How can I make my digital platforms an experience?

Grant Leboff: Shirra, for many Business to Business brands, they may not be thinking about doing some great events or live life brand things, but obviously all of them have digital platforms that they are utilising, be it their websites, be it video, be it social media. So how do they start to think about delivering experiences through digital?

Shirra Smilansky: A live brand experience, actually does not need to be executed face to face.  Increasingly with the social media platforms offering Instagram live, Facebook stories, obviously Snapchat is a very much a live platform and you have an untold host of live webinar streaming services out there.  Brands are really able to create that live brand experience and event, not in the physical world. They can simply tell their audience to logon, whether it be on their phone, or on their computer, at a certain time and they can all engage, remotely.

So I think that's something that we're going to see a lot more of, especially with augmented reality and virtual reality and merged reality coming in. The experience that can be delivered remotely is becoming increasingly something very, very exciting for brands.

Grant Leboff: And where do you see this is going? I think two of the things that I find quite exciting in marketing at the moment are things like, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and also the whole conversational commerce piece with bots and how that can change and make something much more dynamic than it used to be. So how is that, in your mind, and in the work that you do, influencing?

Shirra Smilansky: That's right. With an experience, you need to have that interaction with the brand and historically, for every little conversation, whether it be a 30 second / split second message communication, or an in depth chat with a brand ambassador, that has a real cost and that cost has an implication of what scale can ever be achieved.

On the other hand, if you can have a tailored, personalised, authentic communication at scale, will that personalisation can now reach a mass audience in a way that it never could before and so it gives brands a really exciting opportunity for one on one interaction at scale. That creates intimacy at scale, which we've never seen before.

Grant Leboff: So with all these opportunities out there, in some ways it's almost overwhelming for a business owner or a marketing department, marketing team, sort of sitting there, because almost the sky's the limit. Where for you, do people have to start when they're looking at their digital real estate and starting to think about what can we do? What would work for us?

Shirra Smilansky: I think a lot of brands, a lot of companies, are keen to simply be on every platform, because... a new platform's come out, let's get on it and actually you can waste a lot of resource in simply spreading themselves too thin.  My prime recommendation would be to set up a content calendar and look at what's realistic. How many platforms can you afford to create and tailor your content for.  And also look at leveraging your content across platforms. So 'what format will work' is a really good question. I mean, simply pulling the audio off your YouTube videos and using that as podcast content is something which a lot of people have had great success. Yet, not many people are ripping the audio off the YouTube content, so why not? Maybe look at how you sweat your content harder and how you utilise it across the platforms that really, really matter. Rather than going to every platform and trying to produce something completely from scratch.