The Digital Approach to Interacting with Your Customers

By Glenn Renner
HomeSphere President & COO

 

Last month we discussed building credibility through thought leadership in various formats. According to CMI, “Content marketing is… creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience–with the objective of driving profitable customer action.” So, now that you have generated worthwhile content, it’s time to share it with your customers in attempt to build engagement and ultimately encourage sales.

Core to any digital marketing and engagement plan is the use of general as well as behavior-based, targeted email. Publishing a regular newsletter is a great way to “speak” to your entire database on a monthly basis, delivering your most recent content and industry news. Newsletter text can include new product/service announcements, new partnerships and press coverage, along with summaries and links to full whitepapers, case studies, eBooks and more. Additionally, a series of more focused email communications should be created each month for segmented campaigns.

Some customers on your email list may rarely leave a “digital footprint”. In other words, they do not register for webinars, click through promotional emails, download case studies, or take other actions to indicate interest. As their typical engagement level is low, you don’t know what they are specifically interested in—so, offering a variety of content in a newsletter makes sense. When a topic catches their eye, they will click through. When this occurs, their lead score should increase as you track them in your marketing automation system. Once that score hits a set threshold, yours sales team should be alerted for personal follow-up.

Other customers might engage with your digital communications regularly, indicating strong interest in the content you are providing. In order to maintain this level of engagement, you’ll want to tailor your email communications to their interests using a triggered email campaign. For example, if a customer downloads a whitepaper on your site about trends in outdoor living spaces, an automated campaign could follow up a week later with an email that includes a special discount for rain screens or patio materials. If a customer attends a webinar on decking, the following day they could receive an email with “tips and tricks” for proper installation. Monitoring this behavior and setting up rules for when and what emails to send will allow for more personalized interactions with your customers. Again, as they interact with your digital communications, their lead score should compound with alerts triggering at set levels to your sales team. Sales follow-up messaging should be tailored based on the digital assets the customer engaged with.

Social media outlets such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn are a great way to distribute content to customers and prospects via “micro-blogging”. Unlike email, you don’t have to have contacts in your database to reach people through social media. However, building a strong social media following takes a substantial amount of planning, time and effort. You should become well versed in social media strategy by researching common “dos and don’ts” online before attempting this method of content distribution, as it’s easy to gain negative attention for seemingly innocent posts. One easy tip to remember is to engage the audience in conversation rather than talking at your followers. Everyone loves to share their opinion and preference and this often naturally persuades additional engagement in a more subtle and friendly manner. Each member of your organization with access to company-owned social media accounts should be aware of the overall strategy and guidelines for posting content to ensure consistency and avoid conflict.

Posting often is the best way to build followers on any platform. According to a study of 36 million Twitter users, “a twitter user who has written 1 to 1000 tweets has an average of 51 to 100 followers, whereas users who have tweeted more than 10,000 times tend to be followed by 1,001 to 5000 individuals.” Reposting content you’ve already generated a few times is perfectly acceptable. On professional networking sites like LinkedIn, you should not only post updates to your company page, but also to industry-related groups with members who may be interested in your content.

Remember, content marketing is not a sales pitch—it’s an offering of ideas and experience to provoke thought and conversation, providing resources rather than promotion.