Navigating The Digital Communication Paradigm Shift
Reaching Gen Z customers without alienating your other generations may be one of the biggest challenges today’s marketers face. How do you make your communication authentic, inclusive, and exciting? Making your brand relevant and accessible is at the crook of communication decisions but also buying decisions. People want to support brands, businesses, and organizations they know, connect with, and in turn connect with them. Marketers need to figure out how to create personalization without exuding stalker vibes. Many marketing teams are faced with the challenge of using audience intelligence and segmentation effectively and at scale without a marketing army. To top it all off, digital marketing is rapidly taking on a new look. With the explosion of “digital campfires” (smaller, more intimate social media platforms) reaching audiences, particularly Gen Z, requires a fresh approach to the communication plan. Sarah Wilson superbly addresses Gen Z audiences, digital campfires, and the new landscape in this Harvard Business Review article, Where Brands Are Reaching Gen Z. I’m taking it further to address what communication platform you should be using and why.
Optimize Connecting with Communities
With the explosion of digital campfires, one thing is for sure, and something (brand) marketers collectively agree upon, the social media craze has fostered the ability to find like-interest groups and spin up micro-communities quickly. This ability cultivates a welcoming online culture full of hashtags, themed challenges, and more. Now, micro-communities engage with brands, marketers, and messaging. This means brands, businesses, and organizations need to engage accordingly. While the secret sauce to “making it happen” may still be a secret, the reality is a hashtag, image, video, or message can become a viral trend in the blink of an eye. But how does one carry that across into other aspects of brand outreach and engagement? Hello, peer-to-peer (P2P) conversational texting communications!
At Hustle, we have seen the success of clients who embrace P2P text messaging and use it to complement their social media and email communications. Delivering messages with a call to action in real-time further drives relationships. Conversation threads using customized scripts, personalized offerings, and more fosters direct interaction with the call to action. People are becoming increasingly accustomed to brands playing in the digital campfire spaces. Using text messaging or video over email is a natural extension of that. Text messages have a 98 % open rate, and 90% are read within 3 minutes. At Hustle, on average, we see a 20% or higher engagement rate. This performance by far surpasses email.
What’s more is you can A/B test anything from call to action, to messaging, to the offer, and all in real-time. You can include hashtags, gifs, and links. This gives the marketing team the agility needed to pivot quickly, stay connected with the community, and fuel the community-marketer engagement culture we are increasingly shifting towards. In a nutshell, P2P messaging provides authentic communication and conversations powered by people. And now with Hustle Studio, there is aP2P video capability.
Video Messaging in an IG Story, Tik Tok World
With the launch of Hustle Studio, Hustle became the first peer-to-peer text messaging platform for brands, businesses, and organizations to take advantage of the mobile marketing trends of both P2P texting and vertical video stories within one tool. This new product capability is catapulting what marketing teams (however big or small) can do with their message and engagement. Hustle Studio is the trusted mobile messaging platform for seamlessly folding video into outreach and engagement campaigns. You can bring in brand voice, showcase products, highlight customers and influencers, and authentically share your mission and cause. With video, you can show people what your brand, business, or organization is all about and strike up a conversational exchange in doing so. Bring the IG Story Tik Tok vibe into your communication reach with Hustle Studio. This new innovative product allows you to send video messages to your audience through text, inspire follow-through in a single click, and track engaging results in real-time.
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