Work with the business leaders and stakeholders to develop and optimize new and existing content for search engines, creating organic traffic growth and increased on-site conversion.
In partnership with the Demand Generation team, build and iterate keyword strategies that generate leads and accelerate sales funnel velocity.
Cultivate a cohesive content marketing strategy targeted at: driving traffic and brand awareness, increasing engagement, generating new subscribers, building on a strong donor base and retaining activity within an existing community.
Work with internal/external collaborators and creative resources to deliver content that is consistent with A Network for Grateful Living’s mission, brand voice and strategy.
Responsible for writing highly-polished, clear, concise and grammatically correct copy that is consistent with brand voice and in-line with SEO best practices and commonly-used style guides.
Use keyword research tools to identify, research, and prioritize key traffic and revenue-driving terms from which to write and optimize website copy, meta data and inter-linking strategies.
Marketers can’t argue the effectiveness of social marketing or the need to cultivate a social presence to connect with their audience. The struggle is keeping pace with the constant changes of the social landscape and its relation to your brand’s health. This is more important than ever in light of the past 22 months of the pandemic.
Join experts from NetBase Quid as they share insights from their State of Social 2022 report, including the biggest trends in social media that are shifting brand priorities and where the golden opportunities are for brands to connect meaningfully with targeted audiences.
Knowing your audience and what they want has always been a cornerstone of marketing, but the standard for modern, successful campaigns has grown to include what your audience cares about as well.
Customers are no longer just voting for brands or products via their purchases. Now, they’re also voting for the future they would like to see the world move towards — a future in which climate change is being addressed, centuries of socioeconomic and racial injustices are being corrected and equality and inclusivity are available to all.
This means that brand values are now part of your unique selling point — and if you’re not promoting values that align with your audience, it’s likely that one of your competitors will. However, inclusive marketing isn’t just a tactic to pander to audiences. It’s here to underscore humanity and the common struggles we face while recognizing and celebrating our differences.
It can also help propel your brand towards its business goals: More than two-thirds (67%) of respondents to an Edelman study said they bought from a brand for the first time because they agreed with its position on a controversial topic, while 65% said they wouldn’t buy from a brand when it remains silent on issues they care about. And, inclusive ads drove a 23-point lift in purchase intent among consumers belonging to Gen Z, whether the person experiencing the ad was represented or not, according to Microsoft, meaning that inclusive marketing can help drive your sales funnel as well.
To help further your understanding and strengthen your messaging, we’ve compiled a list of resources that can serve as the foundations for your brand’s inclusive marketing efforts.
Evaluate your own biases
Relying on your own judgment when auditing your implicit biases means that you’re the judge and jury, which can lead to a self-defeating exercise. Instead, try resources like Harvard’s Implicit Association Test (IAT).
A result from Harvard’s Implicit Association Test.
The IAT can help you identify your implicit biases across many categories, like gender and career, skin tone, religion, disability, sexuality, weight, age and more. Once you’ve taken the IAT, share it with your team so that everyone can keep a watchful eye over how their own biases may make their way into your marketing campaigns.
Inclusive marketing resources from Search Engine Land
As the need for inclusive marketing has grown, we, the editors at Search Engine Land and the programming team behind SMX, have created a number of resources for brands to consider as they build inclusivity and diversity into their organizations and campaigns.
The cost of ignoring website accessibility: Non-compliant sites are vulnerable to lawsuits, but SEOs can help protect them by advocating for accessibility, which can serve both differently-abled audiences as well as your business goals.
(Video) Addressing diversity, recruitment and retainment in agencies and marketing teams: A panel discussion featuring CJ Bland, Zenia Johnson and Jackie Leuing about why diversity is good for business, what intentional commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&I) initiatives looks like and how employees can initiate change in their companies.
(Video) Microsoft’s “The Download” Episode 8: Search Engine Land Editor George Nguyen sits down with Microsoft’s Nora Xu for a conversation about the importance of inclusion in marketing after a surge in hate crimes against Asian Americans.
Nora Xu and George Nguyen discuss the need for inclusive marketing on Microsoft’s The Download.
Search Engine Land also presents an annual award for Advancing Diversity and Inclusion in Search Marketing to recognize the individuals and organizations that are driving positive change in the search community. The 2021 winners are Rejoice Ojaiku, for her work in founding B-Digital, “a digital marketing platform aimed at showcasing and inspiring Black talent,” and hasOptimization, a New Hampshire-based agency whose marketing efforts are complemented by their work for both inclusion and diversity across many areas of focus.
