I was searching the web and I came across a video advertisement from Webtrends. I found the video to be informative and I appreciated their thesis about the importance of delivering relevant, real-time messages across all platforms where customer interactions take place. To be successful, a brand needs to deliver the right message, to the right people at the right time. The key is to learn how to acquire customers but to do so in a way where they become engaged with your brand. Customers who are engaged are much more likely to be loyal to your brand. Brand loyalists, in turn, tend to buy more and tell others about their great experiences turning their friends into potential customers as well.
Delivering real-time marketing messages across multiple platforms requires that you take a step back and evaluate your marketing efforts. You need to really ask yourself whether your digital marketing investments are generating any value. Many companies are now spending money across mobile, social and the web. Several brands have actually been able to come up with pretty interesting campaigns that engage their audience across several platforms thereby turning their customers into brand loyalists. This can be a great achievement because brand loyalty quickly turns into company growth and prosperity. Other brands, on the other hand, have fallen flat on their faces and don’t have much brand loyalty to show for it.
According to Webtrends, a successful marketing campaign delivers the right message, to the right people at the right time and engages them in experiences that turn prospects into customers. Once a new customer comes onboard, successful brands immediately work on building loyalty, thereby making it more likely that their customers buy more and tell others about their great experiences. In order to build brand loyalty with a customer, each and every message to that customer needs to be relevant. Delivering relevant messages is the key to sustaining a successful marketing effort where you maintain a strong relationship with your customers. In order to be relevant each and every time, a deep understanding of your customers across all digital channels needs to be developed. Moreover, once a deeper understanding has been gained, you will need to use those insights to formulate and deliver your marketing messages in real time. In short, you will need to create a system that continually learns from its customers and updates its individual messages in real time to those customers regardless of the platform on which those messages are being delivered (whether it be mobile, social or on the web).
So how is this done? First, you will need to gather customer insights and intelligence from many different sources such as the web, social media, CRM systems and anywhere else customer interactions take place. Once this intelligence has been gathered, you begin to use this information to build target groups. Try to spot patterns and trends so you can begin to formulate more relevant messages. One example given in the Webtrends video involved a hotel manager asking for a list of all the people that stayed at a hotel the previous spring break, that hadn’t booked during the current year but had downloaded the brochure from the hotel website in the last three weeks. That’s an example of a targeted segment. Once this segment is identified, relevant advertising messages can be formulated and delivered through email, targeted ads on Facebook or even through personalized experiences on website landing pages. We do this quite effectively on Bundlecity.com. For example, we segment our customer base by those who are interested in 12 volt TVs or ultra-thin TV wall mounts or iPhone accessories, etc. When we interact with these segments, we ensure that these customers receive a relevant message no matter how they interact with us – whether it be on our website, through email or through our social media efforts.
As your campaigns proceed, it is important to continually analyze your insights so you can measure and improve marketing performance within and across the digital channels in which you operate. This will help you pinpoint and understand digital experiences that need improvement thereby allowing you to improve the value that you deliver to your customers and the value that you gain from your marketing efforts. This is the key to acquiring and engaging customers and turning them and their friends into brand loyalists.
The preceding passage was just a summary of the Webtrends video. I recommend that you watch the video for yourself in order to get a full appreciation of the message. Click here to be taken to the Webtrends video.
