Social Media: A 3-step plan for learning more about your audience
By Neil Rosen
Article Highlights:
• Branded communities let your customers interact directly with your company and potentially influence the way you do business
• Website remarketing provides clear information about your customers’ online activities
• Well-designed email campaigns show you are willing to share important information about your company
Today’s online customer relationship management strategies need to look much more like partnerships than the traditional vendor relationship, which focuses almost exclusively on sales and service. The ability to research products and services online, get customer feedback and reviews, and get a solid overview of a company’s reputation almost instantly educates consumers like never before. In most cases this creates advantages for the companies with the best products, services, and reputations. Unfortunately — and anti-intuitively — this is frequently not the case when companies have a previous relationship with potential buyers.
Even companies with strong products, services, and reputations can be hurt by the research process, which typically entails the use of search engines and brings a brand’s competitors — and their promotions — directly into the path of the consumer’s pre-purchase process. This is why companies spend so much on search engine marketing.
While search engines provide a great way for companies to boost market share by stealing customers from competitors at the point of a buying decision, the process also creates the risk of making it difficult to protect an existing base and has contributed to an overall decline in customer loyalty.
To mitigate the risk of losing customers in the search process, companies must provide consumers with all the information they need to make an educated buying decision in a manner that enables the company to maintain at least some level of control over the online buying process, all before the consumer ever goes to the search engines. This is not an easy task, as can be seen by the overwhelming popularity of Google and the other search engines.
However, by integrating email marketing, website marketing, and branded community strategy, companies can do just that — provide prospects and customers with reliable information about the company, as well as access to product reviews, previous customer experiences, other customers, and research — all to help them make a buying decision without ever feeling the need to visit the search engines.
Here’s how it works:
Branded communities are designed to recreate the entire social network environment in your own portal. Your prospects and customers are invited to join, and once they become members, their entire relationship with your company changes. They are able to interact directly with your company and potentially influence the way you do business through message boards, group discussions, and feedback mechanisms. In addition, your community enables your customers to have direct contact with each other, allowing your advocates and enthusiasts to influence the sales process directly. Plus, your customers can invite their friends, colleagues, and family to join them in the community.
Application programming interfaces (APIs) can be used effectively to pull Facebook and Twitter content related to your company into your community. You can then use this information to monitor your reputation and respond to people with questions and concerns. At the same time the availability of this information gives potential buyers confidence about the transparency of the company.
And while your customers are learning about you, you are also learning a lot about them, both individually and as a group. The discussion groups they participate in, experts they follow, pages they view, frequency of their visits, use of viral tools, and questions they raise all contribute to your growing knowledge base.
Website remarketing provides the next best source of information you can gather about your customers and prospects. What pages do they visit? What links do they click on? It can show you where they are spending the most time on the site, what time of day or day of the week they show up, and which pages they are visiting multiple times.
Your website is as much an extension of your branded community as your branded community is an extension of your website. If you want to close deals with your customers before they search, you need to consistently track their activity across both of these media and react to it with relevant content and offers in near real-time. Fortunately, the tools are in place to automate this process, making it simple to set up and inexpensive to execute.
Of course, email is the major tool used to translate all of the information you gather and turn that information into sales. Well-designed, activity-based email campaigns should show each customer that:
1. You know the products and services they are looking to purchase.
2. You are willing to share important information about those products and services, including customer reviews, and about your company.
3. You are ready to provide a valuable offer to get them to buy.
Only then are you able to close the transaction and preempt the consumers’ desire to expand their research.
In this context, email becomes a different type of vehicle, one that does more than blast offers. Each campaign becomes a reminder of how your company does business and is designed around the customer’s own behavior on your website, in your branded community, and through their previous transaction history. Will you continue to blast email to your overall list? Yes. Will the frequency of the blast types of emails decrease dramatically? Yes. Will it eventually disappear? Yes. Will your inbox delivery improve? Of course.
All of this is the prequel to the next generation of online marketing: chatter marketing. The advent of chatter marketing will enable companies to be the proverbial fly on the wall, tracking their customers (with their permission) across multiple venues online, including websites, social networks, user groups, and private clubs. All this will help brands understand customers’ needs and get clear buying signals that can be translated into sales and loyalty, without over-communicating.
Companies will become their customers’ trusted source for the products and services they offer. With chatter marketing, the technology is in place and the strategies and tactics are being developed and refined. The goal is to effectively manage the competitive environment and reach prospects and customers before they search.
Neil Rosen is the founder and CEO of eWayDirect.