We’ll place a link here when we begin taking nominations for the next Advancing Diversity and Inclusion in Search Marketing award — it is free to nominate both individuals and organizations.
Inclusive marketing guides
Google and Bing, the search platforms that are at the center of many of our campaigns, have recognized the value and need for inclusive marketing by publishing their own resources on the subject.
Microsoft’s Marketing with Purpose Playbook: Available as a free download, the Marketing with Purpose Playbook is one of the most comprehensive resources for inclusive marketing statistics (which can help you secure executive buy-in) and tips. The 101-page PDF is divided into three important areas for marketing (responsibility, values and inclusion) and covers a wide range of audiences.
Google’s All In Inclusive Marketing Insights: Created from the lessons Google learned as it began its own inclusive marketing practices, this resource center has strategies for building teams, making inclusive creative choices, embedding inclusion into your strategy as well as audience insights to help eliminate stereotypes in your creative.
Inclusive language guides
Creating a welcoming environment for diverse audiences starts with the language in our messaging. Below is a list of language guides from various organizations that can help you ensure inclusivity in your creative assets and content.
Google’s developer documentation word list: This style guide for developer documentation contains safe alternatives for biased wording, like the use of “slave,” “tribal wisdom” and more.
Northwestern University’s Inclusive Language Guide: This general-purpose guide features explanations for why certain language is considered exclusionary or biased, as well as alternative phrases to use instead.
GLAAD Media Reference Guide: Intended for use by journalists, GLAAD’s guide focuses on language as it pertains to the LGBTQ community.
Accessibility
Accessibility for differently-abled individuals or those that rely on assistive technologies is often considered by marketers to be “someone else’s job,” but inclusive organizations recognize that the responsibility is shared by all. Here are some resources that can help you evaluate and improve your site’s accessibility, while potentially opening up new audiences for your brand and protecting you from ADA-related lawsuits.
W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG): Developed by the World Wide Web Consortium with the goal of providing a single standard for web content accessibility, the WCAG explains how to make content easier to access for people with disabilities.
Inclusive marketing for your campaigns
Numerous platforms have added ways for businesses to showcase their diversity. Below are some articles covering features that you can use to immediately add an element of inclusivity to your advertising or online presence.
This resource will be updated on an ongoing basis. If you have feedback, suggestions or resources to submit, please send an email to gnguyen@thirddoormedia.com.
Marketers give it a 50/50 chance they will attend an in-person event, conference or trade show in the first half of 2022, a new MarTech survey has found. It’s a statistic that should scare any event organizer who had hoped this two-year uncertainty for in-person gatherings was nearing an end.
Respondents to MarTech’s Event Participation Index gave the likelihood they would attend an in-person business event in the first half of 2022 a 5 out of 10. That outlook improved slightly for the second half of 2022, when marketers gave the likelihood a 6 out of 10.
Marketers gave it a 7 out of 10 likelihood they would attend an in-person event in the first half of 2023, but the pandemic has shown us just how much can change in a year.
This past survey marked the eighth time we have fielded the Events Participation Index, and there’s a clear pattern in the data. When asked about the likelihood of attending events more than 6 months away, respondents were always more optimistic. But each time those far-away dates got closer, their comfort level fell.
For example, respondents in March 2021 gave the likelihood of attending an event in the first quarter of 2022 a 7 out of 10. But marketers give the entire first half a 5 out of 10 when asked again this November.
It’s not surprising, given the rise of new variants like Omicron and the reluctance by many to get vaccinated against the virus. But for event planners, it just means the optimism your registrants have today may not be there come event time.
The chart below shows the likelihood respondents gave for attending events within three months of the time the survey was fielded. It shows that we are indeed out of those darker periods where in-person gatherings were either canceled or not remotely feasible. But it also shows that we’ve yet to see a period where likelihood crosses 50%.
That hesitancy is also playing out in budgets. About 78% of the 220 marketers who took our survey said they are budgeted to attend only a small number of events in 2022.
“I think event producers should expect continued reduced attendance and plan for smaller, regional events,” one respondent said. “I think events need to shift away from the model where exhibitors need to commit a year or more out. Perhaps more pop-up type events that are more nimble and have more allure because of the intimacy and the opportunity for deeper connections.”
