Francesco Federico: Content has to morph to the most relevant form for a the customer on a specific medium

In der Vorbereitung zu unserem D2M SUMMIT veröffentlichen wir über die nächsten Wochen wieder einige Interviews mit unseren Referenten und Partnern der Veranstaltung. Den Start machen wir dabei mit Franscesco Federico, Global Digital Marketing Director bei Acer.

In seinem Vortrag berichtet er über seine Erfahrungen bei der Kombination von daten-getriebenen Marketingansätzen mit integrierter Kundenkommunikation über alle "Touchpoints" und einer punktuellen Verstärkung über Social Media.

Im Interview haben wir ihn ein wenig zu den Hintergründen und Herausforderungen befragt.

1. Francesco - you will be talking at D2M SUMMIT about the Digital Marketing Transformation at ACER. What are your three hashtags that characterize the contents of your talk?

#data as marketing has changed forever, data now fuels all business decisions and informs real time interactions with customers, regardless of the touchpoints.

#IT as marketers will find powerful allies in their IT counterparts, which will be the enablers of their vision while also helping them “cutting through the noise” of an increasingly complex ecosystem of partners and platforms.

#culture as even the best laid out plans can lead nowhere if they are not understood and embraced by the whole company. Transformation is about pivoting the whole company, not just marketing.

2. What do you see as key challenge for the digital communications activities at Acer today?

Achieve scaled relevance.

I think it is now well documented how to create great marketing content as well as it is clear how to distribute content across channels and touchpoints. What remains still to be mastered is the combination of the two, in real time. How can we dynamically distribute in real time content that fully resonates with our audience?

The challenge is scaling the relevancy of our messaging, to a 1:1 relationship with each individual customer. For this I think technology plays a central role, put pricing models and even product development has to align as well in order to always have the right product, at the right price for each individual.

3. Customers are demanding for relevant and exciting stories as reward for their attention - how do you address these demands in your content and engagement strategy?

We always try to resist the temptation of putting the brand and our products at the centre of our content strategy. Of course we want this content consumption to end up generating more brand awareness and, ultimately, demand, but we know that customers want to be entertained, not pitched.

This is especially true on social networks, where content marketing has to entertain and engage. In other words, I believe content has to morph depending on the medium on which it is delivered, taking the form that is most relevant to the customer. How not to loose brand relevancy along the way?

Always remember what the brand stands for, what are the underlying values we want to communicate and consistently spread them across all deliverables.

4 How do you related content marketing, influencer relationship management and realtime marketing in your approach?

I see content marketing and influencers as creators of great stories and communication contents for the brand, while real time for us is an approach, a way of distributing such content that emphasizes its relevancy and amplifies its overall reach.

We also try to link influencers’ contents to our own, branded assets in a way that allows us to reinforce the key messages (e.g. key selling points of a given product) using different languages and depth of expression.

Real time marketing kicks in when all the content is set and we need to put it to work, for instance by joining trending topics on Twitter re-purposing parts of the content created for a blog post or customizing part of the online web experience with custom- tailored contents matching that visitor’s interests.

5. What is your vision of the digitally transformed future of marketing and customer communications?

Data has changed the way we do business for good, as such also marketing has changed forever. I always like to say that we shifted from a marketing based on personas to a marketing based on persons; meaning that rule-based approaches such as audience segmentations do not work any more, as they are a rough cut that leaves out too many details. What we need today is a dynamic, data-informed, marketing strategy that, together with advanced data modeling and predictive analysis tools, is able to respond in real time to prospects’ and customers’ needs providing the exact message they expect from the brand.

Online advertising is a pioneer of such shift, with programmatic buying, and I am sure we will witness similar paradigms in many other fields of marketing in 2016.

What are your expectations for the D2M SUMMIT?

I am always hungry for other brands’ experiences, how they are coping with this change, which is indeed hitting all industries but with very different impact and velocity. The travel and music industries were among the first to revolutionized by digital, but there are still many out there yet to be disrupted. Learning from executives sitting in both sides is always a truly inspiring experience.