Engagement Marketing is not interruptive, but two-day dialogs.
Engagement Marketing is not interruptive, but two-day dialogs.It’s been happening. For a long time. But until recently your participation was optional. Today – it isn’t.
The Direct Marketing Association estimates that commercial e-mail will generate $45.65 for every dollar spent in 2008. Contrast that with $22.52 for non-email Internet marketing (search engine optimization and ads) and $7.09 for catalog.
What is B2B is not even clearHow to reach B2B customers is constantly evolvingMarketing paradigm is forever re-aligned
During the past decade, the marketing world has changed dramatically. Today, buyers are being bombarded with product-related messaging from every direction, and its only getting worse. Forrester Research estimates consumers will receive more than 9,000 email marketing messages a year by 2014!
In this brave new world, interruption is out, but messages that are relevant, personal and helpful are in. With the wealth of today’s user-generated content, buyers can find out everything they want to know about a company, and they don’t necessarily need the official Web site or product brochure to get the information they need. As such, they will be indifferent to businesses that are indifferent to them.In the new age of engagement marketing, creative content will be as important as ever, but that alone will no longer be enough. With the permission of their customers, marketers must absorb a nearly infinite array of data points on preferences, behaviors, purchases, postings and dialogues. Most daunting of all, marketers will need to analyze and act on all this data with a sophistication and scale never before experienced that has no precedent in marketing or any other business endeavor before it. And then once a program has been initiated, marketers must analyze the results more closely than ever in order to demonstrate value and ROI.
Social media is a fantastic forum for listening and responding. Monitor key communities, competitors, influencers and related industry topics and keywords on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other social networks. This will increase your understanding of what people are talking about, better enable you to join conversations where they already exist, and can prompt new ideas. The more you interact with users, the stronger your content will resonate, and the better the chances your messages will go viral. Yet many B2B marketers spend the majority of their time on outbound messaging and pay little attention to the marketplace. Only 39 percent of the B2B marketers Silverpop surveyed monitor social networks, and just 28 percent monitor blogs.To avoid this scenario, task your marketing team with setting aside time each week to read what others are saying in the marketplace. By paying attention to this dialogue and listening to the issues your audience is concerned about, you’ll be better positioned to produce content with timely insights.
Salespeople have the potential to be marketing’s eyes and ears in the marketplace, providing invaluable information about the needs, interests, issues and concerns of customers and prospects. Take the time to discuss what sales is seeing in the marketplace, and use this information to inform their research. Who is buying and who is balking—and why? What points of differentiation resonate with prospects, and which fall flat? When it comes time to actually craft messaging, continue to use salespeople as a sounding board. They may have valuable insights regarding the voice you’re using to communicate, and since at some point they’ll be taking over the dialogue from marketing, you’ll want to make sure everyone is in sync so the transition is seamless. By involving sales in the process, you’ll help ensure its voice is present in the buying dialogue—even though at earlier stages that voice cannot be too heavy or intense.
Salespeople have the potential to be marketing’s eyes and ears in the marketplace, providing invaluable information about the needs, interests, issues and concerns of customers and prospects. Take the time to discuss what sales is seeing in the marketplace, and use this information to inform their research. Who is buying and who is balking—and why? What points of differentiation resonate with prospects, and which fall flat? When it comes time to actually craft messaging, continue to use salespeople as a sounding board. They may have valuable insights regarding the voice you’re using to communicate, and since at some point they’ll be taking over the dialogue from marketing, you’ll want to make sure everyone is in sync so the transition is seamless. By involving sales in the process, you’ll help ensure its voice is present in the buying dialogue—even though at earlier stages that voice cannot be too heavy or intense.
Actions speak loudest, so measuring contact engagement across a variety of metrics will give you important information that you can use to build a stronger dialogue. For starters, if your content isn’t prompting recipients to open your emails or click through on links, you’ll need to adjust accordingly. This may involve testing new content to see what better engages recipients, surveying contacts to ask why they haven’t found your communications engaging, or sending your least-engaged subscribers their very own content. Conversely, you can also create content designed especially for your most-engaged subscribers. Measuring social-sharing activity gives you a new way to analyze communications. For instance, imagine you sent out and email with a link to a white paper. Previously, you may have measured engagement by whether recipients opened your email, clicked through and downloaded your white paper, for example.Monitoring social media enables you to also gauge your success by whether your target audience is sharing your white paper and talking about it. These deeper insights will subsequently allow you to engage prospects and customers more strongly by tailoring future content accordingly.
Hooking Web analytics into your email marketing program can also help you get to know your prospects, by monitoring what they do on your site—before and after they register for your email program. These actions can give you valuable information regarding their interests and location in the buying cycle. Leveraging website behavior to send highly relevant messages, even immediately following registration, can go a long way in jumpstarting the relationship.Consider a company that specializes in selling computer software to businesses. A buyer browses the site and peruses your selection of laptops before opting in to your email program. By using this data to assign the buyer to a communication track focused on laptops and related accessories, you could engage the contact from the start with educational content related to his or her interests.
