On June 12th the world’s gaze will descend upon Brazil for the biggest sporting event since the London Olympics. It’s fair to say that with global advertising revenues expected to grow by +6.5% in 2014, there’s an ever increasing amount of pressure on marketers to ensure that they’re making the right types of noise and targeting the people who are most open to listening to the messages they want to share. But how can brands ensure that they are ready to make this a reality?
In our recent online survey of 10,000 participants, we found that a huge 80% of respondents were unlikely to notice and purchase World Cup promotions. Whilst there is a lot of clamour by brands to be noticed, the general public don’t seem to be especially receptive when it comes to engaging with companies associated with football’s biggest spectacle. From a marketing point of view, the World Cup is a great opportunity to get your brand recognised on a global platform. The globalisation of events such as these provide brands with a great opportunity to promote their offering to a far wider audience than may have been available to them previously. The ability to pin-point individuals and households, offering what they want, when they want it will continue to be crucial and even more so with the backdrop of noise coming to the fore this summer.
Marketers are quick to understand that in many cases there’s a disparity between what people say and what they actually do. Like one of the core principles of behavioural economics states, people often make decisions based on approximate rules of thumb rather than strict logic. Brands must therefore embody a certain level of opportunism to ensure they are at the forefront of a customer’s mind when an impulse moment strikes. In order to gain the most valuable insight of your audiences’ preferences and increase your ability to predict patterns of behaviour, it’s important for brands to be able to identify and recognise an individual across multiple channels and target key characteristics that indicate a want or need of a particular item or service and respond in real-time.
So how can brands make sure that they are not wasting their money on campaigns that fail to set customer imagination alight? There are a number of ways that brands can choose to up their marketing effectiveness. By having the ability to interact with multiple consumer touchpoints, analysing data signals in real time, and reacting appropriately to these, you’ll be able to identify who’s actually interested in your World Cup campaigns. It might be that in a household of five people, mum is football mad and never misses an England match, and dad would rather spend his time in the garden. This would present a clear problem for most campaigns because traditionally most promotions would be geared towards reaching a specific audience and when this profile is not met, there’s no way to apply flexibility to your approach. This is where Big Data is able to add real value to your campaign by offering a way of offering consistent messaging to segmented audiences.
Social media is a vital tool used to help improve user experience and engagement, although over the last year or so brands have slowly woken up to the fact that this alone will not be enough to cut through the digital disruption that new marketing technologies have bought to the table. Most brands have a large amount of data available to them from customer relationship management programmes or other initiatives which are a good start to targeting their most loyal customers – but this in isolation will not be effective enough to deliver the most targeted campaigns. Take for example an individual who has no interest in football and brands associated with the competition. Clearly you don’t want to waste valuable resources entering into a conversation or seeking engagement based on your World Cup promotion. What’s much more effective is the ability to recognise certain patterns of behaviour and then tailoring your response based on this. Truly successful campaigns will have the ability to merge customised off-line data with the data rich environment the internet has to offer, giving them the ability to connect with constant and relevant messages to individuals via a plethora of different channels.
In the same survey, we also found that nearly 50% of participants would catch-up with World Cup matches after the event if they had a commitment clash. This points to a slightly different challenge that marketers will need to confront – the idea that nowadays audiences can choose to catch up on matches at any given moment. Indeed according to a recent survey commissioned by Comigo, nearly two thirds (63%) of viewers intend to watch match highlights on a computer, 23% on smartphones and 25% on a tablet and more than half (54%) plan to watch online videos of completed matches. TV advertising is, for the first time, set to take a back seat and online targeting will be the chief weapon in the marketer’s armoury. Unlike online advertisements which are able to offer relevant content based on an individual’s geographical location, TV advertisements currently offer a one-size-fits-all model – which can sometimes be extremely effective. However, companies are much better served at being able to target individuals not just on their propensity to purchase, but on their geographical location. Even if an electronics shop was able to sell me a 50” plasma TV for £200 but I lived a 300 mile round trip away, I would be unlikely to complete a purchase and the shop’s advertisement would serve little purpose than word of mouth.
But, this is nothing new. Advertisers have known about these principles for years now and the most successful campaigns won’t have been thought up a month or even year in advance of this summer’s World Cup. Long-term marketing blueprints are not set in stone, although they give you a great foundation for which to build truly interactive and engaging campaigns. The journey customers have had will have been shaped long before the World Cup kicks off on 12th June and whilst the ability to influence consumer behaviour will remain, those with the best infrastructure in place will be able to take advantage of the World’s premier quadrennial football competition.
Much like the team that eventually takes home the World Cup trophy in July, preparation ahead of time gives the best chance of success in the moment. Shouting loudly doesn’t always get you noticed, at least in a positive light. But having the right conversations with people on a level they feel comfortable with will let you stand out from the crowd in all the right ways.
by Jed Mole, European Marketing Director at Acxiom.
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