I love this time of the year to plan for the year ahead and put in place strategies to engage the right people and become ‘talkaboutable’.
It’s no news that our audiences’ attention spans are getting shorter and shorter and there is certainly a shift in how customers are engaging with brands. Companies need to customize how they engage with their customers more and more, there is no one-size fits all approach.
The future of successful promotions and campaigns lies in authentic, personalized, customized and original marketing that enables audiences to be meaningfully engaged, whether your business is online or offline. Businesses really need to challenge themselves to think about how to engage with their customers, that’s more significant than just using a trending hashtag or the latest emoji.
Three key trends every brand needs to know:
1. Customer-ization: One of the many demands to come out of this rise of a competitive, technology-driven age, is the customer’s involvement in different areas of the business, from content creation to creative ideation (such a fancy word, love it!) to promotions. Customers are becoming more and more picky and are expecting customization more than ever before. And believe it or not, many people are prepared to pay a premium price for an outstanding customized experience. The big question to ask yourself then is not so much ‘what do we want to sell’ but ‘how do they want to buy?’ When looking at the level of customization a company can offer, I often use a triangle model where we look at the company’s product offering depending on the level of service a customer gets. At the bottom we write down all low-entry level products with higher priced items going towards the top. If a product or service is not making money, regardless of its price point, or it is annoying, it’s time to go. This gives the company a clear overall picture of their offering and allows them to look at combining and packaging products and services depending on what the customer wants and needs.
So, whether it’s your customized communication to build credibility and maintain reliability to a customized product offering, implementing a customization tactic is a key ingredient in the recipe to succeed. Am I using the word ‘customization’ too much. I think so.
2. Personalized Everything: As consumers, we have such a huge variety of companies we can choose from so when a company goes the extra mile to give us some extra loving, we certainly take it. And not only that, we are more likely to go back to a business that remembered our name, sent us a handwritten note or made us feel special.
The internet and technology has amazing stalking power and has made it super easy for a business to know and find out all sorts of useful (and not so useful) information about our customers. It’s allowing us to tailor our content depending on someone’s likes and dislikes.
While it may seem overwhelming to personalize content to every individual, it’s not as hard as you think, it can be automated using any good client relationship management system. Technology is helping businesses automate