Posts in category: Did You Know

Millennial mums are a growing section of the global consumer market. According to research carried out by the Internet Advertising Bureau in 2015, 83 per cent of new mums are millennials, which means that brands need to change the way they connect with them – especially as this figure is only set to rise further.

Mums are not an out-of-touch cohort. They are using technology just as much – if not more – than other millennials, so it is vital that brands are speaking to them with their marketing in order to cinch interaction and sales.

What’s more, there has been a significant increase in recent years in so-called ‘mummy bloggers’, who present a great opportunity for brands to benefit from some user-generated content, but also place them under extra pressure, as they know their every move and communication will be scrutinised by these highly influential voices.

Mums do tend to stick with brands that they know and can trust, however. New research from Saatchi and Saatchi involving Mumsnet users found that mums return to brands such as the National Trust, Lidl, Disney and Warburtons time and time again. But what exactly is it that they like about these companies that you could apply to your own business marketing to secure custom from millennial mums now and in the future?

What mums want from a marketing campaign

Saatchi and Saatchi’s research led to the discovery that precision is the most important factor in a marketing campaign for mums. More than one-third (37.9 per cent) rated this as essential to secure their buy-in. Mums’ primary concerns include the safety and enjoyment of their children, so they need to know they are guaranteed this with evidence of how it can be achieved.

Attentiveness came second in mums’ priority lists, for similar reasons to those listed above, while elasticity was rated as another important factor for brands to demonstrate, with 33.2 per cent viewing this as key. Busy mums typically have many demands to juggle, so they need to know that brands are going to be flexible to connect with and provide them with a solution to meet their individual needs.

Integrity was also highly valued among Mumsnet users, with 26.8 per cent ranking this as essential. One way that brands can demonstrate this value is by explaining their unique brand story on their website. Remember the adverts showing the little boy running through the events of an entire century to buy a loaf of Warburtons bread? This was an example of the brand demonstrating its integrity.

However, Liz Wolstenholme, global planning director at Saatchi and Saatchi, explained to Marketing Week: “This belief you need to have a 150-year heritage isn’t what matters to mum, what matters is that their values are visible.

“Even new brands should be celebrating that story. It’s better to smash that fourth wall than hide away.”

So, how else can your brand speak to the growing band of millennial mums through its digital marketing efforts?

Applying these traits to your digital marketing

If you want your brand to enjoy a similar level of success with mums to the favourites outlined in the Saatchi and Saatchi study, you’ll need to make sure you are incorporating the above traits in every single marketing message that you send out.

Whether you’re updating your website, sending out an email marketing campaign or posting on social media, make sure your communication is clear and to the point with a reassuring undertone to meet mums’ requirement for precision.

You should also take every opportunity possible to demonstrate how your brand can provide a solution to mums or solve a problem that they have to show your ‘sorcery’ abilities, while an element of flexibility from your side should be apparent at all times to signal your ‘elasticity’.

Lastly, don’t be afraid to show off a little. As long as you are explaining all of your product or service’s capabilities, the research found that mums are continually impressed by showmanship from brands, so make the most of this and showcase your brand in the best possible light in all of your digital marketing communications.

© Fast Online Marketing Experts

Sources:
https://www.marketingweek.com/2017/04/26/seven-habits-of-highly-effective-brands/
https://www.marketingweek.com/2017/04/26/mums-drawn-brands-disney-warburtons-easyjet/
http://adage.com/article/digitalnext/marketers-time-rethink-millennial-mom/302614/

So you’ve decided to put together your digital marketing strategy, but do you know how to use customer experience mapping to improve it?

Customer experience mapping, commonly known as cx mapping, is the process of plotting your customer’s entire journey. This doesn’t just span from when your business starts engaging with them, but from before they even recognise that they have a need for your product or service.

By creating a customer experience map for this journey, you can then recognise at which stages of this journey your digital marketing strategy can have the biggest impact.

First of all, you want to make sure that you understand how best to conduct customer experience mapping. You want to gain an understanding of the process before you start to think about it in relation to your business, to make certain that you’re doing it right. You’ll find a number of online tools that can help you with this.

Once you’re confident that you understand how best to conduct your customer journey mapping exercise, it’s time to get started.

You’ll want to get a number of people involved in the process, to ensure you’re gaining insight from various areas of the business. You might, for example, have representatives from your marketing, sales, account management and senior management teams. This means that you can draw insight from as many areas as possible, which should make the map most accurate.

The customer experience mapping process can take some time, because after mapping the journey, you need to recognise how the person might feel at each stage of their journey, as well as the people and objects that are involved and might be affecting their experience.

It’s once you’ve completed all of these aspects that you can really look at where the impact can be made. You need to be critical and recognise key triggers within the journey that might be having a negative impact, or where the customer might have a specific need.

Now, you can look at ways you can change this, or processes you can implement that can change that specific experience into a more positive one.

For example, if someone is looking at holidays, they would likely do their research and then take time offline to contemplate their options. It’s at this point that a lot of potential customers will be lost, because they might not come back to finalise the process.

So what can you do at this point to change that experience? Well, you could look at retargeting through social media, or data collection at an earlier stage so that you can send a follow-up email.

Of course this is just one example, but do you get the idea?

Now that you understand the customer, their needs at certain times and the process they are going through, you should be able to better tailor your marketing and even sales efforts to direct more people to a conversion.

Discover more tips here.

© FOME

Mobile isn’t a new phenomenon, but it is one that many businesses are only recently beginning to get on board with.

A surge in the increase of mobile marketing was seen in 2015, when Google changed its algorithm to include mobile optimisation within its ranking, a change that was named “Mobilegeddon” by many. This means that any website that didn’t have its website optimised for mobile devices would be penalised. Read more

This wasn’t a problem for many businesses, and for some it was the prompt they needed to upgrade their website. However, some didn’t make the necessary changes, and as such their websites will have dropped dramatically in Google’s rankings.

In fact, the search engine has announced that this month the algorithm will update again to increase the importance of having a mobile page, and sites that are not mobile-friendly will rank even lower than before.

Even despite this, businesses should now be on board with mobile marketing, and will see great benefits from having a strategy in place to manage this. In 2014, mobile usage overtook desktop, so you need to be sure that your strategies reflect this.

Apps are now a popular addition for many businesses, particularly those selling goods. An app gives you a platform not only to sell your goods, but to offer exclusive discounts to customers and send them notifications to encourage interaction.

In fact, many retailers are now taking advantage of geo-targeting, where push notifications are sent to people’s mobile devices when their GPS enters a certain area.

The next step for businesses is expected to be the introduction of chatbots, according to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

At last month’s F8 developer conference he laid out the social platform’s ten-year roadmap, which had chatbots at the forefront of its plans. Even more brands seem to be adopting this new era of “conversational commerce”, a term created by Uber’s Chris Messina, so “you should be able to message a business in the same way you’d message a friend”, Mr Zuckerberg stated.

However, if your businesses has yet to grasp the basics of mobile marketing, then you should start there. Make sure that your entire website is mobile-optimised, and get your social media up to scratch.

Social media is now as imperative as the internet itself, infiltrating the everyday lives of people across all generations, and millions of people across the globe.

Rather than just making a profile and getting started, you need to make sure that you have a social media strategy in place.

Do some research and see what your competitors are doing. See where your target audience is online and the type of content they’re most engaging with. From there you can start to look for gaps in the market and emerging trends that you can incorporate into your own strategy.

Mobile is a powerful tool, so try to stay up to date with the latest trends and use it to your advantage. If you do it right, you could get really great results.

© Fast Online Marketing Experts