights by Google.

To increase the speed of the landing page, developers can also make use of CDN or Cache that web service providers such as Amazon offer. These are very fast and help store data according to the geographic locations.

A/B Testing and you are done!

When Google launched ads on Gmail, they were not sure which blue colour to use. In their experiment, they decided to provide different shades of blue to different users and see their response. With 1% of users getting one shade and another 1% getting another, Google ended up testing among 40 shades of blue to 40 different groups. The final blue selected in this experiment earned them an additional $200 million in revenue.

This is termed as A/B testing. A/B testing is a process of comparing two different versions of a web page by giving them to different groups and recording their response. A/B testing has been used extensively today to finalize the colour, location or size of the CTA button. An experiment between green and red CTA buttons showed that the red CTA button performed 21% better on 2000 page visits. The 21% increase in the conversion rates points towards how important A/B testing is today.

This does not mean every red CTA button will outperform green ones. Performing A/B testing will provide conclusive results by which you can increase the conversions and they are different for different websites.

Not only CTAs, as a developer you can also test the headlines, buttons and other important content to decrease the bounce rate which eventually does result in increased conversions. You can use Heatmap tools for A/B testing.

Conclusion

If you ever believed that responsiveness is everything there is to increase the CTR, you are not alone. The researches and studies have brought out a lot more about the behavioural aspect of a user than we knew before. From colour to the font-size, conversion rates on a mobile device is like a house on wooden pillars. All of them together increases the CTR to its capabilities and give your revenue a boost up.

Apart from the points discussed in this post, as a developer, you can also perform certain enhancements on the website for better conversions. User experience always matters on a mobile website. Whether it is conversions, word of mouth or any other target, you will always be rewarded for a better user experience. Enhancements such as not losing the sessions when the back button is pressed, providing cart support on multiple devices or shutting up the navigation bar in a hamburger menu. These enhancements are always noticed by the user and the easier it is for him, the better are the chances of conversions. So the next time you are busy developing your website, make a checklist and boost up that conversion rate from mobile web pages.

Sourced from 1WD 1stWebDesigner

In News

The power of audio: Building customer connections and boosting loyalty (VB Live)

March 4, 2021 No Comments

Sourced from VentureBeat

Audio is having a moment, thanks in part to the pandemic. At home most, if not all of the day, consumer consumption habits are unexpectedly switching up dramatically, with audio content and listenership rapidly on the rise, and engagement surging. To stay connected and informed, those sheltering at home are spending their days kept company by podcasts and music.

It’s a hands-free medium that can move with them throughout their day, listened to anywhere and anytime. In a crowded content landscape, the promise of audio is a powerful one. It expands the reach of your marketing significantly, attracting listeners who simply prefer audio content, or who can’t use other forms of content.

Portable and versatile, audio offers brands a unique way to cut through the visual clutter and increase personalization, convenience, and loyalty with meaningful content. And consumers are very willing to listen up.

According to Nielsen, four out of ten households have more than one smart speaker, and in a typical week, 90% use it for music, while 68% are listening to news. In the last month, 37% have listened to a podcast in the last month, 24% listen weekly, and 16 million people in the U.S. are avid fans.

That’s because audio grabs you. Neurological studies have shown how powerful audio is, engaging a storm of neural networks in the brain, including those that control motor actions, emotions, and creativity. Adding a human voice to your brand adds a layer of emotion that engages your audience more deeply, in a more sensory way.

More than any of your other content, to make branded audio content work as an integral part of your full brand identity, you need to understand your target audience, and the way they want to feel when they think about your brand, the mood you want to evoke, the kind of message you want to send — and it requires knowing how to create a rich and seamless audio experience wherever a consumer encounters your brand.

Here are just a few formats and channels branded audio content can include — and what you should be considering to integrate into your marketing mix:

Podcasts, both sponsored and branded. Creating a branded podcast gives you an opportunity to tell your company’s story, give insight into what you do, and show your audience who you are and what your company stands for. Like a blog, podcasts should offer educational, thought leadership-style content for listeners searching for information surrounding your business’s area of expertise. It can include interviews with experts from your company as well as leaders in your field — or you can repurpose existing content from your blog, turning it into a spoken word performance.

Audiograms. Essentially, an audiogram is a soundbite. It’s a way to concisely impart information, or promote something quickly. They can be pithy audio moments layered over still images — such as a seasonal message from your company’s CEO, for instance, and unlike advertisements, they aren’t paid promotional spots, and don’t necessarily require a call to action. They can be shared on social platforms like Instagram, where users tend to browse wearing headphones.

Clubhouse. Brands are starting to dip their toes into the Clubhouse waters. With over 6 million registered users as of February and a ton of celebrity buzz, the app is taking off. Rooms in the Clubhouse are home to live audio conversations that users can listen to or participate in; you can find yourself listening to discussions between reporters, celebrities, scientists, artists, and more. The immediate nature of these live conversations makes them powerfully engaging, and brands are just starting to explore the possibilities.

