Every day seems to bring a new innovation in ad tech, a new ad exchange, and new must-do best practices for reaching consumers.
Fueling today’s mobile ad land grab is the vast opportunity before the industry. Analyst Mary Meeker of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers recently projected that there is a $20 billion dollar mobile and Internet advertising opportunity in the United States alone.
In the race to capture ad dollars and consumer eyeballs in the new mobile ad frontier, remember the lessons learned from the decline of the display ad: Unless you can deliver a compelling message, static can equal stagnation, and ad budgets can quickly evaporate without delivering any discernible ROI.
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While the industry quickly embraces and iterates on new mobile ad tech, fundamentals should remain the foundation. Brands need to reach consumers where they are, deliver value, and make their messages stick.
One place where advertisers can be sure mobile consumers are is online, and the preferred on-ramp to the Internet today is Wi-Fi. Recent studies have shown that 94% of tablet and 42% of smartphone connections are via Wi-Fi. A Pew Internet & American Life Project study also revealed that more than a third of American adults own a tablet, and the people more likely to own them are college-educated, affluent 35-44 year-olds—a dream demo for many brands. The Wi-Fi connected mobile consumer audience is expanding rapidly, with ABI Research reporting 5 billion Wi-Fi devices shipped to date, a number they predict will double by 2015.
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Wi-Fi advertising and sponsorship can target by device, location, and daypart to reach specific consumers online, but a true engagement must still be earned. The multibillion dollar mobile monetization gap, new ad innovations, and marketplaces create a perfect recipe for consumers to experience online ad overload.
So, how can today’s advertisers be sure that their messages are resonating, and that they’re putting their money behind the most effective mobile advertising?
Keeping the following four touchstones in mind can help ensure the engagement and transparency that today’s leading brands require.
1. Create a Value Exchange
There’s truth to the saying “you have to give to receive.” The best way to secure active consumer engagement is by giving consumers something meaningful in return for their attention. Providing a valuable service or offer, such as free Wi-Fi, mobile coupons, or loyalty program perks are just some of the ways that consumers can feel rewarded for providing 30-40 seconds of their attention to a brand.
Venues can get in on this value exchange as well. Consumers are looking to stay connected wherever they go, from airports to malls to sports arenas, necessitating wireless network installations or upgrades in previously unwired locations. Wi-Fi sponsorship and location-based offers create a win-win-win: Customers get the connection or coupon they’re looking for, brands reach consumers in locations where consumers are in buying mode, and venues can share in the advertising revenue to offset the costs of their networks.
2. Know the Customer
In the age of “big data,” consumers are beginning to expect ads and offers tailored to them. In fact, a recent Infosys survey found that 85 percent of consumers want offers targeted to them, but 66 percent said online ads and emails missed the mark.
New wireless analytics tools capture data including location of connection, time spent online, and the type of device used, totally anonymously. When paired with additional third party data, advertisers can pinpoint target audiences with greater precision than ever, and can ensure delivery of the right message to the right customer. Brands can even field localized surveys via Wi-Fi networks to better understand their audiences and whether their messages are resonating.
Advertising delivery via wireless networks can today make it possible to target an iPhone-using working mother on her lunch break at her local Starbucks with a message that she’ll appreciate.
3. Remember That Attention Is Everything
Connected consumers are busy. With only 30-45 seconds of customers’ attention focused on them, advertisers have to make it count and know their message was received. Action-oriented engagement models can ensure that customers are paying attention in myriad ways.
One of the most popular and accepted engagements continues to be the video engagement, but new methods are gaining popularity. Brands sponsoring Wi-Fi can ask that consumers to type-in their slogan before starting to surf online, or click through to a sponsor website. Advertisers with app offerings can also encourage consumers to download an app for access to connectivity or a special offer. The customer receives a service or offer they value in exchange for minimal action, and an advertiser receives measurable data on message recall and engagement.
How does an advertiser know that attention is being paid? Because new tools allow actions to be validated, and the cost-per-engagement model ensures that advertisers don’t pay unless an action is completed.
