The most remarkable learnings from the Duval Union webinar on ‘Growth’
Our fast-changing world needs a rapidly changing you. Adaptation is key to thriving in today’s business world. Simply put, you can’t afford to stay behind on new trends and technologies. Customers need to be delighted on a regular basis in order to ensure growth. That’s why Duval Union hosted their webinar on “Growth”, where 13 speakers shined their light on 11 topics to incorporate in your growth strategy. Here is our recap of the webinar with some key takeaways to guarantee business success in 2021!
1. Your unfair advantage gives you a magnetic added value
Your company’s unfair advantage will leave others green with envy and turn your business into a customer magnet. Ever heard of magnetic marketing? It determines whether you’ll still be here in 5 years and if you’ll be able to protect your market share. The unfair index objectifies and rationalizes a qualitative analysis in four domains: channel strength, customer experience, digital performance and brand power. Don’t be another dime in a dozen. Most businesses simply don’t stand out from the crowd, because they aren’t distinctive. So why should potential costumers choose to spend their hard-earned money on you?
2. Influencer marketing is about content co-creation, not about imposed content
Welcome to the age of authenticity! Consumers, more than ever before, are holding brands to a higher standard. In short: Time for brands to get real. Influencers will incorporate your product in their real-life journey. The whole point of working with influencers is that they know what content works for their audience. Trust, listen and be flexible when it comes to their creative proposals. Influencer marketing is all about creating content together, not about imposing it. Like we said the influencer knows their audience best. So your partnership will be more successful if you give them creative freedom!
3. The opportunity of a community
Before you start pulling out all the stops for growth and a transactional approach, take a moment to define a clear why for your brand. If you want to take your business to the next level, you need a clear brand purpose. It can have a major impact on how people view your brand and be the driving force behind your success! Customers who identify with your business will organize around the lifestyle and ethos of the brand, resulting in a community. Important sidenote: You need to give your community a reason to stay involved, so engage with them regularly and in an authentic way. It’s also important to strengthen them by giving back and activating them. As a result of a clear purpose and community your brand will start to grow automatically, based on a solid why. As Anita Meyer already sung: why, tell me why!
4. The most important indicator of loyalty is time
Time is money. Literally. Recently Ikea let customers pay for goods with their time. Yes, you read that right! The more time people spend driving to Ikea, the more money they could spend. Time is our most valuable asset. In the previous century our economy focused on saving time by outsourcing tasks, giving us more time for the things we love. Fast forward a century and now our economy is all about experience. It’s no longer about saving time, but how you want to spend it. How many hours people want to spend on your brand is the most important indicator for loyalty. It takes a customer 15 seconds to know if your website and content is relevant for them. If a customer wants to spend time with your brand, there is value in that. Your chances of conversion will increase and so will order frequency. And you, how do you like to spend your time?
5. Branding can have a social impact
Advertising is a form of entertainment. If you interrupt people while watching a movie, make it as entertaining as possible. But how can a meaningful brand have a valuable impact on society? It’s all about an insightful and purposeful story. Time to take a stand! Brands can raise awareness and tackle social issues. By redefining their purpose, for example, brands can have a meaningful and positive impact. In response to the #metoo movement Gillette addressed social issues like bullying, toxic masculinity and sexual harassment in their commercial by alluding to their brand slogan “is this the best a man can get, is it” and by changing their tagline to “the best men can be” in the spirit of “the boys of today will be the men of tomorrow”. How is your brand doing its bit?
6. Convert your team from data analysts to data scientists
The shift from data management to data science. Focusing on insights instead of reports will lead to better targeted direct marketing. “Deaverage the data”: what is underneath all the numbers? What do they really mean. Start with your customer: Who is he or she? Are they triggered by your campaign? If you can apply these building blocks in the correct way, the rest will come naturally!
7. Your son-in-law is not the perfect endorser
Athlete endorsement is about activating or using the image of famous professional athletes for the marketing of a product, brand or good cause to activate certain target audiences. You want an athlete endorsement to support your brand equity and to generate sale…so finding the perfect fit is pretty important. If an athlete doesn’t match your brand, the message he or she delivers will have no impact. So no, your son-in-law may not be the best man for the job. It’s all about an organic fit, with an eye on source credibility. Tessa Wullaert, for example, a professional footballer and Red Flame, starred in an Infrabel campaign about workplace equality. She’s a perfect fit because she has been advocating gender equality in top sport for years.
8. Employee engagement directly impacts your customer experience
79% of employees at companies with above-average customer experience are highly engaged in their jobs, compared to 49% of employees at companies with average or below-average customer experience scores. Employee engagement and customer experience are strongly correlated, more often than not it’s the same reasons that make both customers and employees choose your brand. Although it may seem like a never-ending cycle, don’t go running around in circles just yet. Everything begins with high employee engagement. It results in more retention and more customer delight. And has an impact on your growth. Companies with engaged employees register a 19% increase in operating income, record a 51% higher productivity and have a 9% higher shareholder return. What are you waiting for? Go make your employees engaged!
9. Find your North Star Metric
The North Star Metric is the metric that’s all about your core business. For Spotify it’s the time spend listening, for Facebook the daily amount of active users, the number of purchases per month for Amazon, ... . What is yours? Find out by answering these questions one-by-one. When does your customer reach the end result? Is this moment measurable for you? What’s the ideal frequency? How is it linked to growth? Growth is not necessarily about more customers, but about retaining current ones. Increasing engagement and performance metrics, which give your audience reason to spend more time on your platform. This results in a heightened North Star Metric and consequent growth for your business.
10. From ROI-reflex to ROAS-reflex
The ROI-reflex entails that most of the time we start from channels and media. This often comes with a number of pitfalls, like a fixed marketing budget, a siloed approach to marketing and sales or margins that make it impossible to scale up your business. Instead of ROI, we should focus on ROAS which is needed to generate profit. The lower the ROAS-target, the more volume you can achieve and vice versa. Play around with the conversion rate to find that sweet spot. By focusing on ROAS, we can connect every euro spent in marketing to sales results. This makes it possible to scale up in a profitable way, work with a dynamic budget and balance acquisition cost. Bye Bye silos, hello ROAS!
11. Are you optimizing every digital interaction with your clients?
Nowadays, everyone’s mantra is to provide a seamless online user experience. Yet despite many efforts from entrepreneurs, there is still little digital interaction with customers. Custom portals and configurators are a scalable solution to interact with your customer which give a professional look, ensure streamlined processes, and aren’t subject to human errors. They establish a positive partnership and engage with consumers for your brand, providing them with the best possible experience. Tools and tricks your competitors don’t have.
In this fast-paced and rapidly changing society, it’s important to stay on top of trends and technology that can help you grow your brand by making sure consumers have the best possible experience. Download the presentations from the webinar here to ensure a rewarding growth strategy.
A big thank you to our business shapers for their first-class insights:
Carole Lamarque from Duval Union Innovative Marketing
Myra Nurski & Eline Vervloet from MMBSY
Maxime Carpentier from Zerocopy
Tino Dekkers from Nine O’Clock Somewhere
Marc Wellens from Duval Branding
Alain Glickman Porush from Glickman
Robbie Cop from Flying Colours
Inge Van Belle & Anneleen Vanlommel from Herculean Alliance
Renout Van Hove from GrowthAgent
Dennis Kenis from Grava
Max Acke from Seven Days
