Marketing’s influence in creating an organisation’s vision has arguably never been stronger but the task of attracting and retaining the visionary marketers of the future, building the right structure and team balance has never been more challenging.
Content marketing can lose focus on a brand’s core purpose if marketers overemphasise editorial independence and assume their offerings are not interesting enough. Strongly communicated brand values and reflecting customers’ needs should lead to interesting and effective content.
It was always important to Honda founder Soichiro Honda that society was pleased his company existed and that the brand had an emotional bond with consumers.
An ‘arms race’ is developing on social media as brands vie to create high-quality multimedia content, with those that fail to keep up standards with their videos and images risking a steady drop in awareness, engagement and conversion rates.
Without robust integration between technology and customer experience, the encounters that consumers have with brands offline and online can be inconsistent.
It’s the sexy side of data that gets marketers’ pulses racing, but whether that means personalisation or predictive analytics, it is only possible if a brand gets the basics right with a focus on data quality and preparation. Yet 92% of businesses believe their data contains inaccuracies.
A large number of marketers have no strategy for personalising their communications even though it delivers clear returns, and those that do are mostly just using email, but there are a multiplicity of ways to extend its effectiveness.
Marketing Week recently reported that organisations are turning to ‘generalist’ marketers who can work across all channels and have a rounded set of skills, rather than choosing specialists. So what does this mean for marketers’ training needs?
Following this year’s inaugural Vision 100, Marketing Week and Adobe brought together members of this list of visionary marketers to ask what it means to be one, the impact on business and whether it can be learned.
Loyalty rewards are a key factor in attracting consumers but as it is now much easier to find offers, brands need to innovate to keep their customers. And with a savvy younger generation of shoppers who know what they want, retailers need to work harder to earn loyalty.
With consumers expecting the same multichannel service from their financial provider as from retail brands, and new entrants better able to deliver those needs, the sector faces substantial challenges. Our panel of experts discuss the best way forward.
Using non-personal data such as search histories will enable brands to tailor content for privacy-conscious consumers but it is a complex area to get right, so they need to tread carefully
Customers trust businesses providing useful content that informs and educates rather than interrupting their lives, but it must be linked to brand and not sales objectives.
It has never been so difficult for brands to retain loyalty from business customers and consumers alike. Service, ease of doing business and the number of touchpoints involved can all combine to encourage people to stick with, or switch from, a brand creating several challenges for senior marketers.
Marketers need to get to grips with marketing automation or risk becoming an endangered species, but they should not get complacent either and let the technology do all the work.