MANILA – Social Connect, a thought leadership client-agency interaction was recently launched on happy hours. The event allowed marketing leaders to network and learn from each other in a friendlier, more relax setting. Similar events in the future will be hosted by the partner companies to keep current and prospective clients abreast of the latest trends in the digital economy.
Dentsu Aegis Network PH CEO Donald L. Lim and Salesforce APAC Head of Social, Rainbow Cheung, shared insights on the new digital economy and how some of the most innovative brands are connecting customers in a whole new way in the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
Dentsu Aegis Network is a multinational media and digital marketing communications company that is Innovating the way brands are built and is a conglomerate of seven global network brands in thee country — Dentsu Jayme Syfu, Aspac DAN, Carat, dentsu X, Vizeum, iProspect, and Posterscope. Salesforce is a leading Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform. Its cloud-based applications for sales, service, marketing, and more don’t require IT experts to set up or manage.
Today, we see an explosion of brands on the social space. On Facebook alone, 16 million brands are now present. Every brand from every category is on social competing for customer screen time and attention. This increased presence on social platforms, however, has led to consumer aversion to brands turning “social.”
People are now becoming desensitized to brands in the social world; making social unsocial. They just scroll over posts and ads, instead of getting engaged., as much as they zone out or switch channels during commercial break as they watch TV. As such, brands should consider themselves lucky if they even get “seenzoned.”
Fourth Industrial revolution. We are in this phase where intelligence is transforming the customer experience; where every customer relates to smart, always-on devices and real-time interactions. It is the age of the customer and every marketer’s and communicator’s challenge is how to connect to them in a whole new way. We need to capture (real time data signals), learn (natural language processing deep and machine learning predictive analysis) and connect (to your customers differently).
To be more digital is to be more human, whose attention span is dwindling. Digital is putting the user first, where their lives are touched, where closely knit relationships are fostered, and where nations are built. Donald lined up these digital updates that can affect the way we do marketing, advertising, PR and other related businesses:
Social becomes the basic platform, Social Play paramount. Social play is doing 360 marketing campaigns from conceptualization to execution. It brings together creatives, event management services, content creation, talent sourcing, social media, promotions, licensing, brand properties, PR, corporate events and many more. Social play delivers much more than activation. It is anchored on powerful data source, and the experience and passion of team members to come up with well differentiated ideas and better insights. Social Play is “content with context” for higher consumer engagement to achieve better results.
Programmatic goes mainstream. Programmatic is the data enhanced automation of manual media buying and selling decisions and processes. Compared to 2016, programmatic activity has grown exponentially in 2017 – a huge stride as Dentsu Aegis Network has a global goal of becoming 100 percent digital and 50 percent Programmatic by 2020.
Marketing invades e-commerce. Once different experiences, marketing and e-commerce have converged. Giants like Amazon and Alibaba are buying into physical retail, and offline giants like Walmart buying online companies. The implications of this trend are varied: Almost every aspect of life is now an opportunity to shop or experience a brand; brands need to be available to buy wherever their consumers expect them to be; and commerce is increasingly global where we now think beyond national boundaries.
From data gathering to data mining. Data mining is discovering hidden valuable knowledge by analyzing large amounts of data stored in databases or data warehouses, using various data mining techniques such as machine learning, artificial intelligence(AI) and statistical expertise. For businesses, data mining is used to discover patterns and relationships in the data to help make better business decisions. Data mining can help spot sales trends, develop smarter marketing campaigns, and accurately predict customer loyalty.
Chatbots: FB messenger meets AI. Chatbots arise due to the society’s needs to communicate via messages. The main scope of a Chatbot is to achieve the interaction of communication between the user and the Brand. That is why multiple companies have already added this service to their platforms, to have the opportunity to create a personalized conversation with their customers. Some business sectors that are already using this tool include Food and Beverage, Health and Insurance Media and Publishers, Real Estate and Finance, Consumer Goods, and Beauty, Travel and Entertainment, Fashion and Automotive, Weather and Sport, Discovery and Retail, and Flights and Airports.
