Recently, @comm, an expert in integrated marketing, was invited by SOCIAL ONE to talk about "integration" with public.
We believe that business thinking is essential for integration, and most importantly for integrating the business with the kind of communication that marketers are now more focused on.
In addition to the understanding and practical experience of integrated marketing trend, KPI setting, the senior vice President of @comm - ji Yin and SOCIAL ONE discussed what is the real IP and why IP is the "engine" of integrated content marketing.
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SOCIAL ONE
Fat whale think tank is the first independent membership marketing business innovation research think tank in China.SOCIAL ONE analyzes and interprets the context and trend of the marketing industry from the perspective of the third party. Through original case analysis, interviews with industry experts and research on marketing innovation methodology, it provides forward-looking innovation perspective and commercial creativity inspiration to China's front-line brand owners and marketing agents.“An Nei Ren”, derived from the Japanese "あ ん な い" guiding passers-by and guide, is SOCIAL ONE 2016 think-tank original industry experts created deep visit content column. By targeting the industry's front-line marketing experts, dig and share the valuable thinking and insight behind the successful experience.
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Why to say to move toward conformity is general trend?
Consolidation is not so much a trend as a return to its roots.
In fact, the real meaning of integration is the integration of the whole brand from inside out, from brand positioning, product development, marketing, sales strategy, sales channels, supply chain and so on, rather than just the integration of creative content and communication channels. After all all brands, the ultimate goal is to sell goods, survival.
For today's brands, the fragmentation of communication channels leads to more and more complex external environment, consumers' time is limited, brand communication competition is not only from competitive products, how to attract attention is the challenge of every brand marketer. The development of the Internet has made buying and paying simple enough to do things that were previously impossible. This makes integration necessary and more feasible.
This new integration is also a challenge for all brands, but we are already seeing more and more brands making organizational changes, such as setting up an Internet integrated Marketing Department to put e-commerce and brand building together. When introducing new products, some international enterprises take it as a small start-up company to operate, and the person in charge of the brand often has to manage sales, brand, creativity, e-commerce, products and other things, all of which are good practices and experience.
Small start-up companies are very interesting. Many international companies we have contacted recently introduce new brands in accordance with this model. A good marketer must be a businessman.
Exactly. as an independent integrated marketing agency, @comm can better understand the pain points of the brand in business. As a partner of the company, I hope we can become a real business partner of the customer. We require the team to truly understand the customer's business.
To move towards the integration of new forms, we must understand business, we need to learn more in-depth information from the brand, such as the real sales data, the sales situation of various channels, the specific performance of each SKU and so on. These are not only e-commerce and retail partners need to see, integrated marketing service providers need to understand.
What changes do you think have occurred in redefining IMC?
As mentioned earlier, when we say redefinition, we mean relative to what most people in the market are doing. At present, it is more likely to develop different propaganda contents and forms based on the core ideas, such as TVC, H5, posters or micro films, and then put them into different versions and put them into different channels.
We believe that the core idea must be more malleable, so that in any combination of online and offline platforms, there will be different "variants".The challenge is not only to have the ability to create core creative concepts, but also to consider and understand different platforms, different resources, and think about the possibility of exporting customized cooperation solutions while planning.
Yili“you need a glass of milk" campaign is a good example.
The idea behind the idea is to boost demand for milk. The direction we hope to achieve with the customer is that you tell everyone, his answer is different, unlike the general information I used to tell you, such as drinking milk is healthy and makes you energetic.
We selected 8 hot IP, video, print advertising as the carrier, launched a series of brand stories in line with different stars and IP characteristics, showing the divergent concept of "different people drink milk for different reasons". It seems to be very scattered, because each IP and star crowd are not the same, but it broke the old way of a video to launch multiple channels, the content form is different but the core of the expression is the same.
Another area of redefinition is channels.
Most brands still don't really integrate products, communication and sales, even online and offline. We can understand the difficulties, but some brands do, such as uniqlo through UTee such a product, produced a variety of cross-border joint products, not only hot sales also generated a lot of topics, adhere to many years, to create a own IP, so as to directly achieve the integration of products, communication and sales.
These models, although many brands will meet challenges in the system, but we still suggest from the beginning to use the concept of integration to think about strategy, online and offline together. Because both retail and e-commerce are helping you to promote your brand, and it is completely feasible for both online and offline to guide each other. In this way, everyone's KPI is unified, because the real integrated KPI is a series of data that can affect sales.
"From Content to Commerce" can be considered as the core of integration. What is the key to successful transformation?
Marketing with fresh meat does work in the short term for some impulsively consumed products. However, from the perspective of brand long-term construction, we need to emphasize the integration of quality and effect, so that the brand can be concerned by consumers for a long time, and even become consumers' life partner, we must do the brand like cultivating stars and cultivating IP.
In this process, the positioning and value of the product itself is very important. It's important to focus on product positioning, develop very clear insights and ideas to impress consumers, and take the time to build that impression.
When we talked to different brands from content to commerce, it felt as if people were being taken away. Many practices today are more like from content to e-commerce. Uniqlo is a company like this, I believe Tmall flagship store is important for it, but uniqlo has so many stores in China, Tmall may be its biggest flagship store in China, but it is just a flagship store.