4. Make Your Message Actionable—Right Now
Wi-Fi and location-based advertising and sponsorships are place-based by definition, and advertisers can turn purchase intent into purchase action by delivering an eye-catching, localized message. For example, when Google Offers was looking to introduce their New York deals to a new audience, the company ran two separate, concurrent Wi-Fi sponsorship campaigns via the NYC subway network and metropolitan hot zones—one for their NYC Midtown and NYC Downtown Offers services, allowing people to purchase an offer truly close to them.
Today’s technology allows advertisers to deliver messages to the right people in the right mood to take action, whether that be watching a video, downloading a valuable new app or making an impulse buy. Embracing the value exchange, and reaching consumers where they are, with something they want and a message that matters can help brands cut through the online ad onslaught.
COMMENTARY: In an era when multimedia content is constantly streaming back and forth between brands and their audiences, PR and marketing professionals must continuously listen, create, curate, target, distribute, and engage their audiences in order to rise above a cluttered landscape. And, with the real-time nature of social media, speed matters more than ever.
According to Ted Skinner, vice president of data intelligence at PR Newswire marketer's must utilize agile engagement: breaking down their communications process into smaller, more manageable pieces thereby helping communicators engage authentically with a wide range of stakeholders across multiple channels and mobile devices, often in real-time.
Agile engagement is about flexibility — effective communication, having answers at your fingertips, giving real value. such as integrating customer call-center staff into the social media team, integrating CRM into marketing = customer-centric.
Agile engagement is like using a GPS for your near-term communications and a map for things happening later as they’re sure to change. It’s based on listening to your audience, the news cycle, internal developments and much more. You have to be ready for anything.
Agile engagement is about giving each of the individual components the attention they deserve, knowing they are interconnected. Agile communications is about managing authentic interaction across multiple engagement points. That’s why it is so important for marketing and PR to work together in today’s connected world.
The whole organization (marketing, sales, customer service, etc.) should be ready to engage when needed. This involves new skills for some organizations.
The “components” of the agile communication process are interconnected, but the execution is often decentralized. While some components may be decentralized at different organizations, collaboration between departments is a must!
The Dawn of Agile Engagement
Communicators’ success in this rapidly evolving era depends on effectively targeting their audiences and infusing messaging with audience insights gleaned from social conversations. And speed matters more than ever in this real-time world. Increasingly, leading brands are calling on many departments to answer the call for agile engagement. It turns out that empowering more enterprise employees to engage can produce more timely and authentic interaction across a greater number of engagement points.
All of which raises the bar on PR and marketing professionals to work together in leading
their organizations’ online engagement. The rewards in brand awareness, audience
growth, coherent brand voice and business impact can be high.
Streaming your brand with agility
Just how far brand management has come – and how quickly it has changed – is requiring
unprecedented agility. The evolution of traditional, new, owned and earned media has led
cutting edge communications professionals to the practice of brand streaming. That is,
real-time, always-on communications to promote your brand across a full range of media
– from your most coveted news outlet to the most vocal blogger in your market – bringing
your best videos, white papers and other owned content to share across Facebook, Twitter
and other social media channels.
By its nature, brand streaming follows the agile engagement process (see Figure A below),
which involves interacting cycles of listening, creating, targeting, engaging, distributing
and measuring.
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Rachel Meranus, Vice President of Marketing and Communications for PR Newswire says.
“Brand streaming is an ongoing cycle of communications."
It is not a one-way flow of content. Rather, content streams from brand to constituent, and the responses generated by this content throughout the social ecosystem flow back to the brand – full of insight and opportunity – in the form of one’s Social Echo.
Listening at all times
Rachel Meranus, Vice President of Marketing and Communications for PR Newswire says.
“Active listening is where opportunities for agile engagement take shape.”
Listening (on the left side of Figure A) involves pulling in what’s being said by relevant sources about brands, people, trends and topics; analyzing it all; and then using these insights to develop communications strategies. But listening is not a one-time affair; it involves the essential monitoring of your brand’s Social Echo on an ongoing basis to uncover new opportunities, as well as areas for improvement.
Adele Sweetwood, Vice President of Americas Marketing, for SAS, a provider of business analytics and business intelligence software, says.
