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Nigel Wilson (pictured) reveals what you need to know about emerging social trends to help you create meaningful conversations with your consumers.

There’s no mistaking that the United Kingdom has been undergone somewhat of a transformation; new groups of consumers continue to emerge, and old ones change and evolve with time. Understanding the nuances and habits of consumers has never been more important for marketers to be able to create the right campaigns to engage their key demographics.

But what are these changes and how do they impact the insight we have as marketers on our key audiences? What do we need to consider when addressing these new consumers?

Social migration – the ‘Rurban’ generation

As consumers, a bulk of our buying and purchasing decisions are driven by life stages – understanding how these life stages have evolved, and how behaviours are changing to suit this is a key step in understanding how brands should adopt their approach to marketing to particular groups.

As an example, take Declan and Beth. Eight years ago, Declan and Beth were living the suburban life in a comfortable semi in the outskirts of one of the UK’s bigger cities. Then along came their daughter Megan and priorities began to change; the family makes the big move to a home for life in a more rural location that still enables them to have access to work and amenities.

Declan and Beth are among 490,000 people in Mosaic type Rural Vogue; attracted to the ‘Rurban’ lifestyle which gives a mix of the country idyll and access to cities for work and leisure. Although often based firmly outside of the confines of the city this group maintains a strong relationship with urban life, leading to distinct spending behaviour and shopping patterns – something a brand really needs to understand if they are to continue to engage the likes of Declan and Beth.

Let’s now look at how Rural Vogues shop – busy lives and poor access to local shops means that Beth and Declan are heavy users of online shopping for both groceries and for the purchase of other consumer goods. They are creatures of habit and have their online grocery shopping order set up so that it rarely changes. Therefore, new retail and FMCG brands are going to struggle to capture the attention of Beth and Declan. Research from Ipsos suggests that you have three seconds to appeal to this group with your marketing to communicate brand, product and motivate them to act.

Cross-channel marketing combined with traditional media is one way of encouraging them to act. The regular flow of high clothing catalogues from brands such as Joules and Seasalt landing on the doorstep shows that those with a targeted offer can find ways of reaching this affluent family. In a similar vein Beth and Declan are keen to save money but do not have the time to shop around for financial products – although they are occasional users of comparison sites. They rely on their network of friends for financial advice rather than anything provided by a financial institution. Their key demands for financial products are around home improvement, that new kitchen, and also investing for the children’s education. Timing is everything in communicating with Beth and Declan and marketing that is triggered by events in their life is more likely to get their attention.

The changing role of the family

Another key change that requires marketers to ensure they are laser focused when it comes to audience addressability is when they try to reach a multi-generation household. Since 2001 around half a million more young adults, a rise of 21% to almost 3m, have joined the ‘Boomerang Generation’ as it becomes increasingly common for young adults to move back in with family for temporary financial support.

The broad brushstrokes tactics marketers use to target ‘adult children living at home’ aren’t applicable any more. Marketers not only need to look at whom in the family they want to connect with, they need to understand the demographic make-up of these households as well.

Take, for example, Mosaic type Bank of Mum and Dad; this family is living in comfort with the mortgage nearly paid down and plenty of equity in their house. However, it is likely they will need to support their children financially to help them either get on the property ladder or afford rent. You can expect these to be releasing equity in the not too distant future, either from their own home or from their investments perhaps impacting spend on luxury items for themselves.

Compare them to Boomerang Boarders. Highly representative of the squeezed middle, impacted by inflation and a lack of salary increases, they are happy to support their children but are unlikely to be able to offer them significant financial assistance.

With these Mosaic groups alone, we see significant difference in spending power and the range of products these customers might be interested in.

However, targeting to the multi-generational household is complicated. Clearly the parents and the younger adults will have significant different channel preferences as well as areas of interest and disposable income. It is very important within these target groups that highly personalised cross channel targeting is employed.

In many cases, there is no single primary decision maker in the home. Purchase decisions are likely to be shared and influenced by multiple family members. Marketers need to carefully craft their communications when an older parent and a young adult or other children are sharing the same living space. Knowing that this ‘traditional family’ also contains an aged parent dramatically changes the picture.

It’s worth the effort, though. Research from the US from Mintel into this topic suggests that multi-generational parents and home owners can spend up to a third more than parents whose off-spring have fled the nest. The diverse nature of these households provides brands with endless possibilities to market with this group – as long as they understand and respond to the nuances of this household.