I couldn't agree more. In essence, it may be the estrangement between internal departments of the brand. Many e-commerce limited edition, hot style, you put offline performance will be very good. So still want internal conformity good, ability makes really big.
There are many kinds of content, why the special emphasis on IP content in content integration marketing "engine" role?
IP marketing is hot right now, but a lot of people don't really understand what IP is, what features are called IP. I don't think the new TV series or variety shows that suddenly become popular are IP, those are more like short-term hot marketing.
I think IP has some historical accumulation, has very clear character characteristics, can form additional value and has malleability, which can be called IP.
For example, if you print the logo of some variety show on the T-shirt, it will not bring sales, but if you print a pirate king or marvel characters, it will be attractive, because these long-term IP have fixed fans, so it has the commercialization extension.
The reason why IP can play an important role in content integrated marketing lies in that not every brand can become a Life Partner of consumers and cannot build a sense of presence on its own for a long time. It needs to become as important a part of consumers' lives or emotions as possible in a joint or cross-border way. And many ips often have emotional added value, easy to reach emotional resonance with consumers, fans and have the ability to carry goods, but also have the malleability, these characteristics can help the brand to solve brand awareness, brand preference, sales transformation and grass sharing and other brand marketing goals, which is obviously helpful to the brand.
What is the difference between integrated brand partners and specialized IP consulting companies?
Integrated brand partners are more likely to choose resource categories based on the strategic level, starting from the brand itself and considering what content and what IP is matched with the brand based on the understanding of the brand and the needs of customers. Usually, after this direction is determined, we decide what the specific cooperative IP is.
Take sports as an example, we should first determine with the brand whether to choose sports, then determine the specific sports, and then determine the platform, such as CBA or NBA? Player or team? Top level or junior level? The people here, the values and benefits are different, and this is a process that integrated brand partners must consider when making IP choices.
What are the challenges of helping brands to integrate their marketing? How to solve it?
First, the challenge comes from within the agency. Integration is not just about creating or planning for a department. In the process of cooperation with brands, customized solutions should be generated according to the understanding of brand business, which requires a lot of agents. We advocate the integration of the team. Our customer service department, Account department, is actually more like a department that helps customers do business. It is up to them to integrate planning, creative department, e-commerce department and other departments to achieve the effect of integrated marketing.
Second, the challenge from within the client is whether different departments can fully support the whole campaign. Sometimes there are differences in the perspectives of the senior management and the executive level. We prefer to communicate transparently with the whole team from top to bottom to promote the implementation of the whole campaign.
Third, from the challenge of the big environment, many platforms, media and resource providers prefer standardized operation and are not willing to spend time and energy to do customized content together with agents, so we will do more homework by ourselves and persuade them by creating industry precedents and creative marketing.
Fourth, KPI assessment challenges, how to show the effect of integrated marketing to customers? We will judge from three dimensions, all the data that have an impact on sales, such as the introduction of effective traffic, search volume and word of mouth volume, etc.
Fifth, from the differences of international customers' understanding of the Chinese market environment, we will first communicate our understanding of the brand business with the customer, and then gradually convince the customer through some small campaign cooperation.
How to set reasonable KPI is a puzzle for many party a marketers around us. How do you think about this problem?
There are big differences in the way categories are measured. Generally speaking, we will pay more attention to some data that can reflect the sales volume or attention, such as how many people search the brand on the e-commerce platform, how many positive comments on the brand, whether there is anyone discussing xiaohongshu or other relevant platforms, etc.
We can't decide the sales volume, but we can judge how much effective traffic the campaign has brought to the brand through such data.
In fact, the agent needs to follow the brand's co-working KPI today, and customize the measurement standard according to your brand and my understanding of your business.
You are absolutely right, KPI can't be counted by head. It is necessary to comprehensively consider the brand status quo, the performance of core SKU products, which products have high sales volume and why they are high, especially the techniques of operation behind the explosive e-commerce products.
As far as social content e-commerce is concerned, most of the off-site content is still of limited help to the in-site, most of which are 1‰ or even 0.1‰. However, we should not only look at the flow and transformation, but analyze it based on the effective flow. How to do more accurate marketing, after all, the flow inside the station has been saturated, and how to improve the efficiency of the flow outside the station is everyone's topic. I can't say we've reached that point in every project, but that's where we want to go.
In some brands, the integration is completed internally, and only subdivision agents are hired to carry out the project. What are the advantages of agents over in house teams in terms of integration?
First, richer industry experience;
Second, more cross-industry experience;
Third, more abundant channel resources.
It has long been said that agents are facing the dual challenges of big platforms and brands, but from another perspective, this is an advantage. Because agents do more projects than customers, more practical experience, more insight;
For the platform, agents are more neutral and objective. So the biggest challenge for agents is to have business insight. I believe that we need to find the answer from the actual operation. For example, we can use the e-commerce platform to see the real sales situation of products more intuitively and efficiently, and then provide different marketing strategies and ideas according to different situations, just as e-commerce does AB test.
