Marketing today should mean putting humans at the center of your brand’s story, surrounding them with experiences informed by data, and ultimately making them feel validated and appreciated.
To earn the attention of modern audiences, brands needs to try harder. The marketing tools of old – typically large-scale and always interruptive – won’t cut it.
While the role of the brand really hasn’t changed, the role of the consumer surely has. Empowered by technologies that keep them connected 24/7/ 365, consumers control the flow of information and set the rules for engagement.
Today, marketing is about connecting with consumers on their terms, using the data generated to deliver personalized experiences that build relationships and fit people’s lives.
With access to infinite data points, and fresh insights generated by each new interaction, marketing can deliver custom strategies that integrate paid, owned and earned media channels to deliver relevance with precision in a landscape that’s constantly being disrupted.
Cyberlation’s proprietary, sprint-based marketing tools are designed to keep a brand nimble. Leveraging data to optimize continually and find actionable business intelligence, strategic marketing blends art with science and always puts humans first – because with the modern consumer, that’s what it takes to win.
Human-Centric Approach
The most successful brands are those that use marketing tools to build relationships with their audiences. Rather than hide behind a logo, they use it to demonstrate empathy, to communicate naturally, and to almost predict their customers’ wants and desires before they emerge. By setting the stage for long-term loyalty, they’re protecting themselves against the risk of being commoditized, disrupted or simply undercut on price.
Building these relationships requires your brand to create human-centric experiences. And in order to do that, your brand needs to understand every nuance of your audience’s motivations, behavior, and decision-making, as well as your competitive landscape and business goals.
Connection Is Two-Way
So where do the insights necessary for human-centric experiences come from? The short answer: data. Data not only helps you understand your audience and how to reach them, it challenges assumptions you’ve made, and it helps to define the shape and form of the digital experiences you’ll ultimately create.
But there’s one thing data can’t do – it can’t tell you who you are. You can try to be all things to all people, but that approach inspires little trust. And an identity built by data alone isn’t going to connect with real human beings.
The point of getting to know your audience is not to tell them what you think they want to hear. It’s about telling your story in ways that resonate. It’s about finding points of connection and common ground that enable genuine interaction.
Blending Context & Content
The demand for human-centered experiences has grown at such breakneck speed that marketing itself is still catching up. marketing tools now require deep specialist collaborations – not just a series of individual contributions. And collaboration needs to be faster and more responsive to change.
Delivering personalized experiences can be challenging for brands whose marketing tools aren’t integrated. Getting digital right requires deep collaboration between agile teams of experts, and a commitment to responding to constant change.
In response, our marketing team has developed a proprietary, sprint-based methodology that uses data – often from disparate sets – to inform their story-driven approach.
Their process begins with the collection of all available data – brand, audience, competitor, industry, and more – from sources on- and offline. After a series of deep-dive analyses, they develop detailed personas for a brand’s most viable “humans” – their ideal customers, uncovering the context for the next phase of planning. Guided by a deep understanding of a brand’s target(s), we put ourselves in their shoes, creating journeys that connect the stages of the purchase journey to critical touchpoints and content that converts.
To ensure that the content we deploy is well-received, we use a variety of marketing tools and ongoing analyses to optimize for performance. Even when things are working well, we look to improve, iterating plan and creative to garner the best possible results and ROI.
At Cyberlation, we use data to deliver compelling stories to the right audiences at the right times on the right platforms. We know that “me too” marketing and tired tactics won’t help a brand cut through noise filling the modern customer’s journey – but personalized, empowering, and relatable experiences will.
“What are we doing on social?” For brands, the dreaded question can be deceptively challenging to answer.
Social media is at the heart of the new digital age. Harnessed effectively, social is an unrivaled marketing tool for building rapport at scale, enabling round-the-clock engagement and one-on-one conversations.
Standing in the way of social media success, however, is shrinking organic reach, unrelenting competition for audience attention, and the speed of change as platforms tweak algorithms. A more subtle challenge for brands is the pressure to chase metrics for metrics’ sake, sweating over likes and shares that may or may not have business impact.
But we live in a social world, and brands that thrive on social platforms can connect with customers in ways that marketers could only dream of in the past. We help brands succeed on social by being tactically nimble, clear about objectives, and adopting a relentless audience-centricity. The goal of all our social media services is simple: to help audiences tell their own stories better.
An Organic Foundation
As popular platforms reduce organic reach, social media marketing becomes more and more pay-to-play. But that doesn’t mean we don’t still love organic social. On the contrary, we think organic is where good paid campaigns start.
If a brand’s organic pages seem disused, dead, or disconnected from social advertising, even a brilliant paid campaign can do more harm than good. Also, organic social has other roles beyond getting into people’s feeds. Social profiles typically appear high in search results, so they’re often part of consumer due diligence when evaluating a brand.