Endless possibilities

The significant and wide-ranging changes to the social fabric outlined above have altered the landscape of UK society beyond recognition. However this new patchwork of different groups and types presents a great opportunity for marketers. While targeting these groups is no easy task, it`s well worth the effort. With these new levels of insight, brands now have the ability to identify trends within their consumer base they would not otherwise have been aware of, and gives them the intelligence needed to create carefully crafted, highly personalised digital campaigns to ensure that consumer are reached with the right message on the right channel at the right time – every time.

Nigel Wilson is managing director – Consumer Insights & Targeting, Experian Marketing Services.

Changes in consumer behaviour and the reality of the omnichannel customer are driving brands to gain ever-deeper market and customer understanding. With multiple and diverse data sources and innovative analytics, organisations now have an unprecedented opportunity to transform every customer interaction. However, for marketing, the new customer dynamic is creating huge pressure to deliver not only personalisation, but real-time one-to-one personalisation. According to the results of a recent research survey undertaken by Celebrus Technologies and Teradata, almost half of all respondents (44%) are already doing some degree of real-time personalisation – a figure that is set to rise to 75% in the next two years. As Katharine Hulls (pictured) explains, to realise the vision and benefits of real-time personalisation, organisations need to step out of the aggregated data comfort zone.

Understanding personalisation

Will 2014 be the year personalisation, indeed real-time personalisation, becomes a prerequisite? Over the past two years, organisations have tried to exploit traditional offline database marketing techniques, such as segmentation, to gain new insight about individual online customer behaviour. However, they have struggled, due to the lack of detailed data.

Yet, according to a recent survey carried out by MyCustomer.com on behalf of Celebrus Technologies and Teradata, more than half (51%) of respondents say personalisation is either very important or critical to their efforts today. This rises to a phenomenal 80% in two years.

In the future, not only do companies plan to embrace website and mobile personalisation but over three quarters of respondents (78%) predict that they will be making use of data in real-time in the next two years.

Aggregated data

But let’s get this clear: organisations need to take a radically different approach to data collection, storage and analysis to get anywhere near truly effective real-time one-to-one personalisation. To date, organisations have relied on aggregated data – and for good reasons. Aggregated data has provided essential insight into online behaviour that can be used to understand paths and journeys, build a better website and engage senior management with all important reporting.

However, aggregate data cannot reveal the individual customer journey or their needs and preferences. It cannot be used to understand how a specific customer arrived, browsed, searched or moved about the website. Essentially, without this level of individual customer activity information, how can a business achieve relevant, real-time one-to-one engagement?

Detailed data

Today, 25% of organisations are using individual level interaction data according to the survey results. These organisations are now able to undertake far more effective, personalised activity across multiple channels to drive better customer engagement and conversion. For example, knowing exactly which individuals browsed a specific product, such as slow-moving item, enables the creation of highly targeted multi-channel communications to help shift the excess stock.

Real-time website personalisation can also be enhanced by using basket affinity analysis. This method showcases which products are put into a basket at the same time and in what order to then present relevant offers during the online check-out process, increasing both cross-sell revenue and basket size. Alternatively, insight into which products are most frequently bought together created using product affinity analysis can be used to drive targeted content within order confirmation or shipping notification emails.

It is real-time data that is also key to creating personalised offers and engagement that reflect the many diverse ways an individual interacts with a brand. From the different devices used at a particular time of day; to an individual’s preferences for online, telephone or in store engagement dependent upon product type or weekday versus weekend; even full-price versus sale, detailed multi-channel data is becoming crucial.

Omnichannel view

So how does this work in practice? A retailer combining online data with transactional, loyalty and social graph information to attain deep customer understanding can prioritise high value or very socially influential individuals if stock is limited – thus avoiding out of stock situations for the most valuable customers which could impact not just that sale but future purchases and brand perception.

Of course, web analytics based on aggregated data clearly still has a huge role to play in providing critical insight into overall business performance and strategic direction. But it is time to extend that data: technology for online data capture, storage and analytics can now deliver that essential segment of one that will be key to meeting escalating customer expectation and fast evolving cross-channel engagement. To achieve true one-to-one real-time personalisation across all channels, organisations need to go for detail.

 Katharine Hulls is VP marketing, Celebrus Technologies.

