Hallam's new eGuide is helping businesses join ‘The Digital-Ready Culture’

Of course, Covid-19 has played a significant role in that. It has put pressure on the shoulders of companies and marketing managers across several sectors. It’s demanded a pivot and change. It’s demanded they digitise their services quickly and scale them up like never before in order to meet a booming consumer demand radiating from the online world.

What was happening in-store is now online. What were face-to-face conversations is now being done via social media and chatbots. What was a cash transaction is now an online conversion. What was a window promotion is now a creative online marketing campaign attempting to stand out from the rest.

And while a degree of normality appears to be returning, this enhanced digital world we’re living and operating within is not going to go away and it’s those businesses that embrace it that will thrive.

That, itself, has demanded more from companies than ever before, particularly those that had not implemented digital into their business strategies prior to the pandemic.

However, this is where Hallam has stepped in. Through deep research and a range of in-house interviews with their experts, the multi-award-winning strategic agency has pulled together a new eGuide that has been built to address the five biggest challenges businesses are facing in order to join what they are labelling ‘The Digital-Ready Culture’.

Those five issues are:

1. The evolution of the high street

2. Retaining customer loyalty

3. Standing out in an online saturated market

4. Understanding the confusing world of data analytics and security

5. Knowing automation is key, but not knowing where to start

Below we have covered a snippet of Hallam’s latest eGuide, with the agency’s head of content marketing, Siobhan Congreve, discussing the biggest issue brands are facing when it comes to attaining long-term consumer loyalty:

“There’s a lot changing right now. Brands are being required to think about what their customers actually care about and what conversations they want to be part of in order to build up that communication and relationship with the customer.

“Take trends, like sustainability, as an example. It’s easy for brands to say they need to talk about it, because of how high on the public and cultural agenda it is. But actually, they get it wrong because they try and talk about too much, rather than focussing on the areas where they can offer value.

“You wouldn’t play darts in a dark room and hope you hit the bullseye, and it’s exactly the same with social media strategies. Brands need to avoid getting involved with conversations and topics just to see what sticks or even to simply tick a box.

“We still see it a lot where brands say they care about a certain topic, like sustainability, but they’re not actively doing anything about it.

“Because of how technology has evolved, consumers are far more intelligent and they can see through brands that say one thing, but don’t reflect it in their actions. They can smell marketing tactics a mile off and are not afraid to use social media to highlight brands that are talking the talk, but not walking the walk.”

Hallam’s full eGuide can be downloaded here.