Can you even remember a time before social media, voice assistants and video calls? If you’re like me, you’ll find it hard to imagine getting anything done without logging on, clicking away ads, scrolling through content or asking your phone to “show me reviews of that sushi restaurant I passed on the way to work this morning.”
Apart from easy access to restaurant reviews, what I love most about the digital age is that it’s always evolving. What’s true today will not necessarily be true tomorrow and what’s possible today is being done with tools that didn’t even exist yesterday.
We’re constantly learning how to work better and more efficiently, and I love having to think outside of the box, to build new strategies and figure out the best ways to use them in adding value to the business.
I’m naturally curious, and my career in digital marketing means this side of me is constantly being stimulated. At Euler Hermes World Agency, which is a dedicated team working with multinational corporations, we’re a small marketing department developing global campaigns. Here, I’ve had the opportunity to create new structures, strategies and processes to help us better connect with existing and future clients.
One outcome of the Covid-19 crisis has been an appreciation across our departments of the importance of digital. Before the pandemic hit, our colleagues would either not consider the need for digital strategies, contact management and new tools—or take them for granted. Then, there was a total change of mindset, where everything had to happen online and our colleagues came to us to find solutions. But people also started to expect results really fast.
With everyone receiving tons of messages daily, across different platforms, the challenge is getting the right information directly into the hands of the right people. And part of my job has been finding out how, what, and in which form.
We, ourselves, are continually learning about what this means in practice. For example, during a campaign last year, we learned that our key demographic on social media are very likely to enjoy content such as an infographic we published about Day Sales Outstanding, explaining the cost for businesses that are slow to collect trade receivables from customers. Why was this a winner? Because it had direct relevance to their business and Euler Hermes is a highly credible source. Conversely, they proved to be less interested in white papers on digitalization - a topic of general business interest, but on which Euler Hermes is one of many available sources.
This is the kind of discovery that, thanks to our efficient use of data, helps us share relevant information and avoid filling up busy people’s feeds or inboxes with clutter.
The events of the last year have made me realize the importance of communication. My colleagues and I now know how to keep our relationships alive by sharing screens and information, and we’ve also learned how to work in a very agile way, getting rid of endless emails and using new tools to work better and faster.
What’s next? I would like to fine-tune our strategies to get the right content to the right audience at exactly the right moment, using the right platforms. I love to find out what makes people tick and to discover the humans behind the data.
As for my team, we’ll keep focusing on working together, even when we’re physically apart. I really value having great relationships with people. That’s why in this age of virtual meetings, I’ve always got my camera on.
