It’s hard not to be distracted these days, with a multitude of channels bombarding us with the latest news and trends. Chris Brunner, Head of Content at Digitas New Zealand, explores how brands can get their owned content and channels to work harder. It’s key to successfully harness attention and build long-lasting relationships with customers.
The problem with attention? It’s fleeting. And distracted customers are hard to retain. Without strong and integrated owned experiences, we’re only renting their attention. The brands people return to, and can’t stop talking about, are those that capitalise on attention and build long-lasting customer relationships with connected owned experiences.
Owned experiences put your owned content (like articles, videos, podcasts, and emails) and owned channels (like your website, apps, CRM and social media pages) to work. But many brands treat these experiences as standalone touchpoints rather than a connected system. This approach just turns customer journeys into a series of dead-ends.
Connected experiences keep customers engaged
A great owned experience isn’t a load of touchpoints, it’s a connected system.
When owned content and channels work together, they can create a self-sustaining owned media network that keeps customers engaged.
We’ve helped major quick service restaurant and grocery brands do just that. How? By shifting from one-off transactions to digital-first engagement models that connect bespoke communications and in-store actions to drive sales growth.
Global examples like Nike do an incredible job engaging customers post-purchase via an owned network – including the Run Club app, membership and behaviour-based communications. And across the world, fans feverishly engage with Sephora’s Beauty Insider loyalty programme and social communities without the need for reacquisition.
When customers become brand insiders through connected owned experiences – it builds a growth loop that allows paid media to focus on bringing in new customers, rather than chasing down old ones.
Forging a growth loop between paid and owned media
Customer experience (CX) and media often compete for budget. But the best brands don’t split these strategies – they connect them for maximum impact. Here are four ways to get started:
- Get your ratio right. Early-stage brands rely more on paid media, but mature brands should look to leverage brand equity and loyal customers for better returns with owned strategies. Acquisition without retention is a leaky bucket – in a small market like New Zealand, that’s a fast-track to a dwindling prospect pool.
- Connect the experience. Use paid media to drive owned engagement. Connect social ads to valuable owned content, ensure paid acquisition integrates with strong onboarding experiences and invest in high-value creative beyond (not just before) the click. Earned advocacy is trusted over traditional advertising – you can buy perception, but not authenticity.
- Create an engagement loop. Habitual customers don’t need to be bought. Ensure every touchpoint feeds into the next, rewarding positive behaviours, while keeping customers moving through your owned ecosystem. That can be as simple as staggering exclusive content to be ‘unlocked’ at every new level within a loyalty programme, or following up on online purchases by providing unique discount codes that can only be redeemed through your mobile app.
- Shift measurement focus. Look past media conversions to long-term engagement indicators, for example: the percentage of acquired customers engaging with owned brand content, or cost per acquisition as owned investments scale.
Owning customer relationships
Brands that fail to connect owned and paid strategies are throwing away hard-earned acquisition, while those that connect these experiences build something greater: compounding customer relationships, even fandoms, that can’t be ad-blocked, disrupted by algorithm changes, or swept away in shifting media landscapes.
So, why stop at renting attention when you could own it?
Want to read more about customer relationships, loyalty programmes and connecting your strategies? Issue 82 of NZ Marketing magazine has all of this and more – if you don’t already, subscribe today. The digital version costs less than a coffee per issue.
