Brands must become more customer focused, embrace diverse thinking and focus on excellent storytelling to connect and engage with target audiences next year, according to a new “2018 to-do list” for marketers published by CNBC.
With less than a week to the New Year, marketers will now be aiming to overhaul their content strategies, and CNBC has collated opinions from industry experts to inform and help brands so they can start 2018 on the right track with optimised strategies and campaigns.
First up, marketers must become more customer-centric. This is a trend that has really come to the fore during the final months of 2017 and it will again be a major factor next year as there is a growing dissonance between enterprises that listen to their customers and deliver what they want, and those that do not.
Organic and relevant are two words that marketers will also be hearing more of in 2018 as customers become less receptive to advertising that only sells a product or service, instead of delivering added value via personalised information, entertainment and experiences.
“Consumers are not interested in ads,” Mastercard CMO, Raja Rajamannar says. “They want uninterrupted experiences. The fact that there are 225 million consumers who are active users of ad block(ers) tells you that they’re saying ‘no I don’t want your ads.’”
In addition to adopting creative organic mediums such as video, infographics and editorial content, brands must also become better storytellers, as “narrative arcs” promote positive brand reactions during consumption, according to Kantar Millward Brown’s report on the “Media and Digital Predictions 2018”.
