Engagement: This is What Marketing Is Now

There's another layer to your marketing plans that's critical to your success. If you're not giving your customers the chance to share their experiences, rate your products, and ask friends for their feedback, you're missing out.

Together. Flickr user Dev Null.

You see, most people don't just look at your advertising, your web site, or your catalogs anymore when they're ready to buy. They do online research, they check product reviews, and they ask their friends what they think. 

So if you're not helping them do that, you're preventing customers from completing today's sales cycle. Why would you do that? 

So, while you're getting ready for your holiday sales push, add a couple of things to your to-do list:

1) Product reviews: Product reviews enable your customers to share their thoughts with you, and give advice to one another - a key part of today's purchasing experience. Even poor reviews help you - they give you a chance to make it right for your customers and to improve your products and service.

2) Community: Is there a place online where your customers can congregate? Whether you run forums, a Facebook page, or a Pinterest presence, you need a place where people can share.

3) Sharing: One of my favorite local restaurants just ran a contest where users were asked to take a picture in the restaurant (of their friends, the food, the decor, etc.) using Instagram and then post it on their Facebook page. Hundreds of people participated and they got some great submissions, and wonderful images of their delicious dishes. Customers had a reason to return to their Facebook page again and again to see new photos and vote on their favorites.

4) Let Them In: People need a little more than ads or marketing copy to get them ready to make a purchase. Can you show your customers how your product fits in with their lives? Give them real stories from real people? Tell them a little bit about you and your staff? Explain what inspires you to do what you do? I highly recommend you make some videos to show customers a little bit more about who you are and what happens behind the scenes. Let customers in, and ask them to stay a while.

How are you engaging your customers? Please share.

Need a little help making some friends? Let me know. I can help.

Related Posts
What is Story Marketing and How Does it Work?
Make Your Content Go Viral

Have You Tried a Facebook Promoted Post?

Recently, Facebook has been offering a new, inexpensive way to advertise. I think you should give Facebook Promoted Posts a try. Here's how it works, and why you should test it for your page.

From Flickr user Sean MacEntee.

How it works:


For a little cash - usually, $5, $10, $20, or a little more, depending on how many Facebook fans you have, Facebook will make sure your post is seen by a larger percentage of your fans and their friends. Right now, if you have more than 400 fans on your page, you can promote any post for three days.

Why you should try it:

An average Facebook post will be seen by about 16% of your fans. One of my clients is doing better than that - their average post is seen by about 30% of their fans. They have a small, but very engaged community.

When we spent $10 to promote a Facebook post, we went far beyond that - our promoted post reached six times that many people - more than twice the amount of people than our total fan base. Many more people saw and shared our promoted post than usual.

What's more, we saw a doubling of engagement in the 10 days after our promoted post, gained some new fans, and we continue to see a 30% lift in engagement on Facebook, several weeks after the promoted post. 

What to promote:

I'd recommend testing something entertaining - a video, photo gallery, game, or something else fun. Inactive fans - those who haven't interacted with you in a while - are going to see this post and you want to give them a reason to rejoin your active fan base.

But Beware:

Yes, we only spent $10 and got some encouraging results. But those $10 posts add up. Make sure you're budgeting appropriately - you don't want to be spending money every few days to promote another post unless you're seeing good results. Your priority should be generating quality, engaging content to serve your social media audience - once you have great content, then work on promoting it. 

Let me know how this works for you. I'm looking forward to hearing your stories!

Does your Facebook strategy  need a bit of a facelift? Let me know. I can help. 

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How to Raise Your Level of Social Media Engagement

...or, Social Media, You're Doing it Wrong

There are a lot of social media skeptics out there - people who say that networks like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and Pinterest are a big waste of valuable time. Common curmudgeonly statements include:

Gratuitous cat. Photo: L. Ibraheem

• "It's all about kittens and what people ate for lunch"
• "It's all women planning fairytale weddings and picking out nail polish."
• "It's just young dudes playing video games and sharing some kind of code."
• "My mom/grandpa/auntie uses it to get photos of the kids. "
• "It's not for business."

I think they're missing the point. It's true that people do all of these things with social media, but

They do a lot more.


Like:

• Sharing and supporting meaningful social causes.
• Watching video how-to's
• Inviting friends and family to send caring messages to a loved one with cancer.
• Creating and sharing original art.
• Getting in touch with experts about sticky business problems.
• Finding jobs and employees.
• Discussing the news of the day, and new developments in almost any field.
• Learning about subjects that interest them.
• Just keeping in touch with friends.

So, if you're finding that people aren't really engaging with you on social media,

Can you help them do any of the things I just listed above?

I bet you can. If you're not sure how, drop me a line. I can help.

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Your 2012 Strategy: Driving Brand Engagement

How are you going to engage your community in 2012?

First things first. 

Change your headset – it’s not an audience, it’s a community.

What does an audience do? It watches.

What does a community do? It communicates, engages, and acts.

Community. From Flickr user Tobyotter.

Who’s doing this? One example I came across was Heinz – in the U.K., where they are a big soup brand, they’re getting fans to send personalized soup cans with “get well” messages to one another for cold and flu season. The cost is low - just 1.99 pounds, and the engagement factor is high – people are taking pictures of the cans, tweeting and sharing with others. The bonus – many people who had never purchased anything from Facebook before are now buying from Heinz in a new way.

How can you start driving your community to engage with your brand?

Monitor conversations – evaluate what people are talking about and why. With this insight, you can understand what’s going on before you get involved – to avoid barging in.

Track – what, when, how much interest, and sentiment. What are people saying about you and how often? Is there a time of day or week when you get more attention? What are people interested in the most, and is that interest - sentiment - positive or negative?

Community of dogs. From Flickr user Beverly & Pack.

Identify key influencers and track their conversations so that you can engage with them in a relevant, authentic way.

Look at what competitors are doing – what kinds of campaigns and activities are generating a lot of comments and buzz? Is it positive or negative.

Also, mobile is key. A recent statistic from Motricity that’s been getting some attention? 64% of holiday mobile shoppers plan to shop with their mobile device more in 2012 – with mobile coupons, giftcards, and ratings getting the most attention.

How are you driving engagement this year? Drop me a line and let me know.


Related posts: 

My series on 2012 planning
Why you should care more about tablet users