Thought Leadership: Hitting a Moving Target

• Updated on: 2018-09-29
• Read original article here

“ When you’re a global marketing director for a brand that’s been a part of people’s lives for 165 years, it’s a big responsibility. And when you factor in the digital transformation story of this iconic brand, the arc between social, digital and PR strategies becomes even more critical.

Our customers’ needs, priorities and communications channels are fast evolving. Our job has been to create strategies that hit this always moving target by delivering the right solution at the right time, through the right channel.

At the same time, the landscape itself is changing. The “digital experience” is now all pervasive, straddling digital product, distribution channel, customer care, marketing and PR. A company’s digital product and experience are critical, dictating how consumers perceive that brand. Great content as a marketing tool relies on digital distribution. Success of celebrity endorsements hinges on their social following online, and on the other hand, social media has created celebrities in their own right. Marketing spend is shifting from traditional to digital channels, which is where consumers are spending more and more of their time.

My leadership is therefore a reflection of meeting the needs of our customers, empowering my team through data-driven intelligence, an understanding of market need, and the willingness to be creative with digital strategies.

I joined Western Union as a marketing manager for the U.S., when we primarily focused our marketing on the retail business. I joined our digital business in 2012, as the company was mapping out its digital strategy and establishing its new digital unit in San Francisco. Based in the heart of Silicon Valley, WU Digital is the central nervous system for Western Union’s ecommerce arm and all things digital: money transfer, digital marketing, social marketing, and digital content. I’m proud that we have grown Western Union’s digital business multifold in the last several years. We adopted a mobile-first approach, where mobile went from being a very small sliver of our business, maybe 10 to 15% just a few years ago, to now 65% of our digital transactions in the U.S.

My opportunity, challenge, and point of pride was to help lead on this path of not only greater growth, but service and connection with our customer. We’re now looking to use that successful marketing and PR mix to help grow our global digital partnership business, WUConnect™. WUConnect™ is a technology platform that embeds Western Union’s robust global money transfer capability into third party apps including social media and chat apps such as Viber and WeChat.

Once you’ve set your digital business on a path of growth, the challenge becomes how to make the customer experience, product offering and the value proposition to the customer as seamless as possible, across the different marketing, transactional and customer care channels.

The customer doesn’t see us as digital or retail. They don’t care if we’re separate teams or different channels. They just want to know that we recognize and reward them across the board. If they want to switch between different channels, they can. If they want to migrate from one channel to the other, they can. If they want to set up a transaction on the mobile app but go pay cash in person, they can. Mobile and digital became the centerpiece of our omnichannel strategy for being able to serve the customer seamlessly.

A partnership like Viber is a perfect example of this convenient and secure omni-channel experience: consumers using the popular chat app can now send money via Western Union without ever leaving the Viber app. Early customer response has already been very good. Majority of Viber customers were new to Western Union, and satisfaction rates are high.

Moving from retail to digital to omnichannel, the focus remains the same: serving our customers’ needs wherever they may be. As we look ahead and strategize our next marketing moves, we will look to expand our presence on more partner platforms where the modern mobile millennial lives, works, and plays. The opportunity to build the strategy for this iconic brand has given me an extraordinary look into the needs of consumers around the globe, and to translate those needs into winning, service-based digital initiatives, while driving my experience as a leader for my team, our social and digital initiatives, and the iconic Western Union brand”