Brands have to get online customer engagement strategies right

Julia Hutchison, COO of the Association of Publishing Agencies, highlights the best ways for brands to engage consumers online.

So far, the success of digital media in marketing has been largely driven by advertising innovation. However, the climate is changing and digital consumers are starting to ‘reject’ standard advertising formats as they increasingly favour content (whether branded or User Generated Content) over other digital media. More often than not, consumers will now just click away from pop-ups and entirely ignore banner-ads. As a result, brands must learn that the hard sell will no longer work, as consumers seek safety in their content.

A recent YouGov study, commissioned by the APA, revealed that consumers are far more likely to make a purchase if a website engages through interesting, relevant and up-to-date content. Over a fifth of respondents stated that they are more likely to recommend a website to a friend if it is constantly updated with information. A further two thirds of online Brits (65%) stated that they would visit a website once a week or more if content was updated regularly, with 18 to 24 year olds looking for content updated at least once a day. Nearly a third of online consumers are more likely to buy online if a website offers more than just product listings and the same amount again insisted that additional online content, such as editorial focusing on specific products, motivates in-store purchases.

This research reveals conclusively that consumers of all ages are engaged by editorialisation of brands in the online sphere. Therefore, it is crucial that brands concentrate on providing content that encapsulates values and key messages while engaging the consumer.

As specialists in this, customer publishers have the ability to transfer their skills across all channels and are leading their clients into uncharted digital content strategies. Customer publishing no longer just accounts for magazines; the industry has expanded to account for the targeted editorialisation of brands across a variation of channels. Customer publishers are experts at encapsulating a brand and moving away from the hard sell in any medium. It doesn’t stop at website design and build. We’re talking about social media strategies for blue chip retailers, mobile content and platform strategies for telecom brands, and rich media digital video and TV streaming for FMCGs, retail and automotive brands.

To date, brand editorial expertise and customer engagement strategies have been undervalued. However, with ad response rates in decline, and brands finding it harder to win and keep customers in such a cluttered direct response-driven medium, those brands and agencies who truly understand how to engage with customers through the written word, or through richer media content formats such as video, are those who will be successful in the future.

Rather like social media, customer engagement online requires a new set of skills – and new rules apply for brands adopting these strategies. What are these rules? And how is success measured? It’s time to leave impressions and click-throughs to the direct response measurement specialists and to start building and measuring deepy, using more meaningful metrics such as sales uplift, cross-media acquisition and retention and customer life time value. Audiences are complex and brands need to fully understand them. Any misunderstanding along the way can cost, so employing non-experts could endanger a brand’s potential. What’s most important is that a brand is correctly encapsulated and is portrayed in an effective and sensitive way to its audience and it takes more than just a website builder and designer to do that.