Virtual events or bust?
Just because potential attendees are wary of in-person events, that doesn’t mean they are all-in on virtual events. Respondents gave the likelihood they would attend a virtual event in the first half of 2022 a 6 out of 10 chance. What’s interesting is that was the same likelihood they gave for the second half of 2022 and the first half of 2023.
It suggests that just as there are likely people who will never feel comfortable at an in-person event, there are others who either do not see the value in virtual events or are “fatigued” by the sheer volume of virtual events that are available now.
“Virtual events are convenient, but they aren’t the same. I don’t want to sit on a virtual conference all day; the times are always weird and it’s too easy to skip a session if I have a project due,” one respondent wrote.
However, that comment represents the minority. Most respondents suggested that organizers continue to focus on hybrid and virtual experiences, especially if they need to once again cancel in-person shows.
“I prefer virtual events as an attendee,” wrote one respondent. “Limiting travel expenses and time has allowed me to attend more events than ever before. Some in-person is nice, but prefer this to be after an initial relationship is established and the goal and value of the offerings are clearly established.”
Our data also supported that. When asked whether they would prefer to attend events in-person or virtually, 27% said they preferred to attend in-person only, 34% said they preferred to attend virtually and 39% said they would prefer to attend in-person and access virtual components.
“I think people will expect hybrid events to become the norm,” wrote one respondent. “In-person attendance may stay a bit lower than historical numbers and virtual attendance will increase overall attendance significantly. Event hosts will play with pricing to figure out the ideal gap between in-person and virtual prices.”
No clear path for event organizers
Salesforce last week held its Dreamforce NYC event in New York, but concerns over the new Omicron variant led the marketing technology giant to step up safeguards, according to an email sent to attendees before the event that laid out the protocol.
“Complete an onsite rapid test through testing partner Senneca on December 9. Testing hours are 7:30 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. ET. COVID testing may take up to an hour so please arrive early and plan accordingly. Look for your Dreampass in your email once your vaccine record and tests are verified. You must have your Dreampass to enter the event space. Bring your favorite mask and be prepared to wear it while you’re onsite.”
While these safeguards certainly add a new hassle to in-person experiences, people are generally in favor of protocols like this if it means they can attend conferences. For example, more than 70% of respondents to our survey said organizers should mandate that attendees be vaccinated.
In fact, despite the Delta variant wave this year, marketers did attend in-person events in 2021. About 30% of our respondents said they attended up to two in-person business events this year. About 16% said they attended up to five events, 4% attended up to nine, and 4% said they attended 10 or more.
Of course, that also meant 46% attended no in-person events this year.
So what are organizers to do? Many companies are moving ahead with in-person conferences in 2022, as of now, but our data suggests that attendance at least for the first half of the year will continue to be below pre-pandemic levels.
If anything, the data we gathered highlights how deliberate companies need to be in making decisions on holding events. There is hope but also plenty of concern on the part of audiences about in-person safety that will certainly affect attendance. Meanwhile, just because virtual is cost-effective, that doesn’t mean audiences, particularly those who valued events for networking purposes, are going to accept virtual as an alternative to in-person.
“I think they should expect a pretty even split in their audience of folks who choose to take part in only virtual sessions versus attending in-person. Even for myself, I much prefer attending in-person but am starting to heavily use any virtual content, especially post-event,” wrote one respondent.
“I think two things are equally true,” wrote another. “Some people miss in-person events, but others have appreciated the time and money saved by attending virtual events. The companies that do virtual well will have an advantage going forward. Teleconferencing companies have made it easier for things like break-out sessions, replicating the networking benefits that come from in-person events.”
Regulations such as the GDPR and CCPA and frameworks such as IAB TCF have dramatically changed the digital privacy landscape — for the better. They set the standard for providing transparency and choices for how data is used and shared with third parties.
Today’s consumers are increasingly concerned with protecting their personal data. At the same time, they demand more personalized experiences. This creates a challenge for marketers, advertisers, and publishers to respect customers’ privacy while also capturing consent, driving opt-ins, and delivering compelling user experiences. The solution for companies to bring privacy and personalization together through transparency, choice, and trust? A consent management platform.
Right now, companies have an opportunity to embrace the new norm the digital privacy transformation has ushered in and, by doing so, give themselves a competitive edge. In fact, 70% of customers say trusting a brand is more important now than ever before. And this shows — for every dollar spent on consent and preference management, businesses see an average 40x return on investment.
