THE HIGHLIGHTS
The ‘boom moment’: How to uncover new brand stories through customer insight
Sponsored by asana
Customer research can help brands find new narratives that drive engagement, leads and sales, as delegates heard at the Festival of Marketing.
One of the best ways to kick-start a new branding campaign is to create a “boom moment” derived from customer insight. Not only does this provide a way for brands to tell new stories – particularly as they reconnect with customers and try to establish new, post-pandemic relationships with them – it is also a proven way of driving up web traffic, leads and sales.
That was the message for Festival of Marketing delegates from Katie Rowland, head of marketing for Northern Europe at work management platform Asana. She advised brands to consider building a new narrative to take to market based on a relevant area of shared interest, suggesting customer surveys as a key tactic for identifying the right approach.
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“When you start building your survey, think about spending some time brainstorming. Look at trends for your business and your market and think about how to connect those to your solution,” she said.
“Then figure out who is most relevant for you to hear from and who are the cross-functional partners you'll need to collaborate with. You'll probably want your PR team to insert some questions that can help them craft some stories for the press, and maybe the product team want to slip some questions in there to help them prioritise and map out their roadmap.”
Asana's Katie Rowland on identifying trends for your market
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Click here to watch the session on demand at the Festival of Marketing
Generating content assets
For global brands to get the most out of surveys, it’s important to ensure there will be several stories to draw from the research that can be individualised for different countries. This means separating data from each territory and putting it into a series of country-specific reports, which should then be further condensed into infographics.
This gives a marketing team, and their PR colleagues, plenty of content to reach out to each market and maximise exposure. Rowland also recommended that marketing, sales and PR teams put their heads together to get the best return on a demand-generation campaign through the use of the company’s own media sites as well as paid social. The tried-and-tested medium of push email works well here, but other routes have also come to the fore during the pandemic.
“One tactic that we tried for the first time here in the UK, which has worked incredibly well, is partnering with industry experts on webinars,” she revealed.
“So, for example, one of the big stats from our research was a rise in imposter syndrome due to the impact of Covid and working from home. So we had a local expert on work psychology speak about the impact of remote work on confidence and productivity. This strategy not only generated record numbers of signups, but the webinars themselves were incredibly engaging and impactful.”
Patience will be rewarded
When it comes to results, Rowland’s advice is to remember they are unlikely to be instant. With top-of-funnel thought leadership, it will likely take six to 12 months for content downloaders and webinar attendees to be nurtured from sales leads to new customers. One tactic Asana has adopted to help the process along, and ease prospects through the funnel, is following up with the most promising potential clients and extending an invite to small, exclusive roundtables where they can network with peers and the company’s senior experts.
The proof that the tactics can work comes from the outcomes of Asana’s recent worker attitude survey, which led to the creation of 50 content assets that achieved coverage in 40 major media publications around the world. More importantly, the integrated campaign drove more than a third of Asana’s leads in Q1 this year and is responsible for 12% of the company’s current sales pipeline - all using the approach she shared with Festival of Marketing delegates. ■
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WATCH NOW
Click here to watch the session on demand at the Festival of Marketing