Ideas

Today’s digital marketing landscape is both complex and ever-changing. Change is not driven by one particular piece of technology, but rather a complex and interconnected group of drivers. These include: smartphones, social networks, cloud computing and innovative new technology companies that expose consumers to new experiences.

Digital media is increasingly dominating consumers’ time: how they communicate, how they learn, how they discover and how they organize their lives. The central challenge for brands is making the right choices in an increasingly complex digital environment.

The questions CMO’s are asking include:

• What are the most effective ways for us to connect with and engage our consumers?
• What investments will help my brands gain competitive advantage, today and tomorrow?
• How can we best position our brands to earn consumers trust and attention?
• How do we ultimately translate this consumer engagement into sales?

To help address this complex challenge, Trapeze developed and refined a new approach to consumer engagement across all digital touchpoints.

Our approach was developed over three years ago. Since then, we have refined our approach and used the Digital Brand Ecosystem model as a central element in our strategic planning toolkit. It has been successfully applied to a wide range of industry verticals including: Automotive, CPG, Entertainment, Retail and Telecommunications. We fundamentally believe our model helps us make better marketing choices for our clients.

The Digital Brand Ecosystem model (Illustrative):

The most impactful benefit of having a Digital Brand Ecosystem model for your brand(s) is to provide both the agency and client with a simple visual tool for collaboration. The visual framework helps the marketing team fully understand each of the component parts of the ecosystem, and how these components interconnect as part of an interdependent and dynamic system. It also provides a consistent foundation to make key decisions on critical elements of a holistic digital marketing approach such as: customer engagement strategies, technology platforms, CRM program designs and digital analytics. Digital Brand Ecosystems are easily evolved and continuously refined to adapt to the increasing and decreasing importance of component parts and how consumers engage within the overall system.

Our Digital Brand Ecosystem model almost always positions the brand site at the hub of the overall system. We believe the brand site should act as the critical integration point for the overall ecosystem. In an era of Twitter, YouTube, iOS and Android apps and Facebook, not every brand has adopted this approach. We believe this is a mistake. Your brand site should be engineered as the richest, most comprehensive source of content for the brand-online. With consumer touchpoints like Facebook, your brand is simply a tenant, subject to the whims of your landlord. That’s not to say these “rental” touchpoints are not vitally important to the overall marketing strategy; they simply don’t offer the control over the user experience, the content, the technology, customer information or analytics that your brand site can. Ensuring your brand controls the hub provides the best adaptability and strategy flexibility for the future.

Your online digital brand hub also needs to be designed as the central “conversion funnel” for the brand. In other words – your brand site needs to provide the tools and flow that move consumers from being engaged to sales. Creating deep conversion funnel behaviours lead toward actual sales.

The Trapeze team will continue to expand on the Digital Brand Ecosystems model in the Ideas section of Trapeze.com.