‘Giving people a reason to spend time with your brand’ on the agenda for Digital Convergence speaker Howard Scott of National Trust

“With the trust being a charity and being very heavily focussed on visits and days out, getting people to spend time with our brand is a core part of what we do,” explained Scott. “For the National Trust, spending time with the brand is a very literal relationship, so my focus is on what are we doing from a digital marketing point of view to increase engagement from our supporters, as we call them, and to really help add value to the different stages of their journey.

“A lot of the stuff we are doing is around big data: analysing that data to develop a more relevant conversation with the audience – in fact relevance is the key driver to everything that we are doing.”

The National Trust, which looks after more than 350 historic buildings and 713 miles of coastline, had 19.2 million paid-for visits in 2012 and 2013. As the brand is spread over such vast physical locations, Scott, who has been at the helm for just over a year, has refocused much of the digital offering to ensure audiences develop a deeper connection with the stories around the Trust.

“The importance of mobile came to light almost immediately and we are putting a lot of things in place to make sure our offerings across mobile channels are as robust as the ones through desktop and other channels,” he continued. “Particularly in an organisation where location is important to us, the advantages that mobile devices give to us is core.”

The Trust now offers rich, narrative based stories about its properties and the entire marketing philosophy is focussed around content marketing, particularly through digital channels, according to Scott

“We’ve got the real people on the ground in our properties, be they gardeners or chefs, producing content as well as central teams and agencies. We want everyone to have a conversation with a person at the trust who is most relevant to them,” he said.

In terms of its digital strategy, the Trust places all of its focus on relevance and from a mobile point of view is completely rebuilding its websites and reviewing its current app structure so that visitors can engage in pre-visit, during visit and post visit activities.

Mobile engagement on both smart phones and other devices has seen a particular uptake over the past 12 months, particularly over the Christmas period. “Mobile has been a big turning point for us. We had over 40 per cent mobile traffic in August last year and since then it has been increasing exponentially.

“Whilst it’s dropped back down to an average of 47 per cent now, we topped 58 per cent traffic from mobile devices between Christmas day and 2 January and I think that was quite a big wake-up call for us,” he added.

This year's Digital Convergence conference will take place at America Square Conference Centre in London on 12 March. The event will look at the latest news and analysis in digital convergence and features a number of experts providing advice to industry, including Ben Carter of notonthehighstreet.com, Paul de la Nougerede of AOL UK and Steve Forde of Channel 4.

Scott will be discussing how to build a story around the brand, add value to customer’s experiences and also how collecting and using online and offline data is helping to drive convergence.

The conference invites client-side organisations to take part and participants should be directors, heads or managers in the industry. To book your place or find out more about the conference, visit the digital convergence conference website.