Creative Talk with Corrie Dark, Digital Comms Specialist

This month we talk with Corrie Dark, a digital communications strategist freelancing across Australia and New Zealand. 

Tell us about communications strategy?

Every channel matters. Even though I focus on digital and social, it’s important to be aware of how channels interrelate on a campaign, and how customers interact with them all so that the approach makes sense at every touchpoint. Ultimately, storytelling hasn’t changed, just the number of campfires. Great content is still vital. You just need to understand what “great” is. We have so much data available now, advertising can be finely tuned.

What type of projects are you most specialised in?

I love the art of connecting businesses and customers across digital and social. Whether there’s a behavioural change nut to crack, or figuring out how to generate engagement or sales, that’s the part I specialise in. Cracking the problem and then laying out the resulting campaign or communications plan is really satisfying.

Laying the foundations and having a solid digital strategy should always be the case, right?

Absolutely. What’s most important is that digital is integrated into the strategy from the beginning. Customers don’t see channels, they see brands. And that brand needs to be consistent across all channels (offline and online) engaging slightly differently depending on how the customer is thinking and feeling at that point. It’s also critical to:

• Start with business outcomes and customer needs
• People get engaged with ideas and emotions, not technology so solutions must be customer-centric rather than technology-led
• Digital is just a channel. Not an afterthought or an add-on. It must be integrated with the wider plan to be successful.

Do you prefer agency or client side projects?

Both have their benefits, being part of an accounts and creative team mix in agency-land means I get to ideate with some of the best in the business. Client-side enables problem solving at ground zero directly with stakeholders. So they’re both good for their own reasons.

Do you work full time with one client or across several at any one time?

It depends on the project. I often end up working across multiple brands and clients at one time. But it’s great to be able to get knee deep into one project too.

What would be your dream project?

I love a good sticky comms challenge where clients are up for thinking differently and trusting you in the process. I’ve been lucky enough to work on a couple of dream projects lately, where the client has allowed us to take a step back from a purely digital brief and integrate other channels. This has meant as well as generating sales leads, we’ve been able to involve key influential customers and create content which will help tell the brand story in the long term.

Where do you see digital strategy heading in the future?

From a communications standpoint, I think we’re finally starting to see digital as a component of the plan, rather than focusing on new technology and trying to retrofit it into an idea. No matter how cool it is, that technology might not be the right one for what the business wants to achieve. The most game-changing innovations come through answering a customer need with a technically savvy solution.

If you are looking to book a digital comms specialist / strategist, and would like to talk with Corrie or view our other candidates, contact Louise@thecreativestore.com.au