At Cyberlation, we really do see organic social as the foundation of a social media strategy – not the entire effort, but something to build upon. Our first order of business in any marketing that involves social media is helping brands strategize and plan for their organic engagement.
A Two-Way Conversation
Generating loyalty takes a human touch, which means a human conversation. Today, it’s easier than ever for brands of all sizes to start a dialogue with the public.
Customers want and expect to talk with their favorite brands, and the language of engagement — clicks, likes, comments, shares, and conversions — has never been simpler to quantify, although these metrics need to be interpreted intelligently and kept in perspective.
But social media also enables social listening in a more systematic way – taking a bigger-picture look at the conversation around your brand, industry, competitors, and the cultural context in which you operate. The data and insights from social listening can then be fed back into the strategies, content, and execution of your brand’s campaigns.
At Cyberlation, we believe in both social dialogue and social listening, and have the tools and capabilities to empower you to do both.
Social for Performance-Minded Brands
In the social arena, as with any marketing, brands need to know their audience, understand the messages that resonate with them, and take effective action to reach them. At Cyberlation, we do this by pairing clients with a multidisciplinary team that is creative, agile, and focused on results.
When you work with us, we bring together copywriters, designers, strategists, analytics specialists, and marketing experts to create content and messages to reach your audience, whether organically or via paid efforts. From strategy to deployment, Cyberlation’s social efforts are designed to reach the right people with the right content at the right time.
We see organic and paid social efforts as complementary, and we’re strategic about the uses of each. Rather than chasing engagement metrics, however, we look for ways to measure the impact of organic social on your ultimate business goals.
Our teams are agile, so we can move quickly and tune our tactics based on trends we identify through ongoing data collection. We take an iterative, sprint-based approach, so that every Cyberlation campaign informs the next, because we believe the best marketing is always learning from the data – and ultimately, the people behind the numbers.
Focus on keywords and rankings, and you risk missing the SEO forest for the trees. Search tells a story: about your brand, your offering, and your reputation.
Search engines put human users in control of how they research, learn, and buy – and there lies the opportunity and the challenge. Make yourself a relevant, informative source for searchers, and potential customers will quickly come to trust you (maybe even love you). Mismanage your SEO and you become an irritant, or worse, invisible.
SEO throws up new technical challenges all the time, from algorithm changes to the impact of voice and AR/VR. And a good SEO agency naturally lives and breathes the technical stuff.
Rankings matter, but SEO is not just about what ranks where. It’s organic marketing – it’s about how content, user experience, and earned media combine to make your brand discoverable and attractive to your audience. That kind of holistic thinking demands not a technician, but a partner – which is exactly what Cyberlation strives to be.
Why SEO Strategy Matters (Click Here)
We’ve been hearing SEO is dead for about as long as we’ve been doing SEO. The work has changed (a lot), but SEO matters today for the reasons it always has. Search is where most customer journeys begin, it’s often where they end, and it’s usually a big part of the middle.
Users worldwide make 3.5 billion searches each day, which is an astonishing 1.2 trillion searches per year – on Google alone. In this sea of search, how your brand stands out (and for what reasons) is largely determined by your SEO strategy – and how well it’s executed.
And in a fast-paced world where irrelevance and interruption are tolerated less and less, showing up in search results is one of your best opportunities to reach customers the moment they’re open to hearing from you.
What surfaces about your brand in search is often the first impression people get – and we all know how much first impressions count. If you’re authoritative, impressive, and easy to find, it could mean a new customer. Otherwise, it may be a missed opportunity.
Everything is Connected
As a full-service marketing agency, we take a big-picture approach to the SEO services we provide, for a couple reasons.
First, we believe that these days, there’s no bright line between search and organic marketing when it comes to showcasing your brand or getting discovered. Second, we’re working shoulder to shoulder with organic and paid marketers, content marketers, PR experts, developers, our UX team, and many other talented folks – we couldn’t live in a silo even if we wanted.
This holistic approach informs everything we do. We don’t chase vanity metrics or industrial quantities of backlinks. What matters to us – just as it does to you – is brand lift and measurable impact on business results.
Our SEO Process
If we’re building your website, rest assured: technical optimization – title tags, redirects, structured data, all the good stuff – is baked into the process.
When you work with us on search marketing, we think through the technical, but we also think beyond it. Clients can and do bring us on for SEO audits, and we’re always happy to help uncover fixes that can give you a bump in the rankings. But we’d link to think our true value comes from being an organic marketing partner.
The SEO strategy we adopt may be part of a fully integrated digital marketing strategy or a more channel-specific effort (depending on your needs) and will set the benchmarks that will help to measure success. We’re equally attentive to the needs of global brands and the basics of local SEO marketing.
