Editorial Articles

Sarah Mansfield, Head of Global Communications and Media Planning at Barclaycard, explains 360 degree marketing 

Businesses need to think hard about how to plan their communications and how to interact and engage with customers. Three hundred and sixty degree marketing differs from multi-channel strategies because it’s media-neutral. It’s not about starting with one neat channel - TV for example - and then working a communications strategy out from that core channel. Instead it means thinking about your communications objective, and then working out the best mix of communication channels to achieve that. Think about what the task is, who your audience are, and then ask, what are the best channels to communicate with those customers?

At Barclaycard we’re very focussed on who our key audiences are and what messages we want to communicate out to them. That means asking what each communication is about. Is it about driving reach and engaging and inspiring customers around our brand? Or is it about educating our customers around our products? Or is it about motivating our customers to make a purchase? Dependant upon which of those very broad communications objectives we have, alongside more specific communication tasks, we choose our communications mix to complement bought and owned media. Your customers are always there, so it’s no longer about thinking about bursts of activity. It’s about always being there, talking to customers in different forms and through different channels, to drive them down that behavioural channel.

Games are one method of driving deeper engagement with customers. Our TV advertising goes for broad reach and awareness. We leveraged that content to drive deeper engagement through our waterslide game. Games like this drive warmth towards the brand. This is two-way interaction. People spend time engaging with our brand through that vehicle in a way that would be very expensive to buy through broadcast channels such as TV. Of course, you also need to make sure you’re getting the information you need from those campaigns and making the most of it. In the past you may have been dealing with two or three channels. Now most companies are using anything up to six or more. It can be difficult, then, to attribute back and work out the role of each channel in terms of driving consumer action. We moved to using tools such as econometric modelling which allows you to understand the multiplicity of synergistic affects that one channel has on others. That allows you to understand and optimise your level of investment into each channel, as well as the overall level of investment that you put into your marketing spend each year.

Issues for 2012? In this economic climate, companies really need to understand what return their marketing investment is delivering to the business. That will become far more of a focus. And on the back of that, so will understanding how communication channels are working together and then coming up with the most effective channel mix. That may not be innovation as such, but it’s not something a lot of businesses do very well. That will definitely be more of a focus over the next year or so.

The other key thing is to carry on driving greater engagement. The more engaged our customers are, the higher share of wallets you get back, so it’s focusing on innovative ways to integrate online and offline. Social will become even more of a media strategy as we try to interact and engage.

Sarah Mansfield was talking to Jon Fortgang