Ticketsolve at AMA Rewire: Why Consistency Across Your Marketing Matters

Consistency across your digital marketing might be something you take for granted. But busy days and weeks can mean message consistency can get away from you.

In Louise and Alison’s talk, they looked at the role that digital content plays in marketing, and then took us through The Royal Academy of Arts experience with organic and paid social media and how each can help support and drive various marketing and audience development goals.

Starting with content is perfect, because understanding the role each content piece plays in the customer journey can help you to design and create great content, but also ensure its consistency.

Content: What is it Good for? (Well lots of things actually).

There are four areas where your content maps to your customer journey:

1. Grow - developing and growing your audiences and patron relationships

2. Deepen - where audiences begin to really engage with your organisation

3. Convert - where audiences become customers, friends, members

4. Retain - developing and maintaining loyalty and inspiring audiences

As Louise and Alison explained, for The Royal Academy (RA) that means their editorial content is mission-led (focused on creativity, providing a platform for artists voices and promoting debate) and helps to grow audiences and deepen customer relationships. Alongside editorial content are exhibition audience-targeted campaigns which are there to help drive conversions.

This is a great way to keep RA at the forefront of audiences minds. And since RA is data-driven - they know exactly which audiences to target with what messages. Importantly the RA is focused on content - not sales. This is a crucial distinction. As we have said before, digital marketing is all about helping you to create conversations and engagement with your audiences. It is less about sales, and more about drawing your patrons into your story.

Organic versus Paid

As the RA learned, organic and paid are different beasts. Organic social media can often feel like an uphill battle and more and more it is harder to get the reach with organic. However, there are a few ways to get the most from your organic social media.

1. Be authentic - be your real-self, it is what customers expect from the organisations they care about.

2. Use your own voice - a clear follow on from being authentic and honest is to use your own voice in your content.

3. Don’t sell, give value - whether editorial or an ad campaign, your message needs to bring value and engagement to your customers. Going hard on the sell will lose customers.

4. Tell a story - digital marketing is an ideal avenue for telling your story. If you want to try out your storytelling chops, focus on a fundraising campaign to get started.

5. Be topical - but keep it relevant to your audiences. This is a no-brainer when it comes to organic - topics that are trending will get you the reach, but find a way to keep it fresh for your specific audiences.

6. Reflect and fail fast. This is where data is your friend. With data you can analyse how you are doing. Data will allow you to pivot quickly to something else that works better and give you the freedom to get creative with something that will engage.

The other area that Louise and Alison looked at was the RA’s investment into paid social media which they used to drive traffic and conversions (generate revenue). This two-fold approach has the advantage of building awareness, while at the same time building loyalty and engagement - and driving sales.

Again this was an area where data-driven thinking helped RA to maximise sales. Using data for a specific campaign they were able to identify audiences they wanted to go after and tested a variety of messaging on different audiences. They learned a lot through this exercise, but perhaps most importantly that having consistency across their content, channel, paid and organic meant they got a halo effect. They sold a lot of tickets, but they also got a significant uptake in their memberships.

Top Take-Aways

• Use data to make informed decisions - use data to help segment and identify your audiences. Use personas to help you define your audiences more finely, and to help determine the best channels and messages to reach them. Analyse campaign data to test ideas, and shift investment to where it works best.
  
  
• Create plans and strategies with your organisational goals in mind.
  
  
• Be where your audiences are; if they are on Twitter and FB - be there too.
  
  
• Content is still king. Content - valuable content works - hard sales don't. Remember to trial different media as well, video, pictures even podcasting might be what works best for your audiences.
  
  
• Take a risk and be ready to fail. Not everything will work 100% of the time, be prepared for failure. Being data-driven will allow you to test ideas and fail fast - without a big cost.
  
  
• Make sure all your channels are working together (CRM, organic, paid, website etc).
  
  
• Have consistency across your messaging.