Eileen Lynch, Thomson Reuters’ head of global brand strategy, discusses how the company uses digital to attract customers
Q: What role does digital play in Thomson Reuters’ overall marketing strategy??
A: If you start with the premise that our business is primarily on a digital platform, you naturally will gravitate towards using the digital space to connect to customers in real time. In doing that, we found a great opportunity and started to think differently about how we use advertising, digital marketing and social media to connect to our customers in real time while they are doing business.?
Q: How much of your latest branding campaign is digital??
A: From a weight standpoint, it’s probably somewhere from 55% to 60%. All things that are not digital are leading the customer or prospect to digital. If we are running an ad in print media, what we are doing is leading everyone to a microsite that will give them deeper experience. While the number may not be as significant, the value of the landing page being digital first still drives the effort. ?
Q: What’s the main goal for the landing page in the campaign? ?
A: What we are doing is using the microsite to give you a full experience. If you come to the microsite, the first thing you can do is explore the wide range of opportunities at Thomson Reuters in terms of the range of professional industries that we serve. You can go inside those industries and see real-time examples of how we make a difference for customers. The primary goal of the campaign, regardless of the media platform, is for people to understand what we do and how it impacts the marketplace. In order to do that, we show people examples of the kinds of things we do for customers by putting the right information in their hands. They get to make mission-critical decisions that have a positive impact on their professions, and therefore on the marketplace.?
Q: How does this tie to the direct marketing the company does, and what Thomson and Reuters previously did separately? ?
A: We work closely with the marketing teams in the separate divisions. Their job is to stay intimately connected. They use e-mail, direct response and conferences to see how to connect to their customers and their customers’ marketplaces. They drill deep and give people a strong taste of what they can experience working with our company.?
Q: What are your digital marketing goals for 2011??
A: We are a content-rich company with an enormous amount of storytelling that happens because of our deep expertise within the news business. We have worked with the news team to draw that content and allow people to connect to it, see videos and experience Reuters.com that way.
