VistaTalks Episode 64 – Andreas Palm

In this special Digital First focused episode of VistaTalks, we speak with Andreas Palm, digital platform and content professional about his experience setting up for Digital First success by optimizing content for multiple channels and locales. Andreas studied international politics before starting a career as a content specialist in various global organizations. He has held key positions at Ladbrokes and, more recently, with Sony Mobile Communications.

His journey began in Sweden, he moved to Australia, and eventually, he ended up in London. The initial reason for joining Ladbrokes was Andreas’s love of sports. He started to look after the Nordic content team and quickly became manager for the company’s international team of content editors. Andreas shares his understanding of the cultural and linguistic differences when working with global marketing and how he enjoyed learning more about the subject.

The topic of multi-channel for digital channels is an essential part of the discussion regarding his role at Sony Mobile Communications. Andreas shares how content marketing is complex, especially when adding multiple channels, multiple markets, and languages.

Andreas shares his views that it’s not always necessary to have the same tone of voice across the board and how people use specific channels or certain platforms for a reason. He conveys how customers and users have certain expectations depending on what media platform they choose to interact on for communications.

The discussion explores how to alleviate any known pain points you have in the user journey and the importance of continuously optimizing. Other topics include customer engagement, loyalty-building, and how you don’t want to spam customers with the same message everywhere, stressing the importance of actively working with user segments.

Andreas shares the critical requirement to understand your customers on a local level and how having the right technology and data is vital, but only if you have the right people and the time to utilize this data fully. If you can understand it, you can be granular with your data, creating targeted segments. The pandemic has forced companies to embrace digital in a much bigger way and be more digitally savvy. It has become more of a normalized way to find products or services or companies or engage with brands, in general.

Andreas believes that the ambition is often customer-first and customer-centric, which is what everyone wants to do. However, it is not always that easy to do. Organizations need to focus on communicating to customers or users on the platform that they prefer in the tone of voice that suits that channel to help to have a truly customer-first approach. Andreas conveys how it is much easier to slip into a product-first process rather than a customer-first one and how it takes a lot to fully adapt to a truly customer-first approach and then stick to it.

Real examples shared include how once he started to do more granular mining of local data, he realized that Russian customers valued performance equally as high as battery life. In Taiwan, camera performance was high on people’s wishes. Local feedback and the utilization of the information helps to tailor the communications for these markets, which translates into a tremendous impact.

Andreas shares how every company has to change tools and software and become ‘super digital, which means using those tools to be more innovative and faster at what they do.