Tag Archives: Digital marketing

August 24, 2016 · 10:59 am

How To Stay Engaged With Your Consumers

OK, so you buy into my thinking on the need to stay engaged with your customers and potential customers in a meaningful way. Now what? That’s a question my clients and I face all the time so let me share a few things we’ve done to promote that engagement. Feel free to borrow!

The first and most obvious thing you can do is to support listening via social media channels. If you haven’t set up a listening dashboard, I’d make that a top priority. Hootsuite is a good place to start, and it can also be useful in populating those channels with content. There are plenty of other tools out there for listening, but listening and responding when appropriate is what we’re after.

Part of what we’re after is to become a friendly subject matter expert in the eyes of consumers. There are plenty of channels in which to do so, but what’s important is that you not try to be in every single one. Unless you have a support staff of a dozen people, you’re going to have to pick the channel that is most meaningful to your customers and focus your efforts there. My guess is that it will be Twitter since it’s the most interactive.

Next would be a decision about some longer form content. This might be on your own website, a blog, maybe a post on LinkedIn or Medium. Try them all and see which drives traffic and engagement. Remember, there is no garbage can on the Internet so whatever you write for one platform is probably reusable on another.

What do you write about? Start with thinking about how many questions do customers ask you in a week. The answers to each one of those questions can serve as the basis for a post. Unless you’re a masochist like me, you needn’t write every day either. A couple of times a week is a lot for most folks. Write about your customers. Featuring a long-time purchaser rewards them and shows all the others that you’re grateful. Explain a common problem your customers have and how you’re solving it for them.

Ask yourself how you keep in touch with your best friends. Don’t treat consumers any differently and you’ll be on the road to a productive, engaged relationship. Make sense?

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August 23, 2016 · 10:59 am

Measuring What Matters

English: A business ideally is continually see...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I read an interesting report from the Forrester folks this morning. It is about business-to-business marketing but I think it’s instructive to any of us who are in marketing. It’s called “Metrics That Matter For B2B Marketers” and you can read it here. I’m a big fan of the premise:

B2B marketers must do more than measure activities like click-through rates and event attendees; they need to show how their activity directly affects business results. This report shows marketers how to provide insight on the things that matter most to their executive peers and the board — growth in revenue, profit, and customers. While marketers need to capture a wide range of metrics, this report focuses on measuring marketing’s contribution to revenue as a function of customer acquisition and installed base growth.

When I was in TV and marketing (which probably should have been called business development) was a relatively new concept (as opposed to sales which was there from day one), I always felt that part of my role as “the marketing guy” was to demonstrate that marketing was part of the revenue-generating part of the team. The only way to do that was to quantify how what I was doing was driving sustainable business.

Fast forward a lot of years. All of us in marketing are deluged with data. The problem, as the report points out, is that many folks take the easy way out and measure the easy to find stuff while ignoring the pieces of information that may be more impactful to the business but harder to discern. As the report says:

Marketers need to measure a lot of things to understand what is working and what isn’t. Unfortunately, most get stuck measuring activity, not value: More than half (61%) of the marketers we surveyed admitted that most of their data work went into reporting on how they did, not showing how marketing drives better business results.

Measure what matters. Measure quality over quantity. Don’t “manage to metrics rather than performance.” OK?

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August 18, 2016 · 12:41 pm

Quit Pushing Me

We discuss engagement in this space fairly often. I’ve made no bones about the fact that I’m a believer in The Cluetrain Manifesto and that markets are conversations. Think about a conversation you’d have at a bar or a party. You would listen at least as much as you spoke and you probably wouldn’t keep tossing random lines at people, especially if those lines are only about you. Now let’s look at a piece of research.

According to The Future of Content: Rethinking Content Consumption, a national survey report, consumers want to discover digital content on their own and are skeptical of brands pushing online ads through interruptive channels. Rapt Media, recently surveyed an audience of more than 1,000 consumers to understand how content discovery is driving the content personalization trend.

Insights reveal consumers want personalized content experiences that are meaningful, helpful and valuable to their specific needs and interests. But equally important is their empowerment in discovering it on their own. The younger millennial generation is especially mistrusting of brands pushing interruptive online ads.

Key findings from the survey include:

● 95% take action to avoid seeing or receiving online ads
● 5% say ads influence their purchase decisions
● 57% of millennials block ad content because it is too pushy
● 43% say online ads are not personalized to their interests, but 62% say the content they discover on their own is personalized
● 61% say that even if content is customized, they still prefer to find it on their own
● 46% say content they find on their own influences their purchase decisions

I especially like this quote: “Programmatic push messaging is implicit personalization perceived by consumers as irrelevant and inauthentic.” Yep. The findings confirm that consumers have come to expect content personalization along with the opportunity to shape their own experience, so why are we spending time and resources on doing anything that delivers an experience other than that? Maybe we need to make our business behavior more like our cocktail party behavior (and who has ever pondered THAT before?)?

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