Another way to collect information is to simply ask for it. So, the first tactic seems fairly obvious. Why not go right to the source to determine their preferences? Surveying recipients about their likes, dislikes, needs and desires is a smart way to gain customer insights that enable marketers to better send relevant campaigns that increase engagement. Today, new technology is enabling marketers to create more sophisticated surveys that incorporate exciting branching and advanced logic options. This allows marketers to set up surveys that move respondents through different question paths based on their answers to previous questions—tailoring the questions to the specific buyer. The benefits? Marketers have to ask respondents fewer questions to get the same amount of information, resulting in higher levels of survey completions. Plus, you can set up countless different branching scenarios that enable you to get very specific in the data and preferences you collect, which you can then use to send highly targeted communications. You could branch based on product, product line, preferred store, etc.Regardless of how you use these more sophisticated surveys, you’ll generate valuable market research that will enable you to dialogue more effectively with interested consumers.
Part of gaining a greater knowledge of your prospects involves observing the route they follow from initial interest to engaged prospect to paying customer. How do they initially find your company? What do they know about your product or service and its category? What questions do they ask? What materials do they leverage in the buying evaluation? At what point do they transition from online content and emails to live dialogue? And what information do they need to be armed with before they’re ready to discuss a purchase? This is called a dialogue path. Understanding dialogue paths can help you craft better communications and time them more judiciously, ideas we’ll explore in greater detail later in this presentation.
Compiling a strong base of research to build on is a key first step in the process of connecting with prospects, but it can go to waste if you’re careless when it comes time to develop your marketing content.
Common messaging pitfalls include focusing primarily on your brand and products, writing in an overly sales-centric voice, and covering subject matter that fails to resonate with your recipients. Here are some tips for creating compelling content that will engage your contacts and encourage a strong two-way dialogue.
Today’s savvy buyers will tune you out quickly if you deliver a nonstop barrage of heavy product pitches. Instead, take a more educational and engaging approach, particularly in social media and email communications (at least until late in the dialogue). Be transparent and lose the PR/marketing speak. Communicate in a human voice and take the dialogue as an opportunity to differentiate yourself from competitors. Be interesting—and be actively interested in wanting to hear what others are thinking as well. Make sure buyer issues are driving your dialogue, not your latest products or services. Your content must be current to the themes and issues buyers are facing right now, not a week or month or year ago. Being in the moment is critical. In general, your conversation should start with big-picture ideas and thought leadership, eventually channeling buyers toward a direct dialogue with your organization on their timetable.
Every marketer dreams of seeing his or her carefully crafted messages go viral, increasing reach exponentially. To get started, you have to seed the conversation. Post content on social networks in a style that generates reaction and conversation around a topic that is consistent with your company’s offerings, but isn’t directly self-promotional. This helps position your company as an authority, and often the conversation will lead to consumers discussing your offerings for you. To leverage your content for maximum impact, create messaging than lends itself to comments and conversation-starting. And make it fun. Social media shouldn’t be boring, and a lack of enthusiasm and sincerity will be apparent and can hurt your efforts. Highly relevant content must be the rock-solid underpinning of social email marketing programs, so carefully align messages and calls-to-action with the interests of the target audience.
No how matter how brilliant your content, today’s marketplace demands that you speak to buyers in a one-to-one fashion, rather than sending them blanket “one-size-fits-all” messaging. Personalizing messages and including dynamic content based on preferences and demographic or behavioral data enables marketers to deliver completely different messages for each recipient within a single campaign. In fact, the single most important way you can improve your email performance is to increase relevance through increased use of segmentation and dynamic content.
Finding the perfect marketing mix so you communicate with recipients on their terms is essential in today’s marketplace. With buyers moving in and out of different channels throughout the day, taking an integrated multichannel approach significantly increases the chance of getting your message in front of them. Buyers also tend to use different channels at different stages of the buying cycle. For example, earlier in the buying process, they tend to leverage inbound mediums such as search engines and social media pages to seek information. About a third to midway through the buying process, outbound channels such as email become a critical link for nurturing. Simply put, one linear communication isn’t going to cut it. To keep consumers engaged in productive dialogue, accelerate the lead-to-sales cycle and push leads downstream, the best strategy is to use different communication channels. And remember: Let your prospects’ preferences be your guide for how you connect with them. Here’s a look at some of the key marketing channels, with tips for maximizing their potential.
For example, including social sharing links in emails will increase the reach of your message by an average of 24 percent.
So how does issue of dialogue connect with our marketing and sales organization?This is how I think about this issue and how I think about where field marketing fits in …As you know, marketing automation plays one key role – driving nurturing activities on a scale basis and with leads at a variety of stages.But automation can only take us so far, and – in fact – I believe it frees us to be able to focus on the big prize:Authentic dialogue with buyers that is substantive; that is an outstanding experience; and that signals our honest and legitimate participation in marketers’ communities.That’s where field marketing comes in as a critical component of nurturing leads and staying ‘IN’ the dialogue so that as a sales team you have the greatest opportunity to engage with and close new customer opportunities.Here’s one way I conceptualize field marketing in terms of this idea of dialogue … EXPLAIN CHART
The rise of the Internet—and later, social media—set off an inexorable shift in our society that has transformed how we live, how we learn, how we communicate—and how we buy. Buyers today are more knowledgeable, more connected and have more options than at any time in history. As such, the days of marketers shouting their messages as loud as they can, to as many people as they can find, are coming to an end. In the new age of buyer-centric marketing, creative content is more important than ever, but that alone is no longer enough. It must be substantive and responsive. And marketers must to be able to effortlessly reach into and participate with a rapidly emerging set of channels and mediums, connecting with prospects on their terms—when and how they want to dialogue. Only then will your messaging truly be absorbed by the buyer, and only then will you see the benefits of increased engagement, conversions and ROI that creating a strong dialogue with prospects can bring.