Mobile tech giant O2 took to the streets to speak to consumers to gather feedback for its business customers. Gemma Huckle reports
The digital boom and rising uptake in smartphone usage means users’ expectations are continually evolving, but understanding and catering for these changing needs is one of the biggest challenges businesses face today.
To help brands meet their customers’ expectations and provide good experiences for customers buying their products and/or services, O2 launched a national campaign to spark conversations with consumers.
Conversational content
The content marketing campaign, created by The Marketing Practice, was introduced to promote O2’s ‘Joined-up customer’ proposition – a suite of technologies designed to help its enterprise customers get closer to their customers.
The appropriately named ‘Talking points’ campaign saw the mobile company take film crews to the streets of London, Birmingham, Luton and Kent to interview customers of large retail, passenger services and local governments on camera to ask them what they thought the future holds for technology in relation to shopping experiences, work journeys and council services. This information was then gathered to feedback to O2’s business customers.
A customer’s world
The campaign used the slogan, ‘It’s a customer’s world, come on in’, to communicate the message that businesses can deepen their understanding of their own audience and ask questions, via O2, they wish they could ask themselves.
Filming began at the end of January. Over 70 members of the public were interviewed on the subject areas relating to the sectors O2 was targeting. The resulting content was used by O2 to start conversations with IT, marketing, ecommerce and customer service professionals across all three industries.
The video content was edited into three short films – ‘The store of the future’, ‘The one screen journey’ and ‘Citizen and community engagement’ – and posted on YouTube. O2’s inside sales specialists leveraged the video clips of real customers to spark interest and desire for their enterprise target audience to find out more and agree to meet face-to-face.
Customer insight was further used to craft additional content including a host of articles on O2’s blog, ‘The Blue’, short opinion comments from O2 on each subject, and positioning documents setting out O2’s stance on all three areas. Content was promoted via email blasts, hosted on its enterprise site ‘Our thoughts’, and via the @O2BusinessUK Twitter account using the hashtag #O2ComeOnIn.
Tactical approach
With over 14 hours of footage, O2 has the ability to cut and re-edit content to address all types of marketing opportunities. Although ‘Talking points’ was originally conceived as a strategic campaign for O2’s ‘Joined-up customer’ approach, the footage is now being used tactically. For example, a post on O2’s blog discussing the issues around the Government’s digital-by-default policy references parking fines and is illustrated with a short clip featuring Erman, who struggled to make a prompt payment of a parking ticket.
The Marketing Practice says results of the campaign are in the early stages of measurement, but the success will be determined as content is rolled out throughout 2013.
Roslin Mclanachan, enterprise marketing manager at O2 Telefónica UK, said, “It’s a great chance to bring to life what people want from our business customers. We were looking for a unique way to engage with our audience, and the ‘Talking points’ campaign has done that.”