Internet of Things (IoT) will come into experimentation. IoT is a concept that not only has the potential to impact how we live but also how we work. Simply put, this is the concept of basically connecting any device with an on and off switch to the Internet (and/or to each other). This includes everything from cellphones, coffee makers, washing machines, headphones, lamps, wearable devices and almost anything else you can think of. On a broader scale, the IoT can be applied to things like transportation networks: “smart cities” which can help us reduce waste and improve efficiency for things such as energy use; this helping us understand and improve how we work and live. With IoT, the new rule for the future is going to be, “Anything that can be connected, will be connected.”
Rainbow Cheung, APAC Head of Social, Salesforce
Rainbow Cheung’s top five social strategies to kickstart social CRM
Everything starts with listening. We must unfailingly listen to our brand, but it is important to expand our listening to competition, campaigns, product and category insights, and customer interests and preferences. Our focus must be on customer experience that mitigates risk and enable opportunity: crisis management, early warning signals, education, brand building, advocacy and business intelligence.
Redefine social as part of the customer journey. Social is beyond marketing. It brings together a cross functional team that includes service, sales support (advertising and PR included), HR and recruitment. 84 percent of high-performing teams align social across marketing service and beyond. Social customer service (SCS) is a big deal: based on a Gartner study, social agents can handle 4 to 8 times more issues per hour than phone agents; preventive SCS or reaching out to customers can reduce call help volumes 30 percent and increase customer retention 3 to 5 percent an Enkata research revealed. SCS costs one sixteenth the cost of phone interactions and one third to one fifth the cost of email, an NM Incite data disclosed. Candice Iyog, VP marketing and Distribution, Cebu Pacific declared, “We want to recover relationships not just resolve cases. What we’re doing with Salesforce will also create customers for life.”
Rethink social metrics as business metrics. Reach, interaction and community are still very valid and important metrics. But we can find new ways to measure social as part of business: web traffic from social, leads from social, response rate and response time. Success is defined around revenue growth, cost reduction and employee productivity.
Single view of the customer. Successful customer experience relies on connecting the dots. There’s a single platform for marketing, service support and sales, study interaction history and create a knowledge base with context. Gest Wim ter Haas, KLM Social Media Manager said, “It’s first about service, then brand reputation, but also about commerce … we have to make money.”
Create executive buy in and cross company alignment. Top contributor to success is company-wide commitment and participation. We can use social insights to create this buy in: Share simple social insights on brand, products and competitors; Appoint social champions; create cross functional editorial board; and establish a command center.
Dentsu Aegis believes that social media will continue to be relevant to consumers, and accepts the platform’s power to build and utilize social for brands.
To deliver on this foresight, Dentsu Aegis has established D+gility (Digital + Agility) — the Center for Social Media Excellence of the network specializing in social intelligence, 24/7 operations, agile solutions (with solutions, going beyond the usual community management and content creation) and future thinking to help brands continuously evolve and stay relevant.
Dentsu Aegis executives and digital champions lend support to Social Connect
“We don’t want to do social for the sake of just having presence online. Instead, we want to harness its power to ensure relevance and cut-through for our brands. We want to go beyond likes and shares, and adopt a data-driven approach and a purposive use of social media that is sure to deliver impact and business results,” Jim Guzman, Head of Dentsu Aegis PH Social explains. Jim leads a team of five experts and more than 50 engagement specialists within D+gility and the entire network. They are tasked to put social in the DNA of all agencies under Dentsu Aegis PH.
D+gility is one of the, if not the biggest Social Media Command Center in the country with more than 30 screens powered by Salesforce. It houses 60 of the biggest brands in the country which are currently doing social as part of their digital ecosystem.
In main image, Donald Lim, Dentsu Aegis Network PH CEO shares updates on the digital economy.