Join the war on website piracy, says Mary Shields (pictured below).

The City of London police (CLP) recently called for advertisers and brand holders to actively support their work in tackling online crime, particularly their initiative to disrupt online advertising revenues generated through placement on illegal websites. The Digital Citizens Alliance estimates that piracy websites generated approximately $227million in 2013 from advertising. CLP is now looking at those lawyers in Orlando industry to help them fight back.

The CLP’s police intellectual property crime unit (PIPCU) launched ‘Operation Creative’ to partner with creative brands and industry players to crack down on websites that host unauthorised copyright content and to disrupt revenue streams to illegal sites from online advertising. PIPCU had in pilot projects identified advertising as a key component in the generation of criminal profits for websites providing access to infringing content. As a result, they now publish and maintain a list of Infringing Websites (IWL), the first such list of its kind globally to be developed and maintained for law enforcement purposes and with industry involvement.

IWL is actually updated with input from the industry, agencies and intermediaries who can identify and report potential infringers. Their input is then vetted by PIPCU and, if confirmed, the website is added to the list.

Detective Chief Inspector Andy Fyfe, head of PIPCU, said: “If an advert from an established brand appears on an infringing website, not only does it lend the site a look of legitimacy, but inadvertently the brand and advertiser are funding online crime. IWL serves as a safety tool, ensuring the reputation of advertisers and brands are not discredited through association with illegal websites.”

In effect, this means IWL is updated and used within the industry and law enforcement as a ‘blacklist’ for advertisement placement in future. Potentially, this new tool could also be used as a reference point in commercial agreements and contracts between advertising agencies and their clients in terms of blacklisting. However, those agreements should also deal with the consequences of misplacement, tolerance margins and takedown policies at the beginning of that contractual relationship. A development of contractual obligations to include blacklist sites, such as those identified on IWL from time to time could be useful and might help this cooperation between law enforcement and industry. However, there are limits in a global context and that is perhaps where technology and self-regulation can step in to help.

By its nature, digital media crosses traditional geographic and jurisdictional boundaries and thereby creates new challenges. The legal variables between jurisdictions even within Europe can be striking. This makes it almost impossible to have a uniform approach which applies by way of law. The internet is also an area that is incredibly difficult to police and questions remain unresolved around who should take responsibility for assisting in that task. The International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) has mirrored calls of the PIPCU as regards online advertising and is actively encouraging its members and the industry to develop self-regulation and collaborate on safeguards to prevent or reduce advertisement misplacement, again in areas which promote or facilitate illegal activity or next to inappropriate content which can harm brand reputation.

Most industry players are happy to work with law enforcement to crack down on illegal activity. However, opinions diverge when you mention brand safety, which can be more subjective and arguably best left to the advertisers/brands concerned.

Duncan Trigg, CEO of Project Sunblock Limited which has developed technology focused on brand protection, said: “Brand safety means different things to different brands. For all, financial supporting and ultimately the legitimisation of illegal sites with any recognisable brand is a definitive no. However, elements of what is commonly referred to as inappropriate content should really be down to the individual advertiser to decide upon. In commercial terms, some of the most harmful content can be in disaster management.

“For example, an airline will not wish to appear advertising in the digital press against a travel disaster. True brand safety should give advertisers choice and capability to block exactly what content they feel is harmful to their own brand equity in real time at individual page level. With technology such as ours, there is no need to sacrifice the substantial benefits of audience and behavioural targeting that the real time bidding market place offers in order to minimise the risk of negative PR that misplacement can and does generate.”

Technology may well hold the key to any solution to these issues. The calls from the ICC and PIPCU for industry involvement and self-regulation to fill gaps that that the law cannot are sensible in this context. However, there needs to be meaningful self-regulation with consequences for any real value to be added. These new relationships and self-regulatory environments are still evolving. Technology sits somewhere in between, both creating and bridging gaps between industry, law enforcement and the future.

Mary Shields – of Faegre Baker Daniels LLP – is a corporate advisor to online businesses and SMEs on e-commerce and cross-border aspects of digital trade.

Jon Wellings says we should rethink physical marketing in a digital universe.

When it comes to point of sale (POS) material, there has never been a level playing field. Big brands with their own stores have absolute control over every element of the process. When they design an innovative and compelling display for their products, it will be deployed exactly as the creative intended.

