#SESLON: Consistency Is Key for Optimizing Marketing
Consistency can be achieved by having a clear brand voice and not confusing it with uniformity, according to a panel of executives from Facebook, Lego, Microsoft, and Mindshare.
When it comes to ensuring that content is consistent across platforms, having a clear brand message is crucial. That consistency should also be present across devices, said Luis Navarrete Gomez, head of global search marketing at Lego.
In a panel discussion kicking off day two of SES London, executives from Facebook, Lego, Microsoft, and Mindshare shared key tactics for optimizing marketing campaigns.
“If you look at kids nowadays and the way they behave, they don’t necessarily use Google to discover new content, so we have to provide a seamless experience across devices and deliver a consistent message,” Gomez said.
James Murray, a search advertising evangelist at Microsoft, added, “In order to do it properly, you need to have buy-in from every single individual working on the team.”
At Microsoft, collaboration is part of every employee’s key performance indicators, according to Murray, and if you can’t show how you helped somebody else, or how you took someone else’s idea and improved it, you are not going to be successful for the year.
For Facebook, relevance is a component of achieving the consistency goal. Nicola Day, the social network’s client partner for financial services, used Oreo’s most famous tweet as an example. The cookie brand had a whole team of people working during the Super Bowl, ready to tackle anything that could have possibly come up, including a power outage. The often-emulated “Dunk in the Dark” was shared on Twitter and Facebook 20,000 times within five minutes, and has since garnered more than 545 million impressions.
Storytelling is the other big one, according to Day, who added that the way a brand is perceived is built over time.
“Your brand should be more like Friends and less like Game of Thrones,” she said. “You should be able to watch just one episode, but if you follow the whole series, you’ll get a much better understanding of the story and the brand.”
It’s important not to confuse consistency with sameness, points out Chris Wallace, global digital lead at Mindshare.
“We need to make sure we’re hitting [consumers] with a consistent message but not the same message everywhere they go,” he said. He noted the importance of personalization, adding that “to be able to get to one-to-one is a dream.”
“At Facebook, we don’t talk about one-to-one; we talk about one-to-many because we can deliver relevant content to the right people at the right time, and that’s what’s important,” Day said.
Consumers see roughly 5,000 ads a day and audience segmentation is imperative for getting that relevant content to those right people. Day recommended that marketers spend 30 to 40 percent of their time on content, 20 percent on the campaigns, and the rest of the time measuring them.
“Only then can you omit what’s not working and what you’re getting wrong, and see what you’re getting right and amplify it,” she said.
According to Gomez, while data and scalability are important, neither is nearly as important as keeping in mind that marketing is ultimately about people.
“You can sell impressions ’til the cows come home, but they’ve got to go out to people who are relevant to you,” Murray said.
This article was originally published on http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/news/2394848/-seslon-consistency-is-key-for-optimizing-marketing.
