It has become the norm for brands to operate across multiple channels and simultaneously engage with multiple audiences and stakeholders. But, as a result, a brands reputation is left at the mercy of those who engage and interact with the stories and content it broadcasts. One wrong step and a brand’s reputation can be destroyed within minutes.
With this in mind, there has never been a greater need for brands to operate in a more agile way. A brand that can dynamically adapt its communications whilst staying true to its brand voice and narrative will be a brand that can tell a deeper, more engaging story. Agility helps avoid wasting resources on ineffective campaigns and provides you with a platform to adapt to the emerging stories and trends that are most relevance to your customers.
Whilst digital and social media can help ‘deliver’ this agility, brands and organisations also need to adapt how they structure themselves internally.
We have spent the last nine months monitoring the digital and social media space to understand what successful ‘brand agility’ looks like. As a result, we believe that to become a truly agile brand you need to concentrate on the following four core components:
1. Listening and Learning
Most communications teams will have social listening in place. But how often are these findings distributed beyond the communications or marketing teams? An agile organisation ensures audience insight and analysis is shared across all business areas where it matters: customer support and R&D/NPD teams being the most obvious, but also senior executive teams who shape the direction of the business.
Across any business there will also be pockets of insight that can prove just as useful to how you communicate and engage with your audience. What can your e-commerce team provide into what’s driving sales? Can customer support provide data on the most pressing concerns amongst your user base? It’s likely you’re in an organisation where a lot of data is already being generated – you need to simply join up the dots. By doing so helps build a stronger, more useful picture of your audience and how to best engage with them.
2. Create Compelling Content
This is something brands struggle with time and again – even with planned content. As the level of content required to support social media pages has risen, the speed with which it is created has impacted overall quality. Our own research showed that most brands aren’t using data to shape content creation. More often than not they default to talking about themselves rather than creating content that their customers would find valuable.
Data can provide great insight into what content your audiences perceive as being valuable and the kind of stories with which they regularly engage. Always ask yourself “why would our audience care?” and “why would they share?” This can help shape what we call your ‘value proposition’ – the way in which you provide value to your customers through engaging content. In short, if you can’t get your value proposition right, then the content you create will always miss the mark.
3. Speed and Authenticity of Engagement
This is not something that all organisations can easily achieve. Many brands are stifled by overtly risk-averse legal teams or marketing leads. As a result, you often find many brand communications teams unable to quickly react to external forces quick enough to gain the mindshare and engagement of their audiences. Speed turns to stagnation.
Even when they do manage to push out a response, having been forced through a corporate and legal filter, what is left is nothing but an overtly cautious corporate statement that lacks any level of authenticity or humanity. Authenticity means that your words and deeds need to match. In essence, if you want to be trusted, be trustworthy.
Even if you are stifled by internal forces there are ways to help your organisation communicate with greater speed and agility. One of the easiest solutions is to have your legal and marketing teams pre-approve statements and responses to the most popular or pressing issues and customer questions. If you’re looking to leverage social media around key events then plan ahead and create multiple pieces of content that can be used dependent on different outcomes and scenarios.
4. Integrated Infrastructure
This is often the most difficult phase to conquer. It relies on an organisation pulling together potentially disparate and siloed teams, and getting them to talk the same language. This won’t happen overnight; but by taking smaller steps at first, you can reach a place where everyone is singing from the same song sheet.
Start by opening up channels of communication between teams to share insight. The next step is to allow different teams, outside of communication and marketing, to engage with customers: be that as expert spokespeople, industry commentators or even customer support. Next comes some of the systemic challenges: how does your budget allocation process drive behaviour? Is your team structure what you need or a quirk of history? Are you structured to best reflect what your customer wants or around your products?
Finally, engage and seek buy-in from the most senior executives and counsel within the business. Working with multiple moving parts in the business will be far easier if those that lead ensure other teams are supporting and delivering what you need.
In short, becoming an agile brand will take more than a few alterations in how you operate as a business and how you communicate your story to your customers and stakeholders. But it is an approach that can reap numerous rewards. Fortunately, as communicators, you understand the core tenants of agility. As such, you are best placed to help develop your brand’s ‘fast-twitch’ muscles.
By Gareth Davies, Head of Digital at Waggener Edstrom.
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