Consumers are drowned in information and notifications. Their finite attention is continuously fragmented between an ever-increasing volume of signals. According to the Dentsu Aegis Network CMO Survey 2018, 44% of the respondents see information overload as a key barrier they face when it comes to building better relationships with consumers over the next two to three years.
Successful marketers will be those able to outplay the ad blitz by designing relevant experiences, respective of each individual’s profile and context. Relevance cannot be approached in silos. To be trusted, brands cannot offer pertinent solutions on their websites but irrelevant in-store services to the same consumers. Consistency between environments is critical.
Let’s take a look at how some leading brands integrate their online and offline experiences.
There is no such a thing as the online consumer journey. Or the offline consumer journey. There are only people looking for the most relevant solutions to their daily needs and assessing brands on their capacity to deliver how and where the consumer directs, not where the brand decided to invest its marketing dollars.
Online and offline work better together
Forty-two per cent of marketers think the fact they don’t offer a consistent experience on every element of the consumer journey represents a challenge to long-term trust.[i] To be more relevant, leading marketers synchronise their online and offline media efforts.
Consider TV & Search synchronisation, for example. In 2015, a Dentsu Aegis Network study analysing more than 106,000 airings of TV spots from 66 brands demonstrated that search always reacts to TV, with 100% of campaigns causing incremental search volume. In 2017, follow-up research by iProspect and Google demonstrated that brands making the most of this consumer behaviour by synchronising their TV commercials with their paid search campaigns were winning in the search engine result pages. Ninety per cent of campaigns saw higher engagement with 65% increase of click-through- rate on average. Lower CPA was also observed across 72% of the campaigns analysed. In one real world case, Bet365 Australia synchronised paid search with its TV National Rugby League spots, resulting in conversion rates as high as 76% in a gambling industry where audiences are incredibly fickle.
The challenge of Online-to-Offline (O2O) measurement
Many companies are showing increasing interest in O2O services to better drive their consumer experience. Over the last few years, progress made in mobile signals, location tracking, and identity graphs, combined with the emergence of DMPs, helped append non-digital activities to unique IDs. Although Facebook and Google have been particularly active at trying to offer direct O2O measurement capabilities, they still come with some inaccuracies and don’t yet close the gap between online and in-store measurement. However, this should not stop brands experimenting with O2O.
Pier 1, a U.S. based home goods store, incorporates in-store sales in its campaign measurement. The brand created a dashboard that retroactively applies actual store data to corresponding paid search campaigns to check overall strategy post-purchase. Additionally, in order to optimise in real time, Pier 1 uses an Enterprise Return On Ad Spend (ROAS) (which accounts for both offline and online revenue). Factoring in-store purchases into real-time optimisations drove 7% more store visits and a 25% increase in store revenue period over period.
The power of experience
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Experience-driven businesses report 1.6x greater year over year growth in customer lifetime value, 1.7x in customer retention, and 1.6x in customer satisfaction than other companies.[ii] Seventy-one per cent of CMOs believe generating ideas that connect with people emotionally are what will make them stand out and maximise the value of consumer engagement over the next two to three years.[iii] To increase participation, marketers should look at reinventing their in-store experience and enhancing interactions with their brands through relevant uses of digital.
Levi’s, which recently combined its ecommerce and retail teams under one division, has been offering shoppers at its store in Walt Disney World’s Disney Springs the opportunity to buy a limited-edition hat through an interactive AR experience on Snapchat. Users can unlock a Shoppable Lens by scanning a Snapcode, which lets them virtually try the Levi’s x Mickey Mouse hat, share their look, purchase directly through the app and have the hat delivered on the same day for free to their hotel.
“One of the ways we pursue innovation is by creating unique and immersive experiences with consumers. What was important to us was to be able to marry the physical, the digital and the social side of things into one experience as a company.”
Brady Stewart, SVP, LSA Digital, Levi Strauss & Co, Snapchat’s Newest Ecommerce Experience Brings Together Levi’s, Disney and AR, Adweek, 2018
In efforts to drive traffic to its restaurants while contributing to a consistent brand strategy across 40+ Latin American and Caribbean markets, KFC launched Click ’n Share. For this operation promoting their new menu for two people, KFC gamified the coupon redemption experience by giving people half of a coupon and letting them choose one friend who would receive the other half. Both friends had three hours to meet at the nearest KFC and redeem their discount by putting their mobile phones together. KFC’s experience- driven strategy met great success with customers, driving a +7% engagement rate increase, reaching 5.5 million people and successfully driving visits to local restaurants (for instance 1,500 visits in Santiago, Chile). Click to view the full case.
Another particularly interesting example is the one of Sberbank. Knowing that Russian retailers are often strangely located and only 20% of new ventures survive the first two years, the bank used empty store windows to ask local residents which business they would like to see being established there. People could make their voice heard through a simple vote on their phone. The bank leveraged this hyper-local data in a real-time programmatic display campaign aimed at small business entrepreneurs, to show them the opportunity and propose an appropriate loan. The campaign generated 9 times as many loans as traditional loan advertising.
This article is excerpted from Future Focus 2019: Searching for Trust. Download Future Focus 2019 for key insights and success stories on navigating truth and authenticity in 2019.
[i] iProspect 2018 Global Client Survey, October 2018
[ii] Forrester Consulting & Adobe, The Business Impact of Investing in Experience, April 2018
[iii] Dentsu Aegis Network, CMO Survey, 2018
