What does your brand stand for?: Friday’s Daily Brief

MarTech’s daily brief features daily insights, news, tips, and essential bits of wisdom for today’s digital marketing leader. If you would like to read this before the rest of the internet does, sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox daily.

Good morning, Marketers, how will you seize the opportunity and speak directly to your audience?

It’s more important than ever, strategically, not to associate your brand with a single platform or publisher. Customers who find your message valuable wherever they see it will be less concerned about how you found them because they want to hear from you. (And because you’ve been transparent with them about your customer data practices.)

Plus, an omnichannel strategy is channel-agnostic, which means that it doesn’t have all its eggs in one basket. One benefit of this is obvious for any marketers that took a hit with this week’s Facebook outage. As my colleague George Nguyen at Search Engine Land pointed out yesterday, some agencies are seeing conversions drop 50% as a result.

Taking a proactive stance on what your brand stands for will also make it less vulnerable to unexpected changes in the digital landscape.

Chris Wood,

Editor

Ethical advertising: How Quaker Oats helped feed America

“Consumers have been increasingly switching from value-driven buying to values-driven buying. They’re buying based on the things they believe in and the issues they hold dear,” said Amy Williams, founder and CEO of Good-Loop. What’s more, advocacy, trust and loyalty are being better understood as long-term consumer metrics.

Amy Williams founded Good-Loop to distribute ethical advertising and drive brand donations to charities selected by the consumer. Supporting the Quaker Oats “Good Starts Here” campaign, Good-Loop helped feed food-insecure families at scale, while fueling a 44% uplift in the perception of Quaker Oats as a brand focused on community good.

“Advertisers send us their video. We create our ethical wrapper, which has a countdown along the top and an interactive charity selector on the side.” If the consumer reaches the end of the countdown without skipping, they are presented with a selection of charities and Good-Loop makes the donation to the charity chosen.

Quaker Oats found Good-Loop when they were looking for media partners to support their new “Good Starts Here” campaign. It was “just a regular TV ad,” said Williams, “but every time you watched the ad you could unlock a donation to Feeding America. Through this initiative we funded half a million meals for families suffering from food insecurity.”

Read more here.

Getting to “always-on marketing”

In order to manage a successful digital transformation, marketing leaders have to assemble the team and technologies that will deliver the end goal, according to Michael McCune, Senior Director at Gartner, who spoke at our recent MarTech conference about the key components to the always-on marketing machine.

Each part of this machine’s subfunctions have clearly-defined end states that marketers should be aiming for as they go through their transformation process. They include audience prioritization, automation orchestration, content rendering and channel distribution.

These subfunctions aren’t newly created by the technology that your organization acquires, however. They just reinforce and optimize what you’ve already been doing the hard way.

“These all have a current state in your organization,” McCune stated. “You may manually identify and download an audience list, and maybe through discussion with colleagues you might determine what the next best action or experience is for that audience. And you might still be creating all related content from scratch and then manually distributing it across your various channels.”

He added, “The process exists even if you don’t see a system yet.”

Read more here.

More need than ever for work management software  

Before the pandemic, many marketers had already been accustomed to working on initiatives that involved collaboration with people outside their own offices since many brands operate across regions or around the globe. Additionally, marketing projects — whether they’re campaigns or websites or whitepapers or videos — regularly involve working with outside resources, whether it’s an agency or a contract designer or photographer. The COVID pandemic brought all of that to a fever pitch, as projects needed to be completed by a workforce largely isolated in their home offices.

All of that has heightened the need for marketing work management software, which documents and optimizes the processes, workflows and projects undertaken by digital marketers, often integrating with other systems like digital asset management (DAM) or creative suites.

For various reasons, marketing is an ideal use case even for these tools. Speaking on an earnings call, Smartsheet Chief Product Officer Gene Farrell explained why the company has focused on attracting marketers by building a premium add-on and other features that accommodate “more advanced marketing workflows.“

“Marketing is one of those functions that really exists in almost every company in the industry and many times is a lighthouse or very visible part of how companies actually execute,” Farrell said. “It’s also an area where you’re typically collaborating across both internal and external stakeholders with agencies and other creative groups.”

Read more here.

Quote of the day

“‘Sunsetting’ is such a pleasant word for causing chaos in everyone’s tech stacks.” Melanie Tolomeo, Senior Manager of Business Systems for non-profit Little Kids Rock