For incumbent brands, below are 5 very simple hacks they can easily execute & outdo their competition. 

A. Easily shareable digital assets

You want as many people as possible to discover your offerings as quickly as possible. Is it possible for you to showcase some aspect of one of your services to a huge audience overnight without having to wait for the next conference or advertising on the next billboard? It definitely is. It’s the digital age after all. 

A certain percentage of a brand’s equity are now measured by how fast it can churn out outstanding digital assets & make it go viral!

What are your digital assets?  – Photos, Videos, Design files, Word documents, PDFs, Company branding, Presentations, Marketing content and collateral.

B. Create Micro moments

Your customer has access now – both to information and to service at doorstep. It’s not the same world we lived in five or ten years back. And, it’s evolving at a rapid pace. The market is cluttered with new brands coming in almost every day & hour. How do you stand out? Brands are quickly realising that what sticks in the consumer’s mind are some “micro-moments”.
Micro-moments are those “I-want-to-” moments for the consumer where she intuitively turns to her favourite devices or store to act on a need to do something, maybe learn something , discover something new, watch something or buy something. These moments tend to shape the preferences of consumers since they are filled with a certain intent and go on to form the stickiest memories for the consumer, either good or bad or ugly!

As a brand,

• Identify these moments in consumer journeys. Be there & make a difference.
• Be easily discoverable, deliver relevant information and always have a CTA (Call to Action) button embedded in your content or digital assets, so as to make this moment count.
• Follow through in case there is an abandonment.
• Take feedback and maintain a NPS (Net Promotor Score)
• And finally learn to use this data to precisely micro-segment your audience & create small journeys (using journey orchestration tools) using AI/ML engines

C. Secure Frictionless Personalised Customer Experience

Personalisation happens by gaining valuable insights into the preferences of a brand’s consumers and intent & behaviour through data, so that the brand can offer them tailored experiences.
According to an Accenture survey, 2018

48% of consumers have left a company’s website and made a purchase elsewhere. The only reason: the experience was poorly curated.

91% of consumers are more likely to shop with brands who recognise, remember, and provide them with relevant offers and recommendations.

And as we move towards the end of 2021, two major changes have happened which is driving how brands approach personalisation.

D. Partner ecosystem

The world does not operate in siloes any more. Whoever thought that they had got an edge by allowing the customer to operate inside their environment only are quickly backtracking. Collaboration and strategic alliances are now huge competitive advantages that easily kill the lone ranger.

It is imperative that your brand managers recognise this fact quickly and create a robust partner ecosystem. These partner ecosystems could be made of players offering complementary products or services, or ancillary ones like financing options, delivery options and more.

For example, Walmart could tie-up with multiple banks, and consumers when they use the credit cards of those banks would get a certain discount or incentive and the cost of this could be sub-vented by either party.

Partner can also use each other’s ecosystem to monetise some percentage of their digital assets. The publisher can get better profitability for advertising space & the advertiser better rates if they can create partner ecosystems, and they can then further utilise public DSP & SSPs to fulfil unmet needs.

The good news is that all this is possible now with a strong API framework and API security in place. So quit being shy. Reach out & quickly build this ecosystem and reap the rewards for years. Use a strong technology platform to manage this relationship.

E. Plug abandonment

The average eCommerce store loses over 75% of its sales to cart abandonment & in some industries it is as high as 83%. Abandonment can happen at various stages – right during initial discovery to signup to checkout and post purchase.

But with lots of data and meta-data available now, brands have the wherewithals to nudge customers towards a favourable outcome.

Brand need to use re-marketing and re-targeting of customers effectively and in a non-intrusive manner.

For example, brand realised that the customer has de-selected an item from the cart or has abandoned a cart.

It has to send reminders or information or price drop notification after a certain interval to the customer and incentivise her to close the purchase.