When it comes to keeping up to date on global compliance, the most effective solution is to implement a consent management platform (CMP) to maintain your compliance coverage and reduce risk across all your websites, mobile applications, or even CTV applications. But beyond that, it’s important to understand how a consent management strategy helps companies build customer trust, comply with global privacy regulations and meet business goals.
With the right consent management platform, you can capture and manage consent on web, mobile, and CTV applications; uncover hidden trackers and cookies on websites; configure branded banners using unique consent approaches based on location; and measure and optimize consent rates for maximum opt-ins. In short, a CMP can support you to operationalize compliance while building customer trust and meeting your business goals.
In this e-book, you’ll learn about important regulatory requirements, the role the tech industry plays in consent management, and best practices for setting up and leveraging a consent management platform.
“We’re all in this together.” Last year, this statement became the universal motto of brands everywhere, as people learned to adapt to unfamiliar circumstances brought on by the global pandemic.
As the world embraces more in-person interactions, things aren’t going to just go back to the way they were before. The great challenge for brands is how to reimagine their approach to customer experience by connecting every point of interaction, uniting all teams across the business and merging the trust gap between brands and consumers.
To help marketers understand how to bring these pieces together, Acquia surveyed 8,000 consumers and 800 marketers across Australia, Brazil, France, Germany, Japan, Singapore, the United Kingdom and the United States. Our research explored shifts in both marketer and consumer expectations around customer experience and privacy. Now we’re sharing key lessons we learned from this research in our global report: Deliver a Modern Digital CX: A Guide for Marketing Innovators.
1. Create more content without sacrificing brand consistency
With live events, trade shows and physical storefronts unavailable, business leaders needed to stay engaged with their audience by expanding their content efforts to new channels and formats.
Our CX Trends Report found that 49% of global marketers have created more content for customer engagement in 2021 compared to previous years to fulfill new customer behaviors. But as businesses introduce dozens of new content channels into the mix, maintaining brand consistency and a clear, overarching brand message becomes more challenging.
Without strong brand governance and oversight into all the content you’re publishing, the customer journey can become confusing and frustrating, sending your audience off to a competitor.
2. Empower marketer and developer collaboration with low-code tools
Meeting the rising demand for new, more personalized content requires organizations to eliminate barriers between internal teams and take a holistic approach to creating digital experiences.
Our survey found that 83% of marketers still struggle to create content that can be rapidly released across all their digital platforms. If businesses want to reach maximum efficiency and get new experiences to market faster, they need to use their teams to their full potential.
Today, 72% of marketers require help from technologists to create digital customer experiences. Rather than waiting for developers to fulfill requests, modern marketers need tools that will put them in control of shaping the customer experience from end to end.
3. Bridge the gap between customer privacy and personalization with first-party data
One of the greatest points of disconnect our CX Trends Report revealed was in marketers’ and consumers’ perceptions of how organizations use individuals’ personal data.
Marketing teams need customer data to create personalized experiences, but customers want to have meaningful experiences with a brand before providing them with this information. This is the privacy and personalization paradox. 54% of global marketers found that increasing personalization efforts led to more engagement with consumers.
So how can we bridge the customer trust gap? Our survey points to first-party data as the secret weapon that will keep companies successful in the long term.
While the future of digital transformation is often unpredictable, the customer experiences your brand offers should feel seamless and trustworthy. Learn more about how today’s marketers create more unified customer experiences in our new global report, Deliver a Modern Digital CX: A Guide for Marketing Innovators.
Marketers and business leaders came together at Zeta Live ‘21 to discuss the evolution to a digital-first world and trending topics on the future of marketing. From NFTs to first-party data to the Metaverse and everything in between, here are some of the conference’s most engaging themes that marketers can’t afford to ignore.
1. E-commerce enters the experience era
The last 20 years of ecommerce and the technological progress made within the industry have offered solely static experiences for consumers. Enter the “experience era.”
The experience era enables marketers to give consumers the branded experience they crave. In the What Comes Next for Social Commerce session, industry experts from Verishop, Snap Inc., ThirdLove, and Yahoo! explain what’s next, with emphasis on one-to-one interactivity, sustainability, the Metaverse, and livestream selling being the holy grails.
