Some things are truly inevitable. They stand out from the churn and unpredictability of daily life. And one of those things is a trend I’d like to call “High-Velocity Marketing”.
So, how do you define High-Velocity Marketing?
High-Velocity Marketing describes a brand’s ability to act and react faster than ever before. Think of the kind of instant brand communication that takes place in the fast-paced social media world of Instagram and Twitter.
Why should brand executives and marketers care?
In the very near future, speed will be the most important strategy for brands that want to stay relevant. Instead of planning online marketing campaigns weeks in advance and rolling out your brand marketing globally over a period of many months, it will be done in days – or even hours. Brands that can’t immediately get their messages out, respond instantly to world events, or adapt to shifts in online sentiment will miss out on these fast-paced global conversations.
Here’s an example: When President Donald Trump invited the National Champion Clemson Tigers to the White House and served hamburgers and pizza, he shared this tweet about “hamberders”:
Trump Hamberders
Within a few hours, Burger King joined the conversation and tweeted this:
Burger Kind Hamberders
Nicely done. But what if Burger King had been able to respond even faster? What if minutes after Donald Trump’s initial tweet, Burger King had devised and launched a digital marketing promotion to offer “hamberders” in every Burger King around the world? Same ingredients as a regular hamburger for just $1 more, just because. Who wouldn’t want to order one of these? How would this kind of social media strategy impact sales?
To become and stay relevant in the age of Generation Z, brands need to act faster than conventional digital marketing strategies currently allow. Social media has created endless, fast-paced global conversations about virtually everything there is to talk about. To be part of that, brands need to move at the same pace. Being a day or even an hour too late will soon be unacceptable.
Why is High-Velocity Marketing so important for handling a crisis?
While an online marketing strategy that moves at lightning speed opens up new opportunities, it could also be mission-critical during a potential crisis. Imagine that one of your social media promotions is perceived as offensive and blows up on Twitter. Your product is being massively criticized for having an upsetting or inappropriate message. How quickly would you want to be able to remove all digital references to this product from every store, online shop, campaign website, ad, social media profile, and app? Instantly, I assume.
You don’t have to search long to find numerous examples of global and local brands that have experienced the problem described above. The longer your offensive messages stay out there, the more brutal the punishment to your branding and sales. Waiting a day? Not a chance.
Situations like this present a huge risk. Iconic global brands like Apple, Nike, D&G, Coca-Cola, Ferrari, and Boeing can afford to take a hit from time to time. But for most, this kind of digital marketing misstep can be an existential threat to their brand identity and sales.
These days, even the big guys need to be afraid. When Boeing delayed the grounding of its global 737 MAX 8 fleet by two days, it invited massive criticism, potentially damaging Boeing’s valuable branding for years to come.
What are the benefits of a High-Velocity Marketing strategy?
The impact of High-Velocity Marketing on the customer experience will be almost entirely positive. Every interaction will change from day-to-day, becoming more relevant and customer-focused. Errors will be fixed faster and brand recognition will improve over time.
The instant nature of High-Velocity Marketing opens the door for more interesting and entertaining interactions to define your brand image. Here are two examples:
Imagine a luxury fashion brand or retailer. It’s Oscar night and the fashion world is watching. Photos of celebrities on the red carpet are flooding social media. What if you could create and share an instant landing page for each photo within seconds to enable your customers around the world to “shop the look” while watching the show? What if you could build on this experience by promoting similar dresses and other matching accessories from hot designers?
Or, imagine that you’re the sponsor of a beloved local soccer team. What if you could push real-time updates on the championship game to all out-of-home screens in the city? Seconds after a goal for the team, a video of the goal and a fun brand message could appear everywhere. Wouldn’t that be a high-value experience to every fan walking on the streets at that moment?
How does CoreMedia Content Cloud support High-Velocity Marketing?
CoreMedia’s very first customer was the DPA, Germany’s leading press agency. From the start we understood that speed, consistency, and the ability for publishers to fully remove any wrong content within seconds was a mission-critical requirement. Today, no matter what your core business is, content marketing has made every brand a publisher with the same need for speed and global reach as this industry-leading press agency.
In fact, CoreMedia Content Cloud was designed for exactly this kind of high-velocity online marketing. But that’s just the beginning. A typical global brand implementation is even more complicated than that of a press agency. We’re handling integrations into multiple eCommerce platforms for different markets, managing translations into 10-80 different languages, and, sometimes, delivering content to more than 100 different countries. And all of that’s in addition to providing support for an increasing number of other touchpoints like apps, in-store displays, digital signage, service portals, out-of-home advertising, internet platforms, social media channels, and voice portals. And that’s where our high-velocity brand orchestration capabilities truly shine.
For a number of fashion customers, we’ve reduced the time-to-web for new digital marketing drops in multiple markets from weeks to less than 30 minutes. That is a time-savings of more than two orders of magnitude. With CoreMedia Content Cloud, they can accomplish the same tasks in less than 1% of the time.
The future will be more complex, more exciting, and more dynamic than anything we’ve seen. Brands should get ready for High-Velocity Marketing. Their future competitors will.
