Key takeaways from a Brand Activation Lab course 

Senior Account Executive Krista Osborne recently took part in a Brand Activation Lab hosted by Digital Greenhouse in conjunction with Avado Learning, where participants delved into the world of digital marketing and tailored advertising.

The two-day course involved learning about Google’s See Think Do Care marketing framework and techniques, and applying these to a product campaign. She has shared some of her learnings and advice on how we as PR practitioners can utilise this framework to support clients with content that will have an impact.

Personalised marketing

Have you ever logged onto Netflix and watched a recommended series or movie? Maybe you’ve listened to a song that Spotify thought you might like. We’ve all been targeted by personalised marketing in one way or another. When it’s done accurately, it works wonders.

As business owners, understanding your audiences’ wants and needs is integral. By giving your audience an experience that feels personal and tailored to them, it is the starting point to building a successful brand relationship and creating trust for the consumer.

Did you know that 84% of companies have an increase in revenue from personalised marketing? 

Tailoring your product to a specific audience at a specific time in their purchasing journey can have significant positive effects for your business. One option to support you with this is using Google’s See Think Do Care model.

Google’s See Think Do Care

The See Think Do Care model is a revised framework which assists practitioners with understanding the customer journey in more detail. In the current digital age, a linear process is no longer applicable to the average buyer. Data has shown that people tend to go back and forth and consume different types of media along the way. This in turn can influence their purchase.

Customers will appear in the See Think Do Care framework at different times, and they all require a specific style of messaging and marketing.

By using important CRM data from this framework, brands can target their customers as they move through each stage of the framework. For PR practitioners, the framework can provide us with useful information to create messaging, social media content and user-generated content.

Take a look at the framework here: 

	SEE	THINK	DO	CARE
Goal	To know about you	To look for you	To buy from you	To come back to you
How to Achieve Goal	Drive AWARENESS – increase brand recognition	Drive INTEREST – educate and inform	Drive CONVERSION	Drive LOYALTY
Audience	Any potential customer	A customer with some commercial intent, they are in the market for your product	A customer with full commercial intent, they are ready to buy!	A customer who has purchased from you previously more than once
Signals & Data  Digital signals allow brands to understand their potential customers’ behaviours online	Detailed demographics i.e. location, occupation, gender, age	Key term search on Google or YouTube Affinity – habits and interests based on Google searches Life events	Abandoned shopping carts	CRM customer data Specific search terms
Messaging	Generic messaging targeting your target goal audience	Specifics about the brand	Talking about costs and discounts	What the brand can do for the customer i.e. reward schemes Other products by the brand
Advertising	Video ads In-stream ads	Shopping ads Search term ads Video ads	Search term ads Shopping ads Retargeting	Email ads Search term ads Video ads with tailored call-to-action PPC
Measuring	Impressions Views Reach	Engagement Time on site Completed views Lift in brand awareness	Conversion Revenue	Lift in brand favourability Revenue per user

The framework shows us that focusing on signals and data is paramount if you want to find a specific audience. This is where the harmonious relationship of a digital marketing agency and a PR agency can work extremely well.

How can we use this framework to support our roles as PR practitioners? 

PR and social media experts aren’t full-time website creators, nor do we grapple with the Google algorithm on a daily basis. However, understanding its importance to integrated communications is essential. The See Think Do Care model can also be applied to many other aspects that we may deal with, such as creative content.

Knowing your clients’ target audience is essential, so when you begin planning a campaign, think about who you’re targeting and, more importantly, where they may be on their consumer journey.

Is your client looking to gain new customers? Are they taking care of their current customers? Each campaign will look slightly different and will fall within a different remit of the framework. Your audience may be diverse in demographic, but they can be similar when it comes to their thoughts and feelings about your brand or product.

We’re communication experts, so messaging is at the forefront of all that we do. Ensuring we visualise who we’re targeting by using this framework will help to shape the message we want to put out externally. How we word messaging for an existing customer will look very different to someone who has never heard of the brand, so keep this in mind when you’re crafting your social media posts, blogs and adverts.

Thank you to the Digital Greenhouse and Avado Learning for this great session, we can’t wait to apply this knowledge to our clients.

For more information on how Black Vanilla can help you with your brand story, key messaging or your customer journey, please contact us.