In an age where company competition, options for products and customer engagement is at its fiercest, how do industry leaders and brands stand out amidst the fray? How can they engage with the human beings behind their screens, and offer up content to drive outcomes and brand awareness?

Last week we held a “10 Minute Talks” event with a bevy of industry leaders within healthcare, consumer logistics, and Melbourne's top digital marketing agencies to help break down how we as brands should be attacking content marketing and strategies.

They covered what’s worked well for their organisations and what they’re still looking to achieve. What’s the key when creating content? Is it customer data, media partnerships, expert knowledge or giving audiences a reason to emote? Each of our speakers presented very different yet equally integral case studies to deliver this vital messaging.

Lauren Brady and Cam Bisley from Pearson Australia honed in on the importance of creating purpose-driven content in order to drive measurable results by creating tangible building blocks from the outset.

Pearson has a clinical division and their goal was to drive engagement and attendance to their Living and Ageing Well Conference by doing an assessment intervention — finding out exactly what content medical professionals look for, and where they go to find it within the aged care market.

Cam and Lauren’s team went on a quest for expert information on their customers, partnering with Decision Design to do valuable market research on who their customers are and what channels they use to devour their content. They helped to optimise the eDMS and banners which resulted in a doubling of click through rates and the average time customers stayed on the page.

In short, if we slow down, think about who are customers are, what they want and let our content exist without pushing it, we build brand trust and ultimately drive results we’re after.

Rene Rached, Head of Lifecycle Marketing at Medibank knows a thing or two about building brand trust… with his 3 million person customer base.

A central focus for Medibank has been to evolve the company, not simply to be a health insurance provider, but into a true wellness hub that helps Australians live healthier lives. Rene and his team are using content, community activities and the “Live Better” Rewards program to help build Medibank’s overall health and health care credentials by providing incentives and rewards for loyal customers.

After expanding their content and social, Medibank bolstered up their media partnerships, aligning themselves with proven leaders in the field to deliver health news, events, broadcasts, subscriptions and content. These wellness initiatives helped drive customer engagement, which lead to more interactions with the brand; ultimately these efforts increased Medibank’s customer retention, acquisition and incentivised Australians to live happier, healthier lives. 

Antonella Hellier, Acting Head of Digital Marketing and Content at Australia Post takes a very humanist approach when addressing her marketing strategies.

“Our attention spans are shrinking,” she says, highlighting the fact that audiences typically leave a page within 5 seconds. How can we create content that grabs and keeps our attention for 6 seconds?

Antonella and her team partnered up with Commoner, a video content agency to produce 5 short films with one main objective: build an emotive connection with a niche audience. The “Unboxing” campaigns focused on 5 special Australians who use online shopping for hard to find products; ultimately increasing brand favourability and creating deeper brand engagement. Timing was crucial to the release of these wonderfully curated shorts, dropping them around major events for ultimate exposure.

Antonella’s 5 top takeaways were: 

1) Team work makes the dream work - encourage unique collaborations

2) Invest in always-on

3) Let your agency challenge you

4) Experiment relentlessly

5) Find the humanity amongst the trends

Australia Posts's “snackable” content series can be found here: https://lnkd.in/f-t9NJY

Happier, healthier people means happier and healthier brands, and in order to give customers content that make them happier, Isobar’s Sharon Behen (Executive Director of Strategy) and Stephen Graham (Associate Strategy Director) shed light on what they believe is the key driver in understanding the needs of their customers - the DATA.

Knowing how aggregate it, analyse it and act is paramount to properly segmenting and personifying your customers. It starts with getting a strong hold on the data and creating an insights ecosystem for your players to pull from.

When you’re trying to create the best content, data becomes the most powerful tool we have available, and if we don’t utilise it to our benefit, we’re flying blind more than half the time.

But how will we know when digital investing in data or otherwise is helping to sell products and lift brand awareness? How can we move from feeling to knowing? When you have a single source of truth, such as a data warehouse using it for omni-channel marketing will maximise output of content creation and result in higher customer interaction and brand reach.