Brand Strategy

Reimagine Content

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“The pandemic has changed consumer behaviors, some permanently. We have seen a consolidation of shopping trips: in China, for example, the number of transactions in grocery declined by 30 percent during the pandemic, while the average value per transaction increased by 69 percent. In the United States, e-commerce availability and hygiene considerations are increasing store switching behavior, with 17 percent of consumers shifting away from their primary store. Many customers have also tried new omnichannel models: buy online, pick up in store (BOPIS) grew 28 percent year-over-year in February compared with 18 percent in January, and grocery delivery is up by 57 percent. More important, many of these new engagement models are here to stay. Consumers report high intention to continue using models such as BOPIS (56 percent) and grocery delivery (45 percent) after the pandemic.”

With Omnichannel and Digital first approaches, it’s imperative for brands to reimagine content across channels to offer a seamless experience.

Some of the content trends that are emerging to make the customers experience across touch points seamless are:

Personalization

Customers expect personalized messaging from brands to stay connected with brands during these troubled times. Conquer personalization with these five steps:

Collect Data on your customers

Build Personas

Use Dynamic Content

Choose your channel

Use personalized messaging

Gamify your Content

Engage audiences with gamified content. Offer content that increases user engagement. An example of this is Virtual workout offered by Nike China. Nike China activated its digital community by offering virtual workouts and saw an 80 percent increase in weekly active users of its app.

Use Video Conferencing

Businesses can make greater use of video conferencing to bring the in-store experience online. Customers expect to get individual attention and bringing in store experience online is a great way to keep the customers engaged.

Use Innovative techniques

Make use of new technologies to engage users with content that is innovative. Jewelry brand Kendra Scott is tackling that problem by launching a new platform, Virtual Try-On, which uses augmented-reality (AR), machine-learning, and computer-vision techniques.

Create Content for Bots

The use of Chat bots has gone up during the pandemic and brands need to connect with audiences via the bots. Publish content that meets the customers needs requires insights for their top most concerns. Listening to your customers can help understand their fears that can be addressed via chat bots. Additionally product queries can be better answered with a product inquiry bot.

 

Five Ways To Engage With User Generated Content

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UGC, User Generated Content  resonates better with the conversion rates for UGC being 5X higher. Brands have reportedly seen an increase of 10 percent in conversion rates when User generated content has been used in the buyer journey. While Sweepstakes is a commonly used tactic to expand reach for your campaigns, UGC with ratings, reviews, Q&A’s and user submitted images can improve your site’s search rankings. According to a Forrester’s research on UGC,  User Generated content is helpful through all stages of buyer journey, making it a key tactic for new product launches.

Consumers research more and more products online and on the go. Consumers don’t just research big-ticket items like cars or computers, they research everyday purchases like toothpaste and cereal. 

Marketers view user-generated content as a critical tool during the early stages of the customer life cycle. 

Marketers employ UGC as a key component of new product launches. For leading consumer packaged goods (CPG) marketers, user-generated content has become a key tactic for new product launches — the lifeblood of CPG brands

UGC has significant SEO benefits 

UGC and The SEO opportunity*

Use Consumer content to reveal the words that are more relevant to search queries.

Repurpose content such as reviews, questions, answers, opinions, photos, videos, and other types of consumer content in multiple places where it can provide a desirable user experience or help guide the consumer decision process.

Users expect reviews in search results without a click. Do A/B tests to understand search results and revenue when review content adheres to this principle.

Content written by consumers has a shelf-life, therefore it’s important to have a content generation strategy that provides a constant flow of quality content.

Properly structured UGC can help generate rich snippets that appear in search results and can increase click-through rates by 30 percent.

Awareness Campaigns For Storytelling

Campaigns that are designed to harness the power of UGC require an awareness campaign that positions the campaign to be unique enough for audiences to react, engage and share. Generating awareness with existing fans and followers can increase conversions from your Sweepstakes Contest.

In a User Generated Content Campaign, Under Armour has effectively used Video advertising to create awareness with a YouTube video to promote the contest with hashtags #RuleYourself and #IWill.

 Customer Centricity

Consumers have a world of content to choose from. If you are too self-serving, you will turn customers away. Instead, focus on your customers’ needs to provide value-added content that puts customer first, product or brand second. Include ratings and reviews wherever possible.

At the same time harness the power of endorsement, turning referrals into a point that creates compelling messages for your audience.

According to Forrester’s report,  “Harness the power of peer-to-peer endorsements by sharing them widely. Incorporate stellar ratings or innovative product uses into point-of-sale materials and online or mobile ads. One CPG manufacturer learned that display ads that incorporate ratings and reviews drove higher web traffic and conversion than ads without such information”.
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Five Steps To Brand Success With Digitization

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Define your Brand’s Purpose in Customers’ lives

Nordstrom, the luxury department store, has taken retail by a storm with overall revenue growth at 9.8 percent, at USD 3.12 billion for the Quarter. The store sales excluding new and closed stores increased  4.4 percent year on year, the strongest among the segment.

The brand’s purpose is  to provide a fabulous experience for apparel, accessories and shoes shopping by empowering customers and the employees who serve them. 

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