“You’re always keeping the customer experience at the top of your mindset – how they
interact and the value and relevance you can bring to their interaction.”
Additional benefits of listening include the ability to:
- Communicate with audiences within their context, to avoid seeming irrelevant.
- Pinpoint the vernacular your audience uses, to incorporate into messaging.
- Identify the keywords your audience uses in social networks, to further content optimization and online visibility.
- Discover influential sources of conversation.
- Assess hot-button issues and risky areas, to either avoid or meet head-on.
Customizing content for optimal relevance
With the insights gained from active listening, the next step in the agile engagement process is to create and optimize content to engage more effectively with various audiences.
Customizing content ensures optimal relevance to the many subsets of your audience. This often means not only targeted messaging, but producing it in multiple formats for consumption across multiple channels and via multiple devices (PCs, tablets and smartphones) – whether press releases, white papers, podcasts, apps, tweets, blogs, webinars, text messages, demos, coupons and special offers, infographics, microsites, ebooks, videos or presentations.
Skerik says.
“When you’re writing, think about how you can make it easy for various people to find,
share and interact with that content.”
She suggests the following:
- Use multimedia.
- Format the written content for easy finding and tweeting.
- Use keywords from smart social listening.
Sherik says.
“All of these taken together can ignite a lot more interest and visibility for your content.”
Additional benefits of content optimization include the ability to:
- Build brand credibility.
- Sustain audience engagement.
Targeting for amplification
Targeting is the third piece of the agile engagement model. Simply put: Targeting increases the chance that your content will be found and amplified by the right people.
Target individuals, influencers and media sources in real time to engage and guide
conversations. (Remember, agile engagement means you are already listening to what
they care about and are prepared to deliver the content they value in the format they
prefer.) Even while targeting, though, you also have to think about crossover to multiple
audiences.
Engaging and interacting with audiences
Creating multimedia content “hubs,” such as social media portals, knowledge centers and microsites, can help create ripple effects for your brand. It’s all part of the “Engage and Interact” component of the agile engagement approach. What type of content is included on such a site?
Downloadable PDFs (white papers, brochures, sales sheets), videos, coupons, calls to action, photos, images – all with sharing features built right in.
Distributing via push and pull
Distribution is, of course, a critical cog in the agile engagement wheel. Like the others, it is
a multifaceted endeavor, comprised of reaching traditional media sources, Web sites, blogs
and social media channels.
But here’s the key: Traditionally, distribution has meant outbound, one-way
communication, but this definition is outmoded. Today, distribution takes both push and
pull into account.
Even the traditional press release – PR’s workhorse – is recast in a scenario where push and
pull are no longer mutually exclusive. The press release is the official communication of record from your brand. But you can increase the engagement value of this vehicle through tweetable press release headlines and the incorporation of multimedia content, as well as by sharing useful facts – especially numbers – from the text via social channels. The same goes for owned content such as white papers.
Then, pull occurs when new audiences are directed to your message from within the social
and digital ecosystem – through referrals from search engines, Web sites, social networks
or the like – and, in turn, share it among their followers, creating a viral effect.
Measuring on an ongoing basis
Measurement, the sixth component of agile engagement, need not be thought of as the final step in this process. Rather, it is the linchpin perpetuating the ongoing cycle of agile engagement.
By keeping a close eye on the results generated by your campaigns, you can gauge areas of success in order to build on these successes in the future, and also assess areas of weakness that can be further refined moving forward.
Conclusion: exercising agility in communications leads you to constant – and effective – engagement
The evolution of media is requiring much higher levels of agility in listening, creating content, targeting influencers, engaging and interacting, distributing brand messaging and measuring the results. Approached systematically, these six continual cycles of activity can form a framework for effectively planning, preparing and leveraging communications – a framework that helps communications professionals make the transition from a pattern of campaigns to the practice of ongoing engagement.
There is a saying that “chance favors the prepared mind.” With an agile engagement framework in place, communicators can be in a constant state of preparedness, and reap the benefits of effectively streaming their brand in a real-time world.
Courtesy of an article dated August 15, 2013 appearing in MarketingProfs and the PR Newswore whitepaper titled, "The Dawn of Agile Engagement"
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