Facebook Live. Streaming an audio broadcast on Facebook Live — for instance, showing viewers a podcast recording session — is a great way to get on your audience’s news feed. It’s also a great way to solicit engagement, allowing them to comment in real time, provide feedback, and ask questions from your guests.

Making existing content accessible. Adapting your visual and written content into audio makes it available to audience members who are vision-impaired, which is table stakes in 2021. It also makes your content more portable, the way audiobooks let readers take their books on the road. It can also bring energy and emotion to your content, engaging an audience in a way the written word cannot.

Audio advertisements. 49% of avid podcast fans report that advertising on a podcast is the best way for a brand to reach them — and 54% said they’re more likely to purchase a product they heard about on a podcast. You can find this kind of ad space on radio programs and streaming services. It’s an opportunity to find a compelling way to capture audience attention quickly, and to create an audio brand for yourself.

It’s important to ensure these on-demand audio experiences should have the same clear audio quality as live interaction. Consumers now expect this, and when audio is sub-par, they can get frustrated and abandon. However, many application developers are not audio experts. And historically, great audio required an audio engineer, and the right software, and a lot of time.

But there are new ways to deliver great audio, whether that’s on a communication platform or with online content. New cloud-based API solutions can improve audio quality with just a few lines of code, allowing for background noise reduction, loudness adjustment, and improved dynamics and equalization, and a consistent quality control process.

To learn more about the importance of branded audio content across online experiences, how to develop powerful audio branding, how audio can help you connect with your users, plus the tools that can help you improve your audio and extract actionable data, don’t miss this VB Live event.

Register here for free.

Sourced from VentureBeat

In News

Pay attention to your ‘sonic logo’ in 2021

March 3, 2021 No Comments

By Elijah B Torn

Lessons and opportunities in sonic branding

We’re living a lot of our lives virtually, increasingly looking to digital channels and platforms for shopping, entertainment, and educational needs. Unsurprisingly, many people now have their first encounter with a brand online yet marketers are letting the sound of their brand blow away in the wind.

Few are paying attention to crafting an effective and recognizable sonic signature, which is ridiculous when you think how much sound and music play a role in our experiences across the burgeoning number of new platforms.

Of course, I might be a little biased, but the fact is there are huge opportunities for brands to make a connection through sound — if they can figure out the right way to differentiate themselves.

Sound and emotion

In the past year, we have seen huge audience behavior shifts when it comes to sound, which means marketers need to think more strategically about the role that music branding can play in forging a deeper relationship with their customers.

They need to pause and reflect on how they personally feel about various sounds and music — I know what emotions are evoked for me when I hear the electric hum of a tattoo machine, or the tranquil, ambient sounds when walking in nature. Marketers can then start to imagine what feelings they would like to evoke via sound in their audiences.

When we hear ‘sonic logos’ we consciously understand we are hearing a brand sound for a few seconds. What we may not realize is that a good strategy behind many sonic identities means we’re subconsciously hearing something that is determining how we feel over time. And that is very powerful.

What do I mean? People usually point to the sonic identity developed by Intel as a good example — simple yet iconic:

There is also Coca-Cola and its iconic suite of sonic assets — the sound of the bottle opening, the ice cubes in a glass, and the more obvious five-note sonic logo. The video below does a good job summarizing the work behind the soundscape.

Have a listen and see just how seamlessly this strategy has been embedded. This isn’t luck — Coca-Cola’s marketers understand the science that proves the effectiveness of sound, and continue to reap the benefits today.

Every brand wants this but they want it fast. Few understand how to execute a sonic experience strategy properly, opting instead to simply slap on a quick-fix sonic logo as a short-term tactic and then expecting long-term results.

It’s not easy — pitfalls await the unprepared. Even a brand as innovative and focused on the customer as Netflix can trip up.

I can’t be the only one who felt Netflix’s new cinematic sonic brand was clichéd and unoriginal despite the adaptation of their sonic logo being composed by the legend Hans Zimmer. Nothing about the brand is evoked and there seemed to be little else in terms of strategy and rollout.

The science of sound

But does any of this really matter? Well, you don’t have to just take my word for it — it’s backed up by studies. Research carried out at the University of Leicester in the UK discovered that brands that use music that is aligned with its identity are 96% more likely to be remembered by the consumer, versus brands that use ‘unfit’ music or no music at all.

The findings of the 2020 Power of You Ipsos report confirmed that brand assets such as sonic brand cues are more effective than assets leveraged from wider culture, such as celebrities.

The associations between a specific brand and celebrity fade over time or become obscured as the person signs up to more and more partnerships. A sonic signature is unique.