However, for most brands, it is not so straightforward, as only the minority have any certainty about the end environment where their product will be displayed. They can design the most imaginative POS material, but there is no guarantee it will even make it out of the box in some locations.

To make matters worse, the bigger the campaign and budget, the more challenging the issue. When scale is introduced, at a continental or even global level, it becomes even harder to predict how different store environments can accommodate POS material. Anecdotally, POS wastage stands as high as 80% for some brands.

The advent of changing and increasing channels could mark a fundamental shift in how brands think about POS and can make their spend work harder. After all, the POS is where the transaction happens and that is no longer just physically in a store. Online retail means that the POS could feasibly be anywhere on the customer journey, particularly when it comes to mobile purchases. This liberates brands from a uniform and restricted campaign, allowing them total control and predictability over the sales environment. Previously, all brands without a retail footprint could do was attempt to raise awareness outside of the store as much as possible and hope that the POS was deployed as intended.

Not all stumbling blocks are magically vanished with the introduction of digital sales channels however. Multi-regional strategies have been difficult to implement owing to local differences and variations. This has been particularly problematic for physical POS because of the significant differences and sheer unpredictability of instore environments. A campaign deployed digitally is working in an environment of known quantities. They do not have to worry about the whims of store managers in creating a beautiful display for their product, because a digital POS can be controlled centrally.

However, this still does not give brands carte blanche to develop a one size fits all campaign. Local differences and variations go beyond solely the instore environment. They need to take into account linguistic disparities, the needs and preferences of local consumers, and cultural sensitivities which may render the humour or tone of a campaign inappropriate. This is alongside the more basic elements of thinking about how ads or sites will appear on different devices, and which are most prevalent in the locality where the product is being marketed.

This is all well and good for brands which are marketing ‘destination products’ – those items which merit a particular journey or those that customers would specifically browse online for, such as jeans or cosmetics. However, online sales channels are of little use to FMCG products which are incidental to a shopping visit. Only so much can be achieved using external brand awareness – instore standout is key, and this is where the lack of physical POS can be limiting. Online shopping does not necessarily solve the problem either, as a functional product will struggle to get noticed.

This is where new means of engaging customers can pay dividends and the explosion of digital channels comes into its own. These are principally using personalised communication and technology to bring a new dimension into stores – reducing reliance on physical POS to achieve standout.

Brands without their own retail footprint have no guarantee that a POS will be constructed and displayed for their product, even if supplied. But they could print a Quick Response (QR) code on the product itself, which customers can scan with their smartphone to receive a personalised offer or price. Equally, brands could develop their own apps that can be used to scan certain products, which then text discount coupons that the customer can use at the till. This is something companies can fully control and tailor to different localities, which also rewards loyalty and generates interaction with the brand.

This technology is readily accessible and for larger stores, already a reality in some venues. Earlier this year, iBeacon technology was unveiled which will allow retailers to use Bluetooth to broadcast notifications (special offers for example) to smartphone users through dedicated apps. While QR codes may be a little clunky, app technology has been widely used and adopted, and could represent a tipping point for instore marketing of products. Used wisely, it may one day even prove to be more effective in winning the standout war than physical POS.

However, that being said, companies are still reliant on the store owner implementing this technology. In time, stores may come to charge brands for the increased penetration and data they receive from this cutting edge technology.

Jon Wellings is head of managed services at Communisis.

Content marketing is no longer enough. Recent research has found that 78% of consumers say they feel personalised content has led to a deeper relationship with a brand. It’s all about integrating customer service information with marketing across multiple touchpoints, as Richard McCrossan (pictured) explains.

There are two core elements to any marketing strategy – content and audience. Marketers often tend to focus a lot on content but not so much on the audience – but what if you could increase engagement by using more of what you already know about your customers to better understand their needs?

Personalised consumer marketing is becoming an integral part of securing sales and building a loyal customer base. By providing a more personalised experience, brands have a huge opportunity to provide a much-needed personal approach to consumers across an ever-growing amount of communication channels.

But how can this personalisation be achieved?

The answer lies in leveraging the information which lies in the contact centre. To be able to personalise your marketing strategy, a lot of data is required to be able to gain relevant information about your customers, and this is often found within the customer service department.

By using contextual history which dwells in the contact centre, marketers can better understand customers’ needs and their previous interactions with the company. For example, with this knowledge, marketers would know not to push any promotional emails to a customer if they had complained in the last week. Conversely, if a customer recently responded positively to a customer service satisfaction questionnaire, they may be more receptive to promotional emails.

