Hallam’s New eGuide is Helping Businesses Join ‘The Digital-Ready Culture’
Through deep research and a range of in-house interviews with their experts, the multi-award-winning strategic agency Hallam has pulled together a new eGuide, ‘The Digital-Ready Culture’.
The way businesses operate has changed a great deal over the last 12 months.
Digital marketing has shot to the front of the queue and has become an essential business tool, rather than just optional or an added service extra.
Of course, COVID-19 has played a significant role in that. It’s put a heavy weight of pressure on the shoulders of companies and marketing managers across several sectors. It’s demanded a pivot and change. It’s demanded they digitise their services quickly and scale them up like never before in order to meet a booming consumer demand radiating from the online world.
What was happening in-store is now online. What were face-to-face conversations are now being done via social media and chatbots. What was a cash transaction is now an online conversion. What was a window promotion is now a creative online marketing campaign attempting to stand out from the rest.
And while a degree of normality appears to be returning, this enhanced digital world we’re living and operating within is not going to go away and it’s those businesses that embrace it that will thrive.
That, itself, has demanded more from companies than ever before, particularly those that had not implemented digital into their business strategies prior to the pandemic.
However, this is where Hallam has stepped in. Through deep research and a range of in-house interviews with their experts, the multi-award-winning strategic agency has pulled together a new eGuide that has been built to address the five biggest challenges businesses are facing in order to join what they are labelling ‘The Digital-Ready Culture’.
Those five issues are:
- The evolution of the high street
- Retaining customer loyalty
- Standing out in an online saturated market
- Understanding the confusing world of data analytics and security
- Knowing automation is key, but not knowing where to start
Below is a snippet of Hallam’s latest eGuide, with the agency’s Senior Strategist, Julie Reid, discussing how increased expectations of a digital experience will form a significant part of a brand’s business strategy and how they can build consumer trust.
The way we’ve used data analytics in the past is no longer fit for purpose. The removal of third-party cookies will have a significant impact, limiting the amount of data available to businesses as people make their journeys across the internet.
Once these are phased out, brands will have no alternative than to shake up what they measure, track, and make decisions against. Soon, we’re not going to be able to see where those people are coming from or even where they’re going.
One answer could lie in on-site personalisation, which allows us to make decisions based on the interactions a visitor is having on a brand’s website and not through a profile built up by third-party data.
Ultimately, it’s about trust, but it’s also about our customer’s expectations. Brands find themselves caught between a rock and a hard place – a lack of trust on the one hand and an increase in expectation on the other.
Speaking from the view of a consumer, we want the convenience and the personalised experience we’re told data can provide, but when brands fail to deliver on that, we’re left doubly disappointed.
It can feel like we’ve signed a Faustian Deal with companies like Google and Amazon. We’re terrified of the amount of data they have on us, but we don’t want to lose the convenience. There’s a balance that brands need to strike and a lot of it will come down to trust.
Hallam’s full eGuide can be downloaded here.
About Hallam
Hallam is a collaborative digital agency with offices in Nottingham and London. Since 2000, they’ve partnered with clients to grow their revenue through integrated digital marketing that’s steered by strategy and long-term vision.
In short, they use their strategic skills, creativity, and technical edge to transform businesses and help their clients thrive online.
And they have the awards to back up their expertise. As well as winning an impressive 10 awards at The Drum Recommends Digital Awards 2020, they’re the first-ever agency to win three back-to-back Grand Prix awards, making them the UK’s most recommended agency for the third year running.
They were also crowned as Europe’s Best Large Integrated Agency at the 2020 European Search Awards, and were named as Google’s top-performing digital marketing agency for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa when they won Google’s elite Growing Business Online Award.
These accolades speak volumes for the results Hallam achieves, and they’ve become a trusted partner for leading brands like The United Nations, Suzuki, Speedo, and Boots, as well as having specialist expertise working in the SaaS, life sciences, and manufacturing sectors.