The research shows how a cohesive and compelling sonic strategy fuels positive recall and steers behaviours. The challenge is how to inject audio into a brand’s ecosystem.

So how do you create a strategy for sound scaping your brand?

Well, you can take a page from my book.

When I and my team first meet with brands, we look incredibly closely at the overall business and brand objectives. We dive into whether this is a new brand, a repositioning or rebrand, or whether they just need to cut through a cluttered market. We form an internal map and understand the brand’s personality — their tone of voice, language, who they are talking to, and who they see as competitors.

This helps us match sounds to their unique values — a crucial part of the strategy and where many brands slip up. Rather than looking to their own identity, brands often look to competitors and the ‘sound of the sector’ meaning brands start to sound the same. For example, can you think of an individual utility company’s sonic identity right now?

I see a lot of the same errors in judgment when brands blindly tap into a music zeitgeist in order to try and reach a younger demographic — don’t do this. They miss the mark because they’ve strayed outside of what the brand stands for or what it means to consumers.

This doesn’t mean your brand shouldn’t look to diversify or understand what different audiences want — but simply adding a grime soundtrack to a campaign to appear ‘cool’ will do nothing for brand equity.

A more effective approach to using sound in the most culturally relevant way is to spend time figuring out a clear direction for how your brand should sound in and of itself, and then make it flexible enough to tap into other genres and artists.

Why I’m lovin’ McDonald’s strategy

McDonald’s did this brilliantly nearly two decades ago with its partnership with Justin Timberlake on the track ‘I’m Lovin’ It.’

After the strategy was conceived the song was released and that now-iconic five-note mnemonic (ba-da ba ba baaaa) started appearing in all brand advertising which meant they reaped the benefits of teaming up with a popular artist without straying from their own brand identity.

Simply licensing one of his songs would have been more costly and would never have had the same long-term brand-building that this strategy generated.

So how does a brand balance cool with its own values and doesn’t then run the risk of quickly becoming dated? For example, capitalizing on a trend like TikTok without looking try-hard and lost. Bose just launched a really popular TikTok challenge using the hashtag #CancelTheNoise and featured a cool and accessible custom-made track — this worked for the platform’s format, reflecting the personality of Bose whilst also appealing to both younger and older users.

Recently, Gucci strategically found a way to reach younger audiences and be ‘trendy’ without renouncing its values. Collaborating with director Gus Van Sant, the brand created its first digital film series featuring musicians Billie Eilish, known for her love of the designs, and Creative Director Michele Allasandro’s muse Harry Styles.

Peloton recently announced a strategic partnership with Beyoncé. The brand took the data that proved she was the most requested artist by Peloton owners and then used the partnership to celebrate students at historically black colleges and universities, placing purpose at the core whilst appealing to the fan-base of one of the biggest musicians in the world.

I think we’re coming to the end of one of the most interesting and challenging periods in recent history. Brands have struggled and yet face enormous opportunities to evaluate and update as they work to match rapidly-changing consumer behaviours.

It is my hope that smart marketers soon realize that simply slapping a quick-fix sonic logo on their ad and playing it repetitively offers little more than basic consumer recall, while strategic sonic branding has so much more potential to build brand love.

Sounds exciting, doesn’t it?

By Elijah B Torn

Sr. Creative Director, MassiveMusic New York — Elijah has been working with music and audio for brands for nearly fifteen years. His experience however is not just limited to audio branded content. Torn has also released three solo albums of electronic music. These albums have received air time on KCRW’s ‘Morning Becomes Eclectic’, WNYC’s ‘New Sounds’ as well as (the late) Lou Reed’s SiriusXM radio show ‘NY Shuffle’. Twitter: elijahbtorn

Sourced from TNW

In News

How To Hide Your iPhone’s Unique Name From Apps (And Why You Should)

March 3, 2021 No Comments

By Jack Morse

Your iPhone has trouble keeping secrets. Thankfully, there’s something you can do about it.

What you do on the internet, what apps you download, and, often, where you go are all data points that can be linked to an iPhone’s so-called advertising identifier (Android phones have a similar Advertising ID). Combined with commercially available databases, this unique alphanumeric string can be enough for third parties to tie an iPhone’s actions back to the real name of its owner.

We were reminded of the real-world consequences of this Friday, when the New York Times published an article exposing the movements of individuals involved in the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol. The newspaper obtained a data set that linked phone location data to advertising identifiers, which, combined with other available databases, allowed the paper to link that location data to real people.

Assuming they’re playing by Apple’s rules, app developers get access to a phone’s advertising identifier by simply requesting it from the phone. Think of an ad identifier like the more familiar web cookie which follows you around the internet, remembering what you do and exchanging information with websites along the way. Your phone has something like a cookie, too — that’s the ad identifier.

