Level up your digital marketing

How exactly should you innovate, be super-creative AND maintain quality and consistency, to meet surging consumer expectations?

Orchestrating multi-channel digital campaigns is an intense business. To keep up with consumer expectations for personalisation, you’ll no doubt be working with a range of customer personas across many customer journeys, aiming to deliver the most engaging experiences across all the channels you command.

In practice, that means a very large – and ever-growing – volume of content hitting down every day, landing in inboxes, on social platforms and on websites, through chat and media services. Your campaign deliverables are being viewed, shared and discussed. Consumers are seeing your propositions across multiple channels and pursuing their journeys from one campaign to another.

Creativity and constraint are uneasy bedfellows

With all this activity going on, you need to keep consumers’ attention and interest, but you also need to portray one brand across multiple channels. There’s a fine balance to achieve between creative expression and brand consistency. The same content works differently in different media: optimisation is key to make sure your customers and prospects have a friction-free experience, with no glitches or rough edges that could undermine your brand values.

Our creative optimisation team knows all about staying agile and alert to all the pitfalls and challenges of high-volume, multi-channel, multi-brand campaign design and execution. Achieving flawless delivery for our clients demands a systematic approach, as well as a finger on the pulse of the latest creative trends and smart design. Here’s an example of the details they consider for every variant of every email campaign before it goes out:

• Is it mobile-first?
• Are the fonts optimised?
• Are images formatted in the right resolution?
• Are the images sized to display immediately, without a lag?
• Will the headers avoid spam labelling?
• Is the pre-text correctly formatted?
• Is the call to action in the first screen?
• Does the branding comply with corporate guidelines?
• Is the recipient greeting correctly personalised?
• Are all the legally mandated elements present?

You have to automate for control when there’s so much going on

There’s nothing magical about these criteria – they’re well-known best practice for campaign execution. The challenge here is applying them consistently, across every single item that goes out. Our template management platform, Email Studio, is a crucial tool to make this happen: you need the power of automation for quality control when you’re dealing with such high volumes. Email Studio spots and flags any inconsistencies, missing elements or poorly rendered content so they can be corrected before anything goes out.

Blink and you’ll miss it – the rules and formats keep on changing

When they’re designing individual campaign items from scratch, your formidable creative team will always come up with the goods. Issues tend to creep in when you seek to drive the most value from the content by using it across multiple channels and formats.

It’s just not as simple as sharing a TV ad on YouTube and posting the link on Instagram. Video and sound formats need to be checked and re-optimised for different platforms. Character counts and post formats vary. Distorted images and inappropriately cropped thumbnails are quickly called out by digital audiences used to high standards.

And of course, new channels are constantly emerging to form part of your customers’ journeys. You need to disseminate your content into them quickly – with a whole host of new parameters and conventions to apply. You need to know what will work best in each medium, how audiences are engaging with the latest content and what cumulative effect you’re creating from your multi-channel presentation.

Can you supply matching luggage for every single journey?

We often talk about matching luggage – you need strong, consistent branding and intelligent optimisation of your creative content across every item, however differently it might be sized, shaped or used. The goal is that whatever combination of luggage your consumers pick up for their journey, they’ll have a great experience with their own coherent set.

Keeping on top of all this change and variety is intense. You need to be plugged in to rapidly evolving trends and tech. You need to be able to update your campaign templates and executions fast. You need to keep ahead of competitors who are striving just as hard to deliver compelling customer journeys to the same target audience.

You can do it… but you’ll need to be thorough, eagle-eyed and ever vigilant. That’s why many clients choose to use specialist customer engagement campaign automation tools, resources and consultants to support, build, maintain and continuously improve their creative campaign execution operation.

At CACI, we’re dedicated digital marketing campaign experts, working every day with leading marketing organisations. It’s our business to know the latest best practices, consumer trends and emerging technologies… and to share them with you. Get in touch if we can help.