Building trust with your customers: Monday’s Daily Brief

MarTech’s daily brief features daily insights, news, tips, and essential bits of wisdom for today’s digital marketing leader. If you would like to read this before the rest of the internet does, sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox daily.

Good morning, Marketers, and how will you build trust with your customers today?

Those familiar with how branding works understand that your customer has an image of your brand in their mind, and that every time they engage with the brand, that image improves or declines.

How can you improve your brand’s favorability? By allowing your customer to trust you more. And what’s the best way to do this? Use data. Make sure you understand where they are in their buyer’s journey and have an arsenal of messages and know-how to make their experience informed, helpful and relevant. Also, be as transparent as possible about where you acquired this data. Customers don’t get creeped out by relevant information you used at a touchpoint. They get creeped out when they feel like they’re being spied on without their knowledge.

Chris Wood,

Editor

Gibson’s new hybrid experience  

This year, American guitar company Gibson celebrated its 127-year history in music by opening a new interactive flagship store at their headquarters in Nashville. The 8,000-square-foot space was designed in close consultation with three sister agencies, GPJ, G7 Entertainment Marketing and Shoptology. The brand is also leveraging digital channels, including a new video content series called Gibson TV.

The pandemic delayed the opening of the new immersive experience, but it also encouraged more people to pick up guitars and connect with other players in digital communities.

“The goal for the Gibson Garage is to have people be fully immersed in the brands, whether they are first-time beginner players, or long-time aficionados, or they’re the guest of another person who is coming in to look at guitars,” said Mark Agnesi, Direct of Brand Experience at Gibson Brands. “We have been delivering on that. Every single person who walks into the Garage leaves feeling the power of the brands and what they mean to the music community, connecting our history to the present.”

He added, “[It’s] not only interactive brand storytelling, but showing people the real history of Gibson, from the actual instruments that Orville Gibson made, all the way to instruments that you can make yourself while you are at the Garage.”

Gibson’s initiative speaks to the importance of building an in-store and live experience that is worth sharing through digital channels. Leveraging the attention to brand values and design at the physical location in Nashville, Gibson can now use it as a springboard for customer experience and content creation as live and virtual events merge in the current hybrid climate. It’s a great example of the “new normal” that marketers are learning better to navigate as the pandemic and related public health concerns persist.

Read more here.

Search experience updates from Yext  

AI search company Yext, which powers site search for many businesses, announced an update to its search algorithm update along with some key feature additions.

The release includes revamped test search and experience training, and also a reimagining of the company’s data connector and app frameworks.

The Phoenix algorithm update enables businesses to analyze and “rerank” the best-performing search results. In this way, it takes into account the likely search results that visitors to a site have looked for most recently and shows them first in the search window, cutting down the time it takes for users to find the information they need.

With the data connector update, businesses can use a low-code “extract, transform, load” (ETL) tool that businesses can use to extract data to be analyzed in other platforms.

The search experience training and test search enables businesses to test the search experience on their properties in the way that customers see them and use them.

Why we care. It’s all about experience and navigation for a reason. Marketers like to see their customers spend a lot of time on their digital properties, but it should be meaningful time, not time wasted. If customers are getting frustrated when they can’t find the right information after too many searches, they might not spend as much time with your site in future visits. They might instead turn to a competitor with a better search experience on their site.

Read more here.

Recent articles that got our attention

A startup for deepfakes. Hour One hires models whose face can be made into a deepfake that can say anything in any language. These deepfakes can then populate videos for clients, scaling up content production in an already media-saturated environment. Businesses can choose to have an AI-powered voice deliver the script in synch with the video image of the face, or they can select a premium service, where the deepfake is voiced by a professional voice actor. Thus far, advantage goes to the human element. But for how long?

NFT wave caught by 12-year-old London boy. For those who thought non-fungible token (NFT) artworks were going to crash, consider that Benyamin Ahmed, 12, just sold a collection of pixellated whale images and made the equivalent of $400K in British pounds.

RevOps connects sales and marketing. A good think piece on the emerging area of RevOps simplifies the thought process into two questions: What can marketing do to deliver strong prospects to sales? And what can sales do to boost marketing’s strategies in order to turn leads into customers?

Quote of the day

“Intuition is important in marketing. Trust your inner GPS!” Gabriela Cardoza, corporate and personal brand consultant