While you may not have much sympathy for those described in the Times article — who, after all, may have taken part in the attack on the Capitol — the point remains. Your phone’s advertising identifier is yet another digital breadcrumb leading straight back to you.

If you want privacy when, say, going to the doctor, church, an AA meeting, this should concern you. Many of the apps on your phone that have access to your ad identifier are tracking your location. While the apps may promise to store this data anonymously — linked only to your ad identifier — the Times article provides an example of just how easy to it to tie those identifiers (and all the data associated with them) back to real names.

“Several companies offer tools to allow anyone with data to match the IDs with other databases,” the paper explains. And those databases might contain your real name and address.

But there’s a way to fight back.

Apple offers users the option, albeit buried deep in an iPhone’s settings, to deny apps access to your advertising identifier. Turning off apps’ access to location data is also an important step, but there are other ways for apps to estimate your phone’s location — like connections to WiFi networks. You should also not give apps access to your location data unless they absolutely need it to function, like, for example, a map app.

To deny apps access to your phone’s advertising identifier:

Go to “Settings”
Tap “Privacy”
Select “Tracking”
Disable the option that says “Allow Apps to Request to Track”

Limit how you can be tracked on your iPhone.

That’s it.

Interestingly, the menu page doesn’t make it immediately clear that this action will have the intended effect. But it does. Clicking “Learn More” takes the curious to a long page of text which explains what’s going on behind the scenes.

“When you decline to give permission for the app to track you, the app is prevented from accessing your device’s advertising identifier (previously controlled through the Limit Ad Tracking setting on your device).”

There, wasn’t that easy?

By Jack Morse

Sourced from Mashable India

In News

A master’s in marketing: why advocates say courses offer ‘unlimited opportunities’

March 3, 2021 No Comments

By David Benady

The world of marketing is changing rapidly, but a postgrad degree offers a route to more senior roles.

From commissioning TV ads to analysing sales data, marketing is a discipline that combines science with creative magic. Perfecting skills such as branding, digital promotion, creative engagement and consumer psychology requires both in-depth study and on-the-job experience. A master’s degree in marketing offers a chance to learn these skills and helps students plan their career path.

“The opportunities are limitless,” says Beverly Wagner, department head of marketing at the University of Strathclyde. Graduates from Strathclyde’s marketing MSc degree can go into classic marketing roles, such as becoming brand managers or they can use the course to broaden their business skills base.

“As well as the typical marketing jobs, our marketing MSc graduates are employed in businesses to support innovation, undertake market research, analyse industry trends, carry out strategic planning and create social media strategies,” she says.

Students learn about areas such as consumer behaviour, customer service and digitalisation. “Every class includes guest speakers from industry and students are appraised of industry trends and how their degrees can support a variety of career choices. Assignments are often based around real-life business problems,” she says.

One of the big attractions of a master’s in marketing is that it offers a wide-ranging perspective of the field. This was part of the appeal for Lily Garefalaki, who has just completed a one-year MSc in strategic marketing at Cranfield School of Management. The course was interrupted by the pandemic lockdown, though teaching shifted seamlessly online. She says the MSc has provided her with a comprehensive understanding of marketing strategy from concept to implementation. She was also glad to receive training in two distinct areas, marketing to consumers (B2C) and marketing to businesses (B2B).

“We were taught a range of modules covering both B2B and B2C, from key account management and digital marketing to branding. We were able to create strategic plans because the curriculum was structured as a journey, it connected everything together at the end. I liked this course because we were able to get a holistic view of marketing,” she says. In the first term, students worked on key account management – managing a company’s most important clients – with a real business. “Each team had a real live client for whom they did a key account management plan and we had meetings with the actual executives. So it was really hands-on from day one,” she says.

Her ambition is to work in film and TV distribution, so she focused on areas such as subscription TV services and online video during the course. For her 16,000-word dissertation, making up 35% of the assessment, she conducted a literature review on the use of video games to conduct market research.

Meanwhile, Maggie Jones, director of qualifications at the Chartered Institute of Marketing, advises candidates to check whether their chosen master’s offers a high level of digital training, as there is a shortage of digital skills in the industry. Another consideration is whether fellow students are pursuing careers in marketing or more general areas of business. “You pay a lot of money for a master’s, but many of the people who join it may not be marketing related. That can affect the whole experience, so it’s worth knowing what you are going into,” she says.

Playstation Takeover Of London Tube Stops For PS5 Launch

Marketing innovations have continued throughout the pandemic, such as Sony’s PS5 Underground campaign. Photograph: Alex Davidson/Getty Images

Media and marketing: what you need to know
Media and marketing remain popular choices for postgraduate study, offering either a route to academic study or a practical career boost. Those looking to work in news and reporting can take an MA in journalism at a number of universities – and there are a variety of media studies courses combined with subjects such as sociology, film studies and cultural studies.