2. Web 3.0, NFTs, and blockchain technology go mainstream
Web 3.0 represents the next iteration of the evolution of the internet as we know it. Built upon the core concepts of decentralization, openness, and great user utility, the real value coming out of web 3.0 will be blockchain.
At the center of this blockchain technology now sits non-fungible tokens, better referred to as NFTs. In our session 2022: The Year NFTS Take the Mainstage, industry leaders from TIME and CNBC weighed in on the ability of crypto technology to create a new type of relationship with consumers through exclusivity. Michael Rubin, CEO of Fanatics, supported this positioning in his session on Sports Marketing in The Digital Era, sharing why he is launching NFT trading cards to strengthen the fan experience. While we’re still a few years out, NFTs and other Web 2.0 products platforms will inevitably disrupt the MarTech industry as we know it.
3. The next wave of customer engagement in the Metaverse
Despite an uptick in big news surrounding the Metaverse lately, the reality is that this shift to virtual experiences won’t come overnight. Bob Sherwin, CMO of Wayfair, noted in the session on The Future of Commerce & Creativity that the home goods brand has offered these experiences to its shoppers for years. Yet, the question of ‘when do consumers want to engage with it?’ still remains.
4. Identity plays a pivotal role in the digital economy
Identity-based marketing – especially through the use of first-party data – has become increasingly important as consumers accelerate their transition to digital for everyday conveniences, transactions, and social interactions.
In the session Navigating the Golden Age of Identity, marketing experts from Zeta, LiveRamp, AWS Data Exchange, and T-Mobile unpacked the significance of identity being the only thing that unifies the customer experience.
5. CDPs become the marketer’s North Star
Whether it’s added complexity that slows down processes, or siloed processes that lead to mono-channels, marketers are breaking through these roadblocks by implementing a Customer Data Platform (CDP) to power their martech stack. In the session Technology Bets for the Modern Marketer, industry experts from Carter’s, Email Connect, Healthgrades, and SIMON weigh in on the importance of having such a CDP platform at the core of their marketing infrastructure.
Access all the Zeta Live ‘21 session recordings until December 17th by navigating to the “theater” area of our virtual experience here.
Email is a powerful marketing tool. And email with signatures can be a great way to add a personal touch. If you’re new to email signatures, you may be wondering what they are and why your brand needs them. And if you use corporate signatures already, you may not be getting the most out of them right now. In this post, you’ll get the lowdown on email signatures and what you stand to gain by including this highly underestimated but powerful solution in your marketing mix.
Email signatures are not new
Email signatures have been around for a long time, and businesses and individuals widely use them. Professional email signature makes your email messages look formal and helps you build trust with your clients.
Email signature may seem old, but it comes with a lot of exciting benefits. Social media is a great option for many B2B marketers. However, it is not a replacement for the email marketing channel.
There are three times more individual email accounts than both Facebook and Twitter social media profiles combined. That’s not all. You are six times more likely to get a click-through from email than on Twitter.
Every brand should therefore leverage email signature solutions to increase the effectiveness of their business communication.
Do you use email signatures and know the many benefits that come with them? Here are ten important reasons you should give professional email signatures more attention than ever before.
1. Get the best out of every email you send out
Email, as a one-to-one communication channel, remains popular with individuals, brands and employees simply because:
It works and is still highly relevant!
It’s easy to use, accessible and highly effective when sending messages from one person to the other.
Email has long been a go-to one-on-one communication channel for individuals and will continue to be so in future years.
Professional email signatures help you make the most out of every email you send out. Your recipients would sometimes forward or share the message you send to them.
Think of how many people your employees reach out to daily. Leveraging email signature means you add more avenues to drive more sales and increase revenue for your business.
2. Make the first good and professional impression
Your email signature is the first opportunity you have to make the first good impression as a business.
Including a signature in every outgoing message makes you stand out from the crowd.
It makes your messages look more professional than when you don’t have one.
Email signatures make it possible to use personalized, targeted and non-intrusive banners to promote your brand and products.
Your email signature is a branding tool that can make a long-lasting impression. It’s a great place to put your company logo, website, social media handles, blog URL or even an appointment scheduler link to make it easier for your customers to connect with you.
3. Boost your brand identity and awareness
Each time you send an email without including an email signature, you throw away opportunities to promote your brand to a cold and warm audience via corporate signature.
