With long-standing client Wilmington plc, Danny and Sylvain recently offered insights into the five key elements all businesses must include in their digital marketing strategies for 2016. Here are the main takeaways.

To thrive, your business must follow a creative, integrated digital marketing strategy: engaging customers with a meaningful, seamless experience that can deliver quantifiable results. Our Chief Executive Officer, Danny Bluestone and Chief Operations Officer, Sylvain Reiter were recently invited to Wilmington plc’s Senior Management Conference, to share insights on the best practice for the industry. They aimed to uncover the key tactics that are vital to drive innovative marketing strategies in 2016, across industries. 

Cyber-Duck has enjoyed working closely with Wilmington plc on a variety of projects. Most recently, we launched the Wilmington Digital Hub together. Drawing on extensive persona research and content matrixes, the portal combines Wilmington’s wealth of risk, compliance, finance, legal and insight knowledge brands into one entity. It helps to increase awareness and ‘connections’ on the hub itself and each distinct brand website, via a widget. 

Five Key Marketing Ingredients

For the talk, Danny and Sylvain offered tactics to deliver a unified customer experience: from adopting a user-centred design (UCD) approach and drawing on gamification; to expanding communities using digital tools, and building value beyond your business’ current proposition. They dove into the five digital marketing ingredients necessary for businesses to include in their digital strategies, and stand out in 2016

  • Website Performance

Achieve that elusive, delightful user experience through placing insights into customer motivation and behaviour at the heart of your content strategy and design process. Set KPIs to review and improve progress, linked to business vision and objectives.

  • Search Engine Marketing

SEO strategies should bring great content to the surface. Audit the effectiveness of your current content footprint, and research your audience’s needs. Use this to create (and follow!) a strategy that can appeal; continue to expand your SEO tactics with ongoing research into competitor and industry content, trends and links, alongside social conversations.

  • The Power of Social

By using effective tactics and communication models, it’s possible to turn and assemble a crowd into a tribe. Building communities through social connect tools, influencers, ambassadors and powerful messages and reward systems can empower businesses: boosting your outreach, growing a thriving digital community and ultimately humanising your brand.

  • The App Economy

This serves as an additional touch point and engagement platform, connecting businesses with their target audience. Instead of replicating your website, build a platform with unique content and purpose that your users will want to share. Danny shares more about this topic on Econsultancy.

  • Analysis and Personalisation

By learning how to segment and review your data, brands can create personalised experiences for their audience and measure the success of their actions. Smart brands leverage the power of their CRM and tailor the products and service offering with customised messaging and content.

To find out more about how you can effectively harness the power of digital for your business, check out the slides from the presentation below. Alternatively, connect with us to see how you can kick start your marketing strategy for 2016.