BEST PRACTICE
Goodbye Marketing Siloes, Hello Collaborative Results!
Jill Robb, Digital Marketing Director at Origin Digital, working in partnership with ASG & Partners.
e hear the buzzwords‘ digital transformation’ and‘ digital
Wdisruption’ on almost a daily basis, and yet nowhere is this more evident than in marketing, PR and advertising.
Origin Digital is traditionally a digital business, built from the foundations of web development and digital marketing.
Specialising in these areas means that we know our craft well and we stay abreast of the daily changes that occur in the digital landscape. Yet we are also acutely aware that for us to provide the most value to our clients, digital cannot exist in a silo, however tempting it might be to fence off budgets for‘ marketing’ and‘ digital’.
Call it digital transformation or call it a way of life, but people now conduct their lives, absorb media and engage with brands through multiple channels.
QUOTABLEQUOTE
When was the last day that you only listened to the radio and didn’ t access the internet or use your phone? Consumers using multiple screens / channels is a trend that has been building for a few years and is nothing new.
Marketing needs to adapt accordingly
The rise of mobile has transformed how we are building websites and targeting our marketing campaigns. In fact, the rise of mobile and of‘ connectedness’ has led to the rise of the informed and educated consumer who demands relevant and personalised marketing and who will quickly dismiss brands for not being‘ smart’.
Why is it then that brands still seem to approach marketing and advertising in separate silos? One brief for outofhome, another for radio, another for digital and no‘ smarts’ connecting the channels? And what about your overall strategy?
Your customer wants to see only‘ smart’ targeted marketing to facilitate them in engaging with your brand on their channel of choice. You may have heard of the rise of developments designed to shift the power from advertisers back to the customer, such as ad blocking technologies.
These caused a storm amongst heavy users of digital advertising when they were first announced, with many claiming that their advertising campaigns would be decimated. In my view however, if you are using smart, targeted advertising which is relevant to the person seeing it they shouldn’ t block your ads!
When was the last day that you only listened to the radio and didn’ t access the internet or use your phone? Consumers using multiple screens / channels is a trend that has been building for a few years and is nothing new.
And therein lies the challenge for both agencies and marketers: how to conduct targeted advertising with smart, personalised marketing across multiple channels and platforms.
Origin’ s partnership with ASG has allowed us to explore an agency solution to this challenge. ASG has taken the view that the best way to keep ahead of digital developments is by partnering with experts in their field – in this case, for digital expertise, it’ s us.
Equally, we recognise that we aren’ t specialists in traditional advertising / PR, so by working closely together with ASG in a strategic way, we can take a fully integrated approach which takes account of all aspects of the marketing mix, online and offline, measures the impact of the combined approach and provides consistency across all channels. It’ s an approach which has resulted in a genuine surge in campaign success.
The Origin Digital Partnership with ASG provides our joint clients with more rounded strategies and a combined team who can pull together previously disparate elements into an integrated approach that their customers immediately recognise and engage with across multiple channels: it’ s just modern day marketing but very few other agencies are taking this joinedup approach.
The challenge for inhouse marketers still exists however and they are facing the same seismic shiftin marketing disciplines, with roles seemingly everincreasing to incorporate mobile, social media, search engine marketing … and so it goes on!
As a result of this shift and in response to client demands for a solution to help them keep on top of all of these changes, Origin Digital has just launched Mindworks digital training, based in the Training Suite at Origin Digital offices in Holywood.
Mindworks is different from a most other digital training out there. It does not provide theory based courses.
Instead what we want to do is to provide the practical, handson and insightsbased learnings to provide answers to the questions that we are constantly asked by marketers and business owners, to help them become more effective in digital marketing and communications. We assist them to break down their own siloes in their approach.
We realise that there are many academic and professional bodies out there with whom you can gain digital qualifications, but what we also realise is that these qualifications and courses teach the theory but don’ t provide Managers with handson experience or use of the tools that they need in their everyday roles.
By providing marketers with this alternative, practical type of training, we are arming them with an arsenal of insights, data and knowledge of tools to deliver crosschannel campaigns and a deep understanding of the true impacts of their campaigns online and offline.
They leave the training with tools and techniques they’ ll be able to use straight away.
This collaborative approach to marketing and communications between specialists in offline and online is a model that ASG and Origin Digital have been quietly working together on for some time now and with a number of joint clients’ campaigns delivering hugely successful results, experience is proving that the approach is really working.
66 www. businessfirstonline. co. uk