Top tips to increase engagement through content
Kristina: What trends or techniques should marketers be thinking about for holiday success?
Eric Porres, CMO, SundaySky: Three words – personalization, mobile and video. The shopper experience matters most. During the busy holiday shopping season, every marketing message needs to be optimized across devices for on-the-go purchase decisions.
To get the attention of holiday shoppers, marketers need to communicate ad content in an entertaining, valuable and relevant way. The more a marketer can personalize the shopping experience, the better. This means more than just {first name} insertions or even {last product viewed} dynamic banner ads. Personalization, more likely should be the integration of shopping recommendations into the buying experience, like Amazon does. Or it could be in the vein of Neiman Marcus – sending real-time personalized videos to passive browsers and converting them into active buyers with holiday promotions.
Nothing sells better than video, and there’s enormous creative power in making video personalized for customers and tapping into their emotions. The holiday season is the time of year when brands do that best with “giving back” and “feel good” video campaigns.
Kristina: What about technology – do you foresee voice-assistant shoppers to be a big deal over the holidays? If so, what can marketers do to create an engaging experience from this?
Eric: Thanks to innovations like Alexa, Siri, Google and Corntana, consumers’ habits have completely changed. People will take the easiest and most hassle-free path to get what they want, especially during the holiday season. Think about it: you’re ordering your favorite brand of wine for your holiday party through Alexa. All you need to say is, “Alexa, please reorder me a bottle of [insert brand name here],” rather than going to the nearest liquor store to pick it up or even tapping keys to order it online.
Voice-assistance is simply another creative element in a marketer’s advertising toolbox. Catering to customers and getting them what they want, when they want it, with the least amount of effort on their end will be essential this holiday season and into the next year. As such, marketers need to develop these automation strategies now.
Kristina: Although consumers’ attention spans are dwindling, how is SundaySky keeping their content relevant to their customers?
Eric: SundaySky puts the person back in personalization. It’s an end-to-end video marketing solution for the audience of one. The average person will watch one of our SmartVideos for 108 seconds per viewing – an unheralded amount of engagement with personal, relevant and meaningful content. For the past 10 years, we’ve been helping brands tackle the enormous challenge of how to get the emotional resonance of video with the data-driven capabilities of digital, and how to transform traditional, linear video into modular, personalized experiences for customers.
Kristina: What can marketers do to retain customer engagement with video content?
Eric: Video is the most successful storytelling medium with the potential to combine big data and automation with the power of sight, sound and motion. To attract and retain viewers, marketers need to rethink all production requirements for shooting a video and all the statistical measurements of distributing a video. Who receives a video, on what digital platform and at what time? What scenes should the video contain? What storytelling elements should be included?
Creative decisions like whether to have a voiceover, whether to make the voice male or female, how the viewer should receive a call-to-action, or how scenes should expand or contract to tell the story can all be specified to the consumer based on analytics. When marketers personalize the customer experience through video, customers develop more loyalty to the brand.