We’ll assemble the talent you need from across disciplines to cover everything from your social media presence, reviews, and sites where you’re linked to our talked about. We’ll look for, or create, opportunities in content marketing, influencer, and digital PR.
For paid digital advertising to work at its best, it needs to combine data, imagination, and expertise. When these things connect, brands grow and prospects become customers.
As marketing tools go, few change as much (or as often) as paid media. That’s because platforms, channels, and display networks are always evolving along with their audiences. This constant change can be fun for users, but comes at a price for brands without the time, in-house experts or latest tools to stay on top of never-ending shifts and trends.
When you engage Cyberlation for paid advertising, you put a team of specialists to work for your brand. But more than that, you also add data scientists, copywriters and designers who know the digital landscape and collaborate to produce engaging ads that get results.
And when we talk about results, we most want to talk about the results that matter to you – leads, sales, revenue, utilization – not only the metrics that agencies like to measure. We’re passionate about diving into business data to get a complete picture of your customers, your business, and our performance.
Driven By Data Science
Any media team will tell you that data and analytics are key to an effective digital campaign. What they might not tell you, however, is how they’ll connect campaign metrics to business results across the entire customer journey.
To see problems and opportunities in real-time, we look to integrate paid media metrics with data at the business level. When we can connect advertising with business performance, it becomes easier for us to show the effect of ad spend. This level of integration also enables us to respond rapidly to business needs and opportunities as they arise – for example, by diverting spend to a struggling location or capitalizing on a fast-selling product.
When you’re devoting precious marketing dollars to pay-per-impression or pay-per-click advertising, you need to know that all of your ad spend is being used effectively. That’s why we look to push beyond simplistic attribution models to truly understand where ad spend is generating assists, even if it’s not scoring the points.
Powered By Fresh Creative
Research into your audience’s needs and behavior tells us a lot about who you’re trying to reach – and what matters to them. We build strategically paid audiences that reflect audience research (without overtargeting), then refine those audiences based on performance.
But while data helps you find the target, the right messaging and design lets you hit the bullseye. Cyberlation’s paid media team works with our talented copywriters and award-winning designers to create experiences that genuinely connect with your audience. Because our paid and creative teams collaborate closely, we have the ability to adapt and adjust our approach very quickly and to the benefit of your PPC marketing efforts.
Where keyword research, business data and marketing analytics form a solid foundation, our creatives build on it by giving your ads a human touch. By working together, we meet the expectations of your audience, improve your visibility, and force your competition to take notice.
Our Paid Media Approach
A/B testing and constant optimization are critical to paid digital advertising. And naturally, we put great effort into iterating successful strategies and maximizing the value of your ad spend by analyzing performance and driving down your cost-per-click.
However, if all you do is optimize existing tactics, you risk taking a blinkered approach and missing opportunities. Too narrow a focus isn’t without risk – individual tactics sometimes have a way of working until they don’t.
At Cyberlation, we strongly believe in treating paid media data as audience research (you paid for it, after all), maximizing its value by feeding it back not only into tactics, but into strategy.
Adopting an iterative, sprint-based approach, we take audience insights from campaign performance data and test our original strategy. Were our original assumptions about our audience correct? What else did we learn? With a more complete, more nuanced picture of our audience, are there new campaigns or tactics we might try? In the end, it comes down to being not just a media agency, but a business partner – which is always the role we want.
Brands are collecting more data than ever. But somehow, getting valuable, actionable insights out of all this data still seems out of reach.
Data is now the driving force behind nearly every business decision – and if it’s not, that’s the ultimate goal. Data sheds light on opportunities and helps brands avoid missteps. So it’s no wonder that brands are rushing to collect data in unprecedented volumes.
But getting data isn’t the problem. The problem is what happens to the data after it’s been collected. What does it mean? And even if you know what it means, what do you do?
These aren’t data questions – they’re insights questions. And when insights stay buried, opportunities get missed, and you run the risk of repeating past mistakes.
We’re here to help you discover insights, not just collect data. Naturally, we use these insights to market more effectively. But we also help you leverage them to fuel smarter strategic decisions and create more digitally-enabled businesses.
How do we do this? By collecting context, not just numbers. Drawing on your team’s own expertise, and adding the experience of our cross-disciplinary team of marketers, we contribute new questions and fresh perspectives, and bring the analytical firepower to deliver some of the answers.
Staying Human
We think data is pretty great. But it’s no substitute for a story.
That’s why we take a human-centric, story-centric approach to interpreting data. We’re human-centric because we’re always passionate about looking past the numbers to discover what they reveal about the people your brand is looking to reach. Our discoveries help us generate new theories to be tested by future marketing efforts.
