You don’t need to dive into an ocean of social media and networking tools in order to have conversations
There are now so many channels for communication, it seems customers should be more engaged than ever. Are yours? If not, or if not enough, take a look at how much time your marketing people spend on outbound messages, and how much on creating and participating in conversations with customers.
Your customers are participating on social networks and contributing to social media. While these are terrible places for sales pitches, social networks provide great channels for connecting and building relationships, as the vast majority of business buyers use social networks to keep up with trends and stay connected. Yet, most B2B companies who track social media activity simply count mentions, and almost 70 percent ignore customer feedback by having no process in place to respond.
Find out which social networks your customers frequent, and design a process for interacting with those.
The good news is you don’t need to dive into an ocean of social media tools in order to have conversations. Here are some ideas for making some traditional marketing methods more interactive.
Collateral and White Papers - Create a wiki instead of static product data sheets, brochures, and white papers. Provide a framework and some base content; then give your customers the ability to contribute. You can moderate to ensure accuracy, of course. You’ll have more complete information on topics that are most relevant to your audience. Best of all, customers will trust the information more than anything you write.
Websites - Don’t hide customer feedback and support in a corner of your site. Place request links for customers and comments right on product pages so that customers can respond immediately to the content they see. Asking a question gets the customer more engaged than downloading a white paper. Involve product management and engineering in responding to the queries. It’s a great way for them to learn from the customers they otherwise rarely or never see. Post the most interesting questions and answers, or turn them into additional content.
Press Releases - Make your PR team your customers’ and partners’ PR team. Assign your PR group responsibilities for key account segments, and ask them to build relationships with your customers’ and partners’ PR staffs. Rather than writing every story, your PR team can then assist partners and customers with identifying and pursuing PR opportunities that promote their companies, while showing how you’ve helped them succeed.
Webinars - By now, webinars are a “traditional” marketing tool. Many companies tend to make webinar broadcasts rather than conversations, though they can be great interactive tools. Select the webinar hosting services that offer polls, chat, and Q&A. Use surveys both before and after your webinars. And don’t limit the surveys to “Did you find this useful?” Ask questions that help you understand customers and that customers will be interested in. Share the results either during the webinar or as a value-added follow-up.
In-person Events - These are expensive, so why spend the entire time lecturing on information that’s already on your website? Third-party presenters can be more interesting, but any lecture can get dreary, fast. Give attendees lots of time to interact with you and with one another while you listen and take notes. Consider a workshop rather than a presentation format so that the entire event is interactive. At its user conferences, EMC’s Information Intelligence Group offers customers free sessions with consultants. This highly popular chance to interact gets high marks from customers and highly qualified leads and account intelligence for EMC.
If opening a conversation with customers seems too fraught with risk, try letting a small group of customers you know well contribute; then open further when you’re comfortable managing a broader conversation.