Most UK universities offer marketing master’s courses. These can either be MA degrees that focus on advertising, retail and public relations or MSc degrees that lean towards data and market research.

The skilled marketer needs the ability to blend the two areas together. A master’s typically requires a bachelor’s degree, which can be in any subject. A master’s is especially useful for those with a number of years’ experience working in the field as a potential foot in the door for more senior roles.

The qualification can aid promotion to a senior marketing role such as board-level marketing director. While many students self-fund their degrees, there are employers who are prepared to help with tuition fees. More than 10,000 students took postgraduate studies in marketing in 2018/19, according to HESA.

Meanwhile, more than 5,000 students took media studies postgraduate courses and 2,000 studied journalism at postgraduate level. Some universities also offer marketing as part of an MBA course.

The Chartered Institute of Marketing offers a variety of auxiliary training options that can prepare students for a master’s. Students can take a diploma in professional marketing or a diploma in digital marketing ahead of a master’s.

A master’s can also be helpful when applying for chartered marketer status, recognised as the highest level of marketing in the profession.

Feature Image Credit: A master’s in marketing offers a wide-ranging perspective on the field. Photograph: Victor Torres/Stocksy United

By David Benady

Sourced from The Guardian

In News

The Third Seismic Brand Shift Of Our Time: Purpose

March 2, 2021 No Comments

By Roy Hutchinson

We are living in a time of seismic change for brand management, the third of its kind in the last 35 years. Covid brought to the surface what’s been percolating in the market for years: the need for brands to focus on their purpose in order to lure millennial consumers, who have become today’s highest quality consumers because they’re the beneficiaries of the largest wealth transfer in human history.

No longer is advertising a product’s benefits or features enough to keep a brand afloat and attract consumers in troubling times. Brands need to showcase what they do for the greater good, how they treat their employees, and their actions to protect the environment if they want to cash in on the new spending power of millennial consumers.

Previous Seismic Transformations In Branding

Over the past 35 years of my career, I can recall only two periods of similar seismic branding transformation: when the very notion of brand value was questioned in the 1990s and when digital marketing hit the scene in the 2000s.

When Brands Almost Disappeared In The 1990s

In the early 1990s, the world started to question why brands were even important. Why would someone pay more for a name-brand soda when a store substitute tastes nearly the same?

At the time, it was questionable if the very concept of “brand” would survive outside of luxury goods. The debate was reversed when non-luxury brands worked hard to create sales-driving brand association. Toyota and Honda became shorthand for reliability because of the brand’s cost-to-performance ratio. No matter if customers purchased the lowest- or highest-priced Toyota, they knew they were getting the best vehicle for that price point. Apple resurrected itself from near bankruptcy to become the standard for quality in electronics by offering elite-quality products that last, combined with instantly-recognizable design. Quality craftsmanship was only the starting point to elevate these brands, of course. Advertising and marketing campaigns spread the word that both Apple and Toyota produced only “best in class” products.

If you’d like to read more about it, I highly suggest David Aaker’s classic book Managing Brand Equity. (Aaker and I are not professionally affiliated.)

Digital Domination In The 2000s

The second earthquake moment happened with the advent of digital media. Suddenly, print, radio and television were no longer the only way to target consumers. Advertising became a completely new science driven by data that enabled very fine segmentation of messaging. This required a massive change in the skills of marketers, such as learning to engage on social media and create high-converting websites. To this day, two decades on, many brands still struggle with digital success.

Today’s Shift To Purpose

Today, we are experiencing a third transformational change in branding and marketing. This time, the transformation centers around purpose.

To reach millennials, businesses must define and promote their purpose. Almost two-thirds of millennials express “a preference for brands that have a point of view and stand for something,” according to a study of global brands by Kantar.

Millennials favor doing business with brands that share their values. According to the Deloitte Global Millennial Survey 2020:

• 47% educate themselves on the environmental impact of the brands they consume

• 41% think that businesses have a positive impact on society

• 38% have initiated a relationship with a business that has a positive impact on the environment

• 33% think business leaders are having a positive impact on them and on society

• 22% have reduced their engagement with a brand because of the CEO’s political views

Largest Transfer Of Wealth In Human History

In addition to the fact that every millennial is now of working age, from 24 (entry-level workforce) to 39 (peak age for savings and borrowing), they are also the beneficiaries of the largest wealth transfer in human history. This makes them the highest-value target demographic in the market today.

As Baby Boomers (a disproportionate number of whom rode stock options and a 20-year bull market to unusual levels of wealth) begin to retire and pass away, they are transferring a staggering amount of money to their millennial descendants. So not only are millennials earning income in the workforce, they are also on track to becoming an extremely wealthy generation via inheritance.

Estimates of this wealth transfer stand at $30 trillion in the U.S. alone, of which $9 trillion will be liquid assets (e.g., cash, houses). Worldwide, the estimated wealth transfer reaches $100 trillion. Add this to their current spending power as part of the workforce, and brands would be remiss not to do everything in their power to capture this market.