Personalisation is much more than just welcoming back a returning customer or showing recommendations based on what they have bought before. It is about using the data you have to create an enjoyable experience that encourages the customer to keep returning to you.

It’s good to talk

And this covers all communication channels which are available to customers. The phone certainly isn’t going to go away, and we’ve found that human interaction is still a very valuable customer experience, where either a call or web chat can be helpful to the consumer. It’s important to bring the human touch back to your digital customers, and that means reaching out to help them make a purchase at the right time.

Using targeted and proactive web chat can be a great way to provide proactive and precise assistance at the consumer’s point of need. It can also reduce call handling, help to maintain customer loyalty and boost retention.

The online shopping experience needs to mirror the human experience you would get in a store, talking to the customer, engaging with their needs, having a conversation with them to find out more about what they are looking for. It’s all about building a personal profile of the customer – and this means integrating your contact centre customer information with your marketing across multiple touchpoints – from webchat to email, across to text.

And this technology can all easily be integrated into sales and marketing – by monitoring and reacting proactively to buying signals, companies can utilise the value of bringing a sales person into that digital customer experience at the right moment.

Taking marketing to the Clouds

Cloud technology is fast becoming one of the most used – and useful – services for marketing, giving marketers real-time access to customer information from whatever device they are using to create and deliver relevant customer experiences that encourage long-term engagement.

Cloud offers a flexible deployment model for tools to enhance the customer experience, and means that companies can adjust campaign strategies to cater to customer needs, increasing marketing effectiveness and in the longer term, improving revenues.

Richard McCrossan is strategic business director at Genesys

Bryony Thomas examines tactics for successful integration.

Marketing people are always banging on about integrated campaigns, indeed there are qualifications and companies bearing the name.

However, so many ‘integrated’ campaigns I see are little more than loosely co-ordinated tactics in the same theme or colour.

The key difference between co-ordination and genuine integration, is whether or not a campaign has been designed to take a person through the whole buying decision. Or, whether it’s just turning on a number of expensive promotional taps using a common theme, without a functioning sales funnel to convert the interest you generate.

If you want to make your marketing pay in terms of real sales results, you need to make sure that you’re not doing half a job.

A co-ordinated marketing campaign

A co-ordinated campaign will typically have a common creative theme and a matching ‘look and feel’, used consistently over a number of mediums. For example, an ad, some web banners, a press release, a direct mail piece and a web landing page. Some go further, with a download or give-away of some kind that relates to the theme. So, while you’re integrating tactical elements, you’re not integrating with sales … which is what matters if you’re after a decent marketing ROI. Typically, these campaigns will generate a number of marketing leads, which are then passed to sales for qualification. This is often where a number of potentially profitable prospects fall through the cracks. If you’ve not developed an integrated plan with your sales team, then you may have wasted precious marketing budget. I’ve often observed:

• Sales people not following up marketing leads immediately, meaning that by the time they pick up the phone, the prospect can’t remember ever having been interested.
• Sales people not being fully briefed (or ideally involved) in the campaign concept, meaning that follow-up calls are disjointed from the original point of contact.
• Sales people being incentivised on outbound volume targets, meaning that marketing follow-up actually dents their performance on paper.
• Sales people working on that month’s targets, seeing marketing leads as slow burn that won’t reward them immediately and, as such moving down the priority list.
• Sales people not being equipped with relevant follow-up material – for me this is the biggie in terms of marketing having let the team down – so often, a great lead generation campaign just isn’t seen through, and the sales person is left with some great people to call, but nothing more to tell them.

A truly integrated marketing campaign

Planning an integrated marketing campaign means equipping everyone in the team with what they need to move a person from one stage in the buying decision to the next. Simply generating awareness is doing less than half a job. Here’s a quick outline for a genuinely integrated campaign that you might find useful. You’ll need a tool for each step and a fully briefed team that understands how someone moved from one to the other, and (crucially) what tool to reach for next.

Creating awareness: Marketing tools that are specifically good for awareness-driving include:

• Advertising: sponsorship, press, outdoor, ambient, web, pay-per-click.
• Direct marketing: mailings, door drops, exhibitions.
• Social media: broadcast tweets, comments on Blogs and forums for example.

