In the surrounding spaces of Arsenal’s Emirates stadium, on what is a typically overcast London morning, an eager collective of digital marketers gather to discuss the finer points of digital transformation and customer experience.
And we’re off!! Packed at #FigDigConf today at The Emirates… pic.twitter.com/KHmNbK0W5r
— Emma Robson (@EmmaRobson01) November 27, 2014
Derren Sequeira, Head of FCG UK for Facebook shared his view of Digital Transformation:
“Digital Transformation is a more fundamental change in human behavior, it goes beyond networks, devices and content”
This human behavior of which he speaks has some statistics to back up the point of an ever-evolving species of digital natives.
- In the UK, we check our phones 100+ per day and approximately 15 a day of these are Facebook account check-ups.
- We are only ever disconnected from phones on average 2 hours a day (Maybe this is higher in London if your commute in on the London Underground?)
- 532 per cent growth has been evident in mobile video content viewing via mobile or tablet between 2012 and 2014
“Christmas adverts are our Super Bowl moment, where we actively seek out adverts”
Digital Transformation is that last year we saw the roll out of Christmas adverts via mobile first and way before the television broadcast. This year’s John Lewis advert had 6.9 million views in the first 24 hours and Sainsbury’s had 2.1 million views in the same time-frame.
When you think about the changes that have taken place to get us to this conversation around ‘Digital Transformation’ you have to consider:
“It is really just the latest change in our behavior but we shouldn’t forget the way our brain works in terms of left-side and right-side processing function, that has remained the same and at Facebook we do a lot of work with agencies to remind marketers of this fact when creating content”
Derren from @fbforbusiness ‘Time spent on digital overtook TV this year’ #figdigconf pic.twitter.com/15cQrQl4lP — Matt Webster (@MattWWebster) November 27, 2014
Richard Harris, Head of Online Marketing for Paddy Power and how Germany didn’t win the World Cup…Paddy Power did:
“Content is in our DNA. It requires collaboration between different internal teams”
The collaborative approach enables an aggregation of skills from PR, Social through to design and beyond and the results gained from this are Brand building, Award-winning, famous content.
It becomes about building brand equity through social content.
The ‘Go Brazil Nuts’ World Cup campaign for Paddy Power saw a two-fold approach with pre-planned deliberate content deployment and agile, reactive content.
“We had 3 planned pieces of mischief that we planted ahead of the World Cup. A Steven Hawking piece, a rainforest image piece and Paul Scholes as our resident blogger.”
As we can probably remember from this year’s football tournament, there were also incidents that created gifts of in the moment marketing from the likes of Luis Suarez and his bite; England’s woeful performance and the punter who won big on guessing that Germany would thrash hosts Brazil.
Engaging content enables you to make a connection and tell a story that begs to be shared via social and traditional print media and beyond.
High risk, timely and tongue in cheek content strategies from @paddypower during world cup. Brilliant. #figdigconf
— Seán Walsh (@t4_sean) November 27, 2014
Aaron Suppel, Global Marketing Manager for American Express shared his compelling story of a global approach to content marketing:
When I started there was no unified customer experience to speak of and this in turn helped to define the objectives of the program we needed to put in place:
- We wanted full editorial control across regional teams.
- To deliver a scale-able and unified brand experience with multi-device support.
There are 3 pillars of success:
- Editorial engagement
- Global content orchestration
- Omni-Device content delivery
“Both Editors and site users need to be happy to maintain engagement support.” Which means that American Express assume a content editorial approach of “Enter once to deploy to many” from Global through to regional markets content automatically renders across all mobile devices which has delivered cost savings to business as stand alone mobile sites are no longer needed.
Applying the 3 pillars has delivered 18.4 million unique global visits and all without paid search or social. Hyper-local content has driven localized discovery through relevancy.
American Express 3 pillars of advice for CXM: Editorial engagement, Global content orchestration, Omni-device content delivery #FigDigConf — Building Blocks (@building_blocks) November 27, 2014
Jonathan Whiteside – Co-Founder and Kyle Cassidy – UX & Site Optimization Consultant of Building Blocks shared their expertise with ‘Transforming one small experiment at a time’
Organizational digital maturity can deliver support to business-wide systems and optimization testing is one way of realizing this vision with incremental changes delivering huge benefits and returns.
Optimization testing is about segmentation and getting a better return – be that via personalization or other means – and it is the remit of everyone, not just the web team.
Running experiments in development environments can enable you to test, learn and deliver small increases in a safe manner before you launch a full blown web project.
“We take assumptions, put them into experiments and back them up with science to optimize.”
Speaking in terms of ‘confidence levels,’ ‘statistical significnace’ and how basic A/B testing or MV testing can deliver incremental gains and enhance a customer experience leads to the following insight:
“Companies that enhance optimization to make decisions increase conversion by 100 per cent”
The common excuses to ignore optimization return three main excuses:
- Resourcing and Budget issues.
- Organizational issues around ownership and delivery.
- Technology does not allow us to optimize.
“Most of these excuses are completely wrong.”
90 per cent is in the planning, process, people and presentation and 10 per cent is in the technology. The benefits are apprant too. “Companies with a significant increase in online sales are completing 6.45 A/B and MVT Tests per month.”
There is digital transformation in the optimization of customer experiences.
#FigDigConf is about to get transformational. Like an impact sub in the second half. Thanks to @Building_Blocks http://t.co/w2x67WHDbP #SDL
— James Ainsworth, SDL (@SDLjames) November 27, 2014
What compelling insights have you gained from the Figaro Digital event?