The Pandemic Brought Purpose To The Forefront of Advertising

While Covid-19 made every brand put “being safe” at the heart of its messaging, it is easy to tell a true purpose-driven brand from an opportunistic campaign. The latter often includes thinly disguised offers (e.g., “Stay at home and order food online with our credit card, which gives 10% cash back on groceries”). Compare these with genuine, purpose-driven campaigns, like those we saw from Apple, Nationwide, and Vodafone, and the difference becomes evident in tonality and responsibility.

It Takes More Than Advertising To Reach Quality Consumers

Creating a brand that is truly purpose-driven — and comes across as such — requires a company to rethink its internal culture, its consumer-facing processes and its treatment of staff. Millennials will not do business with a company known for unethical treatment of employees, unfair pay practices, animal testing and other transgressions.

What does your company offer to the world? What is your true purpose, other than turning a profit? Craft a brand purpose that resonates with your audience and that your company can and will actually “live.” Then, invest in marketing, advertising and action that brings that purpose to life.

Feature Image Credit: getty

By Roy Hutchinson

Roy Hutchinson, Chief Strategy and Communications Officer, Deem Finance LLC. Read Roy Hutchinson’s full executive profile here. Follow me on LinkedIn. Check out my website.

Sourced from Forbes

In News

5 Secrets of Successful YouTube Marketing

March 2, 2021 No Comments

By Jeremy Collins

Check these effective ways for successful YouTube Marketing!

Making a YouTube channel is a child’s play. Nowadays, almost every other person has a YouTube channel. However, using the correct tools and methodology to market the content is not everyone’s cup of tea. Thus, to buy YouTube views and buy YouTube subscribers, you must seriously consider to up your game in the YouTube marketing field.

Read on the five secrets about successful YouTube marketing that every YouTuber should have on their fingertips.

Social Media Promotion

To increase engagement on your YouTube channel and your views, sharing your YouTube content on other social media platforms is the best way to go! Creating a strong social media presence be it Twitter, Instagram or Facebook can go a long way to make your life as a content creator easy. Moreover, YouTube makes it all the easier to share videos on other social media sites. All you need to do is just click on the “share” icon underneath your video and choose your desired platform. You can also add your YouTube channel’s link or recent YouTube video’s link to your profile bio. This way you can attract potential subscribers from other platforms apart from YouTube.

However, when you promote your YouTube content on social media, make sure it is attractive and interesting. Do not just let people scroll past your content by simply announcing your new video. Make sure you promote it, by talking about it. You can even prepare small teasers to release on social media platforms to attract people to your YouTube videos.

Call-to-Action Overlay

Call-to-Action overlay works as a tool that helps you to brand your YouTube videos. The CTA overlay helps you to direct your crowd over what would interest them on your channel. For example, if you run a Fashion & Beauty channel and someone who is watching a makeup tutorial on your channel is a likely audience who would want to watch makeup product reviews instead of fashion trends. With the presence of a CTA button, you can put in a display URL in the video that will lead them to another video of their liking. Call-to-Action is the literal button that can help you tell your audience what to do next.

Therefore, it is important to include the CTA in every video. You can avail of this feature by clicking on the “info and settings” and the Call-To-Action overlay appears. CTAs have become the open secret of every successful YouTube channel. Using a CTA is just as important as asking people to subscribe to your channel by the end or beginning of every video. Hence, missing out on this feature is a big mistake.

Video title, description & thumbnail

The ABC of marketing your video successfully and organically on YouTube is to optimize your video title and description and create an alluring thumbnail. YouTube is a platform that has 50 videos on the same topic, so why should someone decide to watch your video over the others? This deciding factor hugely lies in what you write in your headline, how precisely you describe your video and how attractive is your thumbnail looks. Thus, it is crucial to construct all these based on the intent of the viewers.

The best way to do it is to use Google. Just type in the keywords that describe your video and look at the sponsored ads that appear. These videos are the ones that are the most popular and they are ones whose titles and descriptions will help you build a similar one for your video. Furthermore, for building quality thumbnail applications like Canva are the best pick. Make sure that your thumbnail correctly represents your video content.

Put yourself out there!

The prime way to attract people to your YouTube channel is to put yourself out there. People love watching videos with real faces in them compared to the ones that only use camera rolls and voice overs. Even when your content doesn’t need you specifically to introduce yourself to people, still take the first 10 seconds of your video and introduce yourself in person and ask people to subscribe to your channel. Additionally, you can also collaborate with YouTubers and feature them in your video and increase your views.

You need to build a community of engaged users and regularly put out your content. On top of that using these five brilliant ways of YouTube marketing can give your channel the boost it has been waiting for.