Your email signature works like your business card. Instead of handing over your card around, your professional signature would do the job of introducing you and how people can reach you. Isn’t that an exciting feature you should include to position your brand for better visibility?
The signature also establishes your credibility and increases your value before the recipients.
You can choose to keep your email signature simple by adding only the company logo and a link to your business website. You can also add more information, such as new offers or upcoming events. Your email signatures keep your recipients informed and let prospects know what to do next.
4. Higher response rate
The number of email users will grow to 4.3 billion by 2023. That’s over half of the world population. Email helps you reach people anywhere they are at any time of the day. One-to-one email communication has proven to be the best over the years. It delivers optimal results and gives a higher delivery rate.
Consequently, you cannot afford to have your employees use different email signatures.
Create customized email signatures to promote your brand’s values.
Professional and consistent email signatures will help you cement the trust of your customers.
As communication becomes increasingly digital, the email signature remains an essential tool for any business. Corporate signature gives people you’ve reached out to unfettered access to your contact details.
Email signature provides you with a unique opportunity to include your primary contact details, such as your phone number, at the end of your message.
If your contact needs to reach you quickly, a reference to the previous email will provide the information necessary without unnecessary delay.
You can also include your social media handles so that your contact will have more avenues of reaching out to you.
6. Generate new leads to your business
You can quickly scale your email outreach by sharing engaging email banners and non-salesy marketing links.
An email signature provides a great way to quickly inform the reader about your company, contact information, and mission statement.
It gives you a chance to promote other business ventures and to generate new leads.
7. Improve your email marketing campaigns
The professional email signature is a simple but powerful tool that any business can use to improve its marketing, advertising and branding efforts.
It is an integral part of your email as it gives a complete picture of your business.
With the help of professional email signatures, you can send more targeted one-on-one email messages to employees and clients.
For instance, you can customize your email signatures to suit the needs of the recipient.
Email signature solutions allow you to have a variety of signatures that you can choose from depending on what you want your recipients to know.
Email signature is a simple but a smart way to keep your brand name in your customers’ minds.
Business signatures will not only make your internal communication formal, but they also open many opportunities for personalization among the employees and management.
You can use an email signature to customize your closing by including a personalized link at the bottom of your email.
The solution is brilliant and makes it easy for any organization to boost employee engagement, advertise new roles, share internal surveys or suggestion boxes, and distribute specific banners internally.
9. Test and measure the performance of your email signatures
It may never cross your mind that you can test new creative with your corporate email signature. But that is another golden opportunity for you!
An email signature marketing platform provides a fantastic tool and easy way for brand and marketing managers to quickly and easily test new creative, such as CTA, theme, banner, and much more.
Like every other digital marketing channel, you can track the metrics and KPIs of your corporate emails.
10. Build brand loyalty and engagement with every email you send
When people hand over their email to you, they give you access to their email inbox so you can exchange messages and vital information.
Email is the top preference for users in the United States.
Email is undoubtedly the most personal medium and access you can ever have to build brand loyalty and engagement.
The email signature should be every marketer’s secret weapon to strengthen brand image and increase brand visibility. It is a highly effective and non-invasive way to engage prospects and customers but is usually under-utilized by most marketers and businesses.
Stop losing opportunities to market your brand
Are you a marketer or a brand that is yet to start harnessing the power of email signatures? It is high time you tapped the enormous benefits of corporate email signatures.
Take advantage of professional email signature solutions to get your branding and marketing message before a target audience who has permitted you to message them.
You have nothing to lose by including your email signature in every outbound email message. But your business has a lot more to gain by strategically positioning your brand for better conversions and engagements.
Urgent requests make it hard to prioritize the most strategic jobs. But when you standardize and centralize the entire process, you can make data-driven resource decisions and ensure the most strategic work gets done first.
In this webinar, join Adobe Workfront as they share six proven methods to handle the onslaught of marketing requests, prioritize the most important work, and increase your value to make 2022 your best year yet.
Marketing functions are at a turning point in their evolution. In the wake of recent challenges, CMOs and leaders face an imperative: reenvision operations and brand experiences to drive growth without more resources or taking more risk to move faster.
Consistency in providing an on-brand customer experience is critical to scale. Delivering consistent brand experiences (e.g., unchanging messaging, values, and language across channels and the customer lifecycle) drives engagement and growth. Consistent brand presentation can increase revenue by as much as 33%. Inconsistent and off-brand experiences do just the opposite: nearly three-fourths (73%) of consumers would go so far as to switch brands if they don’t receive a consistent experience.