We’re story-centric because we know that data can tell us a lot, but it can’t tell us who we are or what we have to say. Data can help us understand if our story is resonating or if it can be told better, but it can’t substitute for a brand that inspires loyalty, motivates, and moves real people.
Getting Perspective
The clue is in the word insight – the ability to visualize data is incredibly powerful. When you have the power to take data streams coming in from all parts of your business, and combine them to form big picture, you’re practically unstoppable.
To put this data to its best use, you need integrated teams to provide context and ensure the right questions are asked. And in order to make business decisions that are both timely and smart, your brand requires insights fast enough (and clear enough) to make a difference in the way you work.
We work with a range of business analytics platforms to integrate data from across your organization. The purpose of this is not just to build pretty dashboards, but to impact both brand and business by offering a clearer view into your operations. And with better data visibility, gathering insights, and relating them to your brand’s goals, becomes much easier.
Fueling Strategy and Execution
Data is not just essential to understanding how campaigns perform – it’s the fuel of our entire strategic approach. Data collection and analysis is key to creating marketing strategies that are on target and move your brand in the right direction.
At the start of a marketing engagement, you’ll typically find us collecting data from everywhere – first-party, third-party, competitor, industry, audience, platform, online, and offline data – whatever we can get, in other words.
As you’d expect, we collect data obsessively in running and evaluating marketing campaigns. The advantage of taking a whole-of-business approach to data analytics is that it gives us the ability to measure performance beyond simple attribution models – by observing the real-time (or near real-time) relationship between sales and advertising in a region, for example.
By adding our skilled cross-disciplinary teams to your brand’s own team, we enable faster data and insight delivery for more responsive decision-making. And in the ever-changing competitive landscape, the faster your brand moves and adjusts to trends and business climates, the better off you’ll be.
Content is the heart and soul of a campaign, and ultimately what makes your marketing efforts connect. Unsurprisingly, it’s at the center of our marketing methodology.
Quality content is the centerpiece of any marketing campaign. It’s what your customers fall in love with. It’s what they share with friends, save for later, and remember down the line. When it really hits, content is as close to brand magic as you get.
Today, there’s more content around us than ever before, and it’s never been harder for brands to be noticed, let alone remembered. In this world, even solid creative can fall flat if it doesn’t have exactly the right message for the right audience, delivered memorably. It takes an agile and strategic team that can employ data to build, deliver, and amplify engaging narratives.
At Cyberlation, we’re creating content that resonates with your customers because it’s engineered for them. Our content marketing services draw on well-crafted strategies, data, and channel expertise to find synergy between creativity and proven tactics. It’s creative meets number-crunching, selling meets storytelling, left brain meets right brain — and it builds brands.
Art Meets Science
While you can and often should advertise to raise awareness, pushing out messages will only get you so far. Brands need ways to attract consumers’ increasingly scarce attention, and that means providing memorable experiences – content your audience would enjoy no matter who produced it.
But the challenge isn’t just quality — it’s relevance, too. Not only do you have to create exciting content, you also have to deliver it to the right people at the right times and in the right places.
Brands that pull this off position themselves for success, even in today’s noisier-than-ever market. Brands that can’t, however, risk getting lost in the fray.
Creative Heart, Strategic Brain
You can’t just put any old content out in the world, and you have to put it in the right places when you do. Even the best content will underperform without a plan, and a great content strategy still needs to be executed. That’s why come prepared to do both.
Our marketing framework makes content creation the core of a data-driven, human-centric process. We start with the brand story and absorb all the data we can to understand the audiences it speaks to. We look for opportunities to tell that story in new ways, or to solve specific challenges – whether that’s educating an audience, making an emotional connection, or making a point in a new way.
From there, we create immersive campaigns from the ground up, building loveable experiences across the right platforms. By the time something enters the wild, we know what our goals are, who our audience is, and what we intend to achieve. Marketing moves fast and we stay agile thanks to a process that encourages collaboration every step of the way.
Promotion and Evaluation
A piece of content can hit the jackpot and find a huge audience, but the best content marketers in the business rely on consistency. They build an audience by finding a format people like, tweaking it in accordance with feedback, and sticking with it as they gain momentum.
But in an age of diminished organic reach, having a plan in place to promote content intelligently can accelerate this process. Paid promotion can be valuable not just because it expands your reach, but because it gives you a wealth of new data about what headlines or ads attract attention and which audiences have an affinity for your content.
This gets at something else that’s vital to making good content – honest evaluation and iteration. At Cyberlation, this process is baked into our marketing methodology. We look closely at how any piece of content performed and feed our insights back into the next round of strategy and creation. It can feel like luck when content picks up steam – but we find that this discipline lets us get more lucky, more often.