By Jeremy Collins

Sourced from INFLUENCIVE

In News

How to win at e-commerce as niche brands disrupt the market

March 2, 2021 No Comments

By Omar Zayat.

1. Adapt quickly to customers’ needs.

2. Become a category specialist.

3. Speak your social truth.

Feature Image Credit: Facebook

By Omar Zayat.

Sourced from AdAge

In News

Why network agencies aren’t dead yet

March 1, 2021 No Comments

By Robin Bonn

Despite the demise of network agencies being greatly exaggerated, to thrive in 2021, marketers need to choose their agency partners more carefully than ever.

From cats versus dogs and Blur versus Oasis, to a certain referendum – the specifics of which escape me – we all love a binary debate. Either pick a side and fight to the death or grab some popcorn and watch sparks fly.

And, of course, it’s all good, clean fun – until it’s not. Things turn ugly, livelihoods are lost and families get torn apart. And that’s just over pop music.

So given the ongoing challenges marketers face in 2021, let’s explore another great debate of our age – network agencies versus independents.

Are network agencies obsolete?

A popular refrain is that indies are agile and networks are slow. It’s certainly true 2020 saw indies snaffle some big-name client wins. In contrast, being publicly listed, the holding companies’ challenging numbers were very visible. It’s been easy to sustain a ‘demise of the networks’ narrative.

But how real is that? And what are the implications for marketers?

My consultancy, Co:definery, teamed up with creative leadership specialists Curve and research agency BAMM to ask marketers how they viewed network and independent agencies. We also spoke to a range of agency CEOs to get their take.

So fetch a cold one, get comfy and let battle commence.

Agency ownership matters

First up, is indie versus network even a thing? After all, no ‘networks’ or ‘indies’ are created equal. And clearly no two holding companies are alike either. Alongside the size difference between, say, Dentsu and Omnicom, the cultural differences are vast too.

At the same time, although all agencies are facing headwinds, perhaps network shops are enduring more resistance. Because they tend to be larger than indies, any decline in retainers will be more disruptive for them. Likewise, the bigger the agency, the more that structure and process become a necessary evil. No wonder unhappy network agency clients often cite scale as a perceived reason for dissatisfaction.

Aside from the relative health of indie and network agencies, our research demonstrates marketers do care about ownership status. Only 15.7% said it wasn’t a factor in agency selection – less than half the amount who said the distinction was critical. And these trends were even more pronounced for higher spenders.

Interesting, right? Let’s unpack why.

Breadth of capability

Network agencies often trade on breadth of service. In response, indies point at competing P&Ls and a thriving, multi-disciplinary freelance market; not least the various ‘collectives’ being formed by top talent exiting big agencies.

Natalie Graeme co-founded independent Uncommon Creative Studio after leaving WPP’s Grey. She told me: “Although no agency has a load of people sitting there ready to go, networks like to tell clients they have a ‘man that can’. But that ‘man’ is often just a warm body, rather than the best person for the job. It’s about finding the right talent, not just the most available.”

With brilliant, motivated and well organised teams found in myriad places, you need to choose more wisely than ever.

Sara Tate followed the opposite path, leaving independent creative agency Mother to become CEO at Omnicom’s TBWA in London. She said: “Whether it’s independent or owned by a holding company, no type of agency has the monopoly on assembling the perfect client team; it’s about having the right attitude and process.”

Long-time network agency leader Tim Bonnet is now president at Unlimited, an independent group (albeit private equity-backed) that’s larger than many local network agency offices. He points to a cultural difference: “Network agencies focus on keeping client spend within the company or within the holding company’s current offering, but indies have a culture of looking outside for new innovations.”

Whether essential skills come from inside or out, network agencies’ ability to deliver a breadth of service was endorsed by our research. At 33.2%, this was marketers’ top answer when asked what makes network agencies attractive. In contrast, at 17.6%, breadth of service was only a middle ranking quality of indies.

The role of quality

Regardless of breadth, surely quality and talent are all-important? That’s why agencies love that hackneyed maxim, ‘our people are our most important asset’.

Charlie Rudd, CEO of Publicis-owned Leo Burnett – himself a product of a pre-acquisition BBH – told me: “When you’re running agencies, the only thing you need to worry about is your talent – getting the best people and keeping them motivated, happy and able to do their best work.”

But can network agencies really do this? Larissa Vince suggests not. CEO of independent creative agency Now – having joined from Publicis’ Saatchi & Saatchi – she said: “Being handed arbitrary, multi-market pay freezes stops you from rewarding the people who are nailing it.”

Interestingly, our research showed that “quality of people, thinking and work” was only a middle ranking feature of network agencies’ appeal. And for bigger spending brands, this slipped to less than a third of the importance of breadth of service.

So are network agencies safe and solid one-stop shops? Not necessarily – quality of people, thinking and work was a similarly middling quality in indies too.