Creating interest: Create your own material, and give the whole team some decent bullet-points, cut & paste copy, for use in their own interactions:

• Content: Blogs, guest blogging, videos, articles papers
• Interaction: Webinars, teleseminars, conversations in social media

Surviving evaluation: You can support people who are comparing you against the market with:

• Product literature: detailed facts and figures that allow them to make a comparison, e.g data sheets.
• Case studies: Video interviews, detailed case studies.
• Other customers: have clients lined up who are ready to take testimonial phone calls, emails, etc.
• Proposal copy: a library of well-written copy for proposals and presentations.

Facilitating trial: having an easy first step will make it easier for people to say yes. Marketing can support this with:

• Product demos: have a pre-built dummy client demonstration that they can look at, or a screen capture of key features.
• Special offers: make sure that your sales people have a pre-rehearsed trial offer up their sleeve if people are teetering on the decision.

Closing the sale: Getting people to sign on the bottom line is more of a one-to-one relationship thing, but there are things that marketing can help with:

• DMU FAQs: have materials to hand that the buyer can use to cover off any internal objections in their wider decision-making unit
• Guarantees: Having pre-agreed guarantees can help people get over the hump if they perceive a risk in the deal.

Generating loyalty: Once you have people on-board, it is important to keep them happy. Marketing can help with:

• Welcome packs: introduce key people, provide contact details, outline support arrangements.
• Capture data: ask them to join a ‘club’, or sign-up to updates so that you can keep them up-to-date with the latest.
• Hospitality: make sure new customers are invited to drinks, online events, fun activities in social media, etc.

So, next time your marketing team or agency suggests some great lead generation, make sure there is a next step, and a next tool, through the whole buying process.

Bryony Thomas is a speaker, author & founder of Watertight Marketing. 

 James Leavesley (pictured) outlines why risk managers need to join the social media revolution.

Social media is no longer just the latest buzz word or an experiment for creative marketing teams. Organisations are fast recognising the importance of social media from a customer, employee and business partnership perspective.

Companies are using blogs, videos, Facebook and Twitter to connect with ‘communities’. However, it only takes one disgruntled customer to take to Twitter, You Tube or Facebook and the results can be costly. Even worse damage can be done by a rogue employee with access to corporate social media accounts and a determination to discredit the company.

So here are five reasons why risk managers should get up to speed with social media and how to control it:

1) Defamation and the law

Not many people realise that posting, Tweeting or Re-Tweeting a libel will leave the person or organisation involved open to prosecution. The position is no different to that of email in the early days. A Tweet, any social media post or email which expressly or implicitly makes adverse comments about others can easily be forwarded or Re-Tweeted and it is always unpredictable what will go viral.

The original person/poster can be liable for all subsequent reposts. The Defamation Act 2013 has strengthened the protection for channels such as Facebook and Twitter, which will encourage those who have been libelled to pursue those responsible for media posts or reposts. This leaves organisations open to legal action if an employee or corporate account is involved. It is essential for risk managers to know where an organisation stands in the event of something going wrong.

2) Loss of control over social media assets

It is commonplace for organisations to empower their employees or marketing agencies to create social media accounts on their behalf. But who owns these accounts and who has ultimate control? Accounts can be set up in minutes but who is responsible for keeping track of these new communication channels.

Risk managers need to be sure that social media policies are consistent with contracts of employment and that employees are aware of their responsibilities. There should be processes and technology in place to manage posts both internally and from third party agencies. Regular audits are necessary to establish how many accounts represent the company and who controls them. However, these can become time consuming and costly without the right social media risk software in place to manage activity.

3) Sharing confidential information

Employees need to be aware that their personal social media accounts will be linked to their employer and therefore could come under scrutiny. An example of how unprotected social media activity proved disastrous for one newly-appointed chief financial officer at US clothing retailer, Francesca’s, highlights the point. After a confidential meeting, the CFO Tweeted: “Board Meeting. Good Numbers = Happy Board.” Francesca’s is a publicly traded company and the CFO was dismissed for sharing confidential inside information. An easy mistake but a risky one which could have been avoided with the right awareness and preparation.