With remote teams and customers engaging in more ways, CMOs can no longer ignore the impact of unwanted variability in the brand experience that their company delivers. But many CMOs feel out of control over all the many places that audiences engage with their brand, making it difficult to maintain a consistent experience.
Let’s look at the perennial challenge of living the brand—and the opportunity that awaits if CMOs rethink their approach to the brand experience.
Why meeting new demands requires a consistent brand experience
Consistency underpins the ability to meet new customer behaviors and demands. Most consumers (75%) now expect consistent experiences across multiple channels. But the focus on omnichannel and influx of new digital channels have opened up more opportunities for disconnected, off-brand content and communications. CMOs need to bridge these gaps to overcome conflicting interactions that slow down teams and erode the brand experience.
On top of customer demands, remote and hybrid work isn’t going away, and the shift to distributed teams makes it more challenging for brands to present a united front. According to IDC, “intelligent digital workspaces” that deliver a single integrated experience to employees—no matter the location—are becoming an expected way of working. With dispersed environments as the norm, CMOs need to find new ways to keep teams in sync so they aren’t weighed down trying to manage brand positioning across touchpoints.
Meeting these new realities starts with a new, scalable approach to the brand experience. By equipping teams to stay on-brand no matter the channel or context, CMOs can drive up customer and employee engagement while positioning the business for growth.
Driving consistent, scalable brand experiences with technology
Traditional approaches to improving the brand experience—like employee training, manual tools, and static guidelines—don’t sufficiently scale and contribute to digital overload among teams. CMOs and teams don’t need more systems to manage; they need ways to enhance existing content and communications that don’t require additional resources.
AI-powered solutions are now available that provide automated ways to keep teams on-brand. Yet surprisingly, Gartner reports only 17% of digital marketing leaders use AI and machine learning. For example, platform-agnostic tools like digital writing assistants and living style guides offer real-time guidance to teams around preferred language, brand names, terminology style, and even tone. By integrating into all the places employees and audiences already engage, these types of tools improve productivity while delivering higher-quality team and customer experiences.
At the same time, CMOs must avoid using automation in a way that impacts the human side of their brand. The focus should be on solutions that fit what IDC calls the “digital coworker”—technology that expands or enhances human capabilities, not detracts from them. The right solutions help teams augment their work across systems and strengthen their own abilities in the process, allowing CMOs to improve the brand experience in a more productive and human-centric way.
Case study: Building customer trust with a unified brand voice
Let’s look at a real-world example from HackerOne, the world’s most trusted hacker-powered security platform committed to mitigating cyber risk. HackerOne’s marketing team needed to present a unified brand voice across two very different but equally critical audiences: enterprise businesses and the hacker community. By deploying AI-powered writing assistance from Grammarly Business, the team can maintain a consistent brand identity and experience across every touchpoint—no matter the writer or channel.
With access to in-line writing suggestions, tone detection, and automated style guides, HackerOne’s entire team can easily follow brand language and guidelines, avoid confusing jargon, and balance the right voice and tone across audiences. The solution updates dynamically and integrates seamlessly into existing workflows, making it easy to push updates on branded terms and preferences to the entire company in minutes. As a result, HackerOne’s metrics show that communication as a whole improved by 66%—measured across quality pillars such as clarity, correctness, delivery, and engagement.
“HackerOne’s brand must speak to two very distinct audiences: the security teams that benefit from our products and services and the hackers that make up our hacker community,” said Tim Matthews, CMO at HackerOne. “Real-time writing assistance from Grammarly Business lets us deliver higher-quality marketing content for our customers while bringing our brand voice to life consistently across channels. This reduces our time spent reviewing written work and managing our brand identity, improving productivity in a scalable way so we can focus on higher-order growth initiatives.”
The bottom line
As we look ahead, CMOs have a tremendous opportunity to reimagine the brand experience in a way that boosts both productivity and engagement. With a foundation of consistency across the board, they can ensure exceptional customer experiences, free up time to focus on growth, and build resilience that leads to long-term results.
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For more about the importance of a consistent brand experience in driving marketing outcomes, visit www.grammarly.com/business.
This article was written by Dorian Stone, Head of Organizations Revenue, Grammarly.
