Growing layers of Digital Marketing

Pre covid, brands considered digital transformation important, but not urgent. Now, it’s table stakes—and happening at incredible speed. While consultancies have spent years consulting rather than executing, brands find that when push comes to shove, transformation needn’t be such a long, arduous process after all.

The People

The pace of conversation is rapid, requiring a need to react swiftly and smartly to become a part of the cultural moment as it happens. With a need to ensure relevance at speed, brands must evolve their teams into content engines that deliver relevant reach through a deep understanding of culture and user-driven insights. New partnerships will help them: think of influencers, content creators, and brand ambassadors hand-picked from your audience, each of whom are deeply in tune with the type of conversations and relationships you want to cultivate.

For brands taking digital transformation forward the only way to accelerate it, is by working with multi-disciplinary and agile teams. Smaller teams designed to understand and solve tasks without having to go through corporate chains will be the key to agility in the times of digital marketing.

The data

Most marketers focus their energies on getting the factual Consumer data right, and while that is a correct step, it, unfortunately, cannot help the brand tailor-make campaigns or communications….. And that’s why brands who collect First-Party Data in sync with consumer data platforms allow for more intuitive and relevant data to be captured like where the consumers are coming from, what articles are they reacting to and how, the content they view, and where they go from our platforms, allows brands to truly understand the consumer journey and its touchpoints. This helps brands reach out to a focussed audience with a higher return on the campaign.

The Plan – Feed the feeds

The meaning of modern brand building has changed, fueling a desire for brands everywhere to become the most talked about in their category. But doing so means showing up for the places where life moments increasingly happen for audiences: online, across channels

To reach audiences today, brands must “feed the feeds” with relevant, resonant content that drives impact and conversation at scale, inspiring audiences to act and participate across the customer decision journey.

Feeding the feeds requires brands to drastically rethink their relationships with consumers, as well as the agency partners they’ve come to rely on; the Mad Men era is long behind us. But by integrating their communication and content practices and taking a more proactive approach to engaging with audiences online, they’ll be ideally suited to build brand love wherever and whenever consumers engage.

Moving Beyond the Big Idea

For brands wanting to solve the understandable concern that cx experiences often fall further down the funnel, benefiting consumers who have already been brought into the brand ecosystem, while it helps build loyalty, raising awareness is still an issue. Hence the shift to TV as a backup. But steeping creative into the ‘fit-for-purpose’ approach can help combine impactful, relevant stories across channels–offering an opportunity to evolve the big idea beyond a one-off message and instead use it to propel the brand’s role in tailored, multifaceted ways.

After months of seeing consumers adopt new behaviors in the era of virtualization, being on social media isn’t enough- the key is to be intimately aware of the way audiences connect with various platforms, needs, and channels. While communicating with the same consumer, what may be true for one FMCG brand, may not be true for another FMCG brand due to brand loyalty, habit, or engaging content.

That’s what the teams need to be cognizant of. This means recognizing opportunities to reach out to audiences in new ways and requirement of new skill sets and expertise that bring those ideas to life.

About the author:

Gayatri Sethi, Vice President, Growth and Operations, Media.Monks India