4) Brandjacking

Brandjacking occurs when someone assumes the online identity of another entity for the purpose of acquiring that organisation’s brand equity. For example, immediately after the Deepwater Horizon BP gulf oil spill, a fake Twitter account @BPGlobalPR appeared with sarcastic and inappropriate Tweets from a fictitious BP spokesperson. In just a few days, the account had accrued tens of thousands of followers. While it is not possible to completely prevent brandjacking, listening across social media channels to find out what is being said means fake accounts can be intercepted and ultimately legal action taken. However, companies first have to be aware what is happening and able to respond quickly.

5) Social media is good for business

There is no doubt social media is good for business. With some analysts quoting as many as 46% of online users referring to it when making business decisions (Nielsen, 2013). However, in common with any risk – normal rules apply. Risk managers need to be able to identify, record and mitigate social media risk and a good place to start is with a rigorous social media audit and the right risk management technology in place.

James Leavesley is CEO of CrowdControlHQ. 

Simon Lawrence (pictured) shares his thoughts about how B2B businesses need to adapt to the changing nature of the B2B buyer.

“Although the industry has come a long way since the cheesy product spiels and clumsy advertising of the mid-1900s, B2B buyers are still being bombarded every single day by ‘salesy’ calls and badly thought-out marketing communications. Buyers used to be naive, falling for false promises and guarantees, but as we’ve moved into the 21st century, buyers have begun to learn how to avoid these traps and wise up. As we enter 2014, we are faced with an army of B2B buyers who can see right through the majority of sales messages. Quite simply, they just don’t believe what they’re being told anymore.

When we look at decision making, alarmingly, buyers are progressing nearly 60% of the way through this process before they even begin to engage with a sales rep*. This is a concerning figure for businesses as essentially, buyers are qualifying them out before they’re even in!  Decisions are being based more on personal experiences and the buyers own judging criteria, with buyers more likely to choose just a couple of potentials to choose from. This can pose a significant challenge if you’re not being considered by the buyer in the first instance.

In the last year, we’ve started to learn more about  the new modern-day persona of a B2B buyer. The new ‘smart buyer’ wants to just be given the relevant information and then left to sift through it in their own time – they don’t want to talk to anyone while they’re in the process of researching. This is proposing new challenges for marketers as they try to find a way of getting through to and engaging with their target audience. It is becoming commonplace for companies to be fighting through switchboards, dead lines and agitated buyers in order to engage. What’s more, popular communication channels such as social media platforms aren’t providing optimal business engagement opportunities – for example, how many MDs do you think actually take full control of their Twitter accounts? While companies may still be able to generate the occasional piece of new business via these methods, people are generally choosing their own way to be communicated to. It is down to companies to find a way of cutting through the clutter and catching buyers’ attention.

In line with this, we have seen a shift towards a buyer-focused approach, where companies are identifying prospects and attempting to reach them in more valuable ways. If buyers are basing more decisions on experiences, it is key for companies to reach buyers with more salient and meaningful messages that encourages a relationship. This could include sending invitations to communicate so that it stays on the buyer’s terms, and ensuring that communication is based on warm interactions, incentives, relevance and encouragement. Relationships create a personal link between the buyer and the company and, once established, are more difficult for the buyer to step back from. Although buyers will still be sensitive to sales messages, if they’re coming from a company they trust, they are more likely to process information that they’re being sent and tolerate being ‘sold to’ .

To establish this relationship, companies need to work towards creating communication which is capable of interrupting the buyers thoughts and making them listen. In other words, creating communication which addresses their company’s pain points, focuses on areas of interest and reaches them via their preferred method for contact. The better you understand who buys what, when and why, the better informed you are to begin tailoring a message that resonates with them. However, although a lot of companies do collect data like this about their prospects and current customers, they are not able to use it in a way that can inform their marketing efforts. This is usually down to varying factors such as incomplete or inaccurate data, a lack of customer segmentation or the amount of time taken to process data for marketing.

The inability to build a complete profile of buyers leaves companies unsure as to which messages their prospects are most likely to respond to. By bringing data together, company’s can learn exactly which factors are driving business decisions, how buyers want to be contacted and when. This information allows for enlightened communications, where marketing can be targeted to different buyer profiles based on these aforementioned preferences. If companies are able to create content that is first and foremost relevant, as well as interesting and encouraging, they will be able to get better results from much fewer messages giving a greater return on marketing investment.

*Statistic taken from ‘The Digital Evolution in B2B Marketing’ research paper by the Marketing Leadership Council

Simon Lawrence is CEO and founder of data insight and data services business Uncommon Knowledge.