Agility and independence

If marketers place similar importance on talent in networks and indies, then perhaps how people work matters more? After all, ‘agility’ looms large in this debate.

Many indies claim to be more nimble, suggesting that running a network agency can feel like a straitjacket. As Uncommon’s Graeme put it: “Holding companies value predictability, which means less flexibility on models and less commerciality within account management.”

Matthew Saunby is the executive creative director at creative agency 2050London. Having worked at networks and indies from AMV and TBWA to BBH and Forever Beta, he’s well placed to offer a balanced view on hierarchy and flexibility. “There may be extra layers in network agencies but that rigour can also lead to better work. And although the process can feel quicker in indies, it’s sometimes an illusion, especially if you’re throwing dozens of ideas at the client. If you’re not careful, this ‘agility’ becomes over-collaborative and leads to the safest, most familiar work.”

Our research makes a similarly nuanced case. For the biggest spending brands, 38.5% of marketers cited “speed, flexibility and agility” as a compelling quality in network agencies – second only to breadth of service.

In contrast, while speed, flexibility and agility was just as highly prized within indies, it became less valued by higher spenders.

That’s a plot twist, right? Not only is ‘agility’ far from the sole preserve of indies, bigger spending brands find it more often in network agencies.

The leadership factor

Another trope is that indies get closer to your business than network agencies. Is that real? And is it what you actually want?

While the input of founders is surely a given in small indies, perhaps any sense of ‘closeness’ is heightened by the cachet of the owners working on your account. After all, with other people running IT, HR and their building, a network agency CEO might actually be more available.

Regardless of ownership, maybe this boils down to how important you feel to your agency. Are they focused on making money for you or for themselves?

Former ITV marketer Simon Orpin is now CEO at independent media agency Electric Glue. He said: “Indies can focus more on their people, which improves the client product and in turn drives profit. In network agencies, these priorities sometimes run the other way round.”

In a world where polarised views rarely promote progress, marketers need more nuance and clarity than ever.

Our research revealed management style is marketers’ biggest frustration with both indies and network agencies. However, they describe network agencies as being too hands-on and indies not being hands-on enough.

Who saw that one coming? Nope, me neither.

Rise of the adaptables

Alongside some nuanced surprises, our research uncovered just as many similarities. After all – newsflash! – difference is relative and preference is subjective. Case in point: as TBWA’s Tate put it, “if we’re competing with Accenture Interactive, then who’s the indie?”

So what’s the bigger picture for marketers right now?

We found that since the onset of Covid-19, the agency qualities that have increased most in importance were pretty consistent across networks and indies – namely ‘sector experience’, ‘quality of thinking and work’, ‘speed, flexibility and agility’ and ‘stability’.

Ultimately, you need innovative solutions to novel problems. So all agencies need to adapt – quickly. And judging by the transformation briefs they’re bringing to Co:definery, they hear you loud and clear – although be a mate and keep saying it, yeah?

Choosing wisely

The anthropologist Margaret Mead famously said: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” This applies to agency ‘citizens’ within both networks and indies.

In 2021, clearly choosing the right agencies has never been more important. And with brilliant, motivated and well organised teams found in myriad places, you need to choose more wisely than ever. So what should marketers bear in mind?

Once the pandemic passes, maintain the new spirit of partnership. Saatchi & Saatchi London’s managing director Sarah Jenkins said: “Covid-19 has brought us much closer to client problems, so trust and honesty have increased, which has enabled us to be more instinctive.”

Don’t just hire an agency for now. Or as Wunderman Thompson’s UK CEO Pip Hulbert puts it: “Understand how the world and consumers are changing, so treat your agency like a marriage and make sure you can grow together.”

If you need ‘agility’, then self-awareness matters. “Knowing what you want is the best way to access speed. You don’t need to be big or small – on the client or agency side – you just need to be clear.” Wise words from McCann London CEO Sheryl Marjoram.

And having delved into one distinction, here’s one more – from Colenso BBDO chief strategy officer Rob Campbell: “Rather than indie versus network, it’s more a case of whether the agency wants to be at the business end of creativity or the creative end of business. The former is a greater focus on revenue and the latter is a commitment to the power of creativity. Clients just need to understand which kind of agency they want.”

So there you have it. In a world where polarised views rarely promote progress, marketers need more nuance and clarity than ever. Let smart agencies challenge you, then seek out the perfect fit, wherever that may be.

If independence or network ownership is mission critical, then follow your chosen path with confidence. Just don’t be guided by preconceptions.

After all, with any binary choice, your decision only matters when it really matters.

And for the record, it’s Blur by a mile. ‘Roll With It’ sounded like the theme tune to Only Fools and Horses. Don’t @ me.

By Robin Bonn

Robin Bonn is the founder of agency management consultancy Co:definery.

Sourced from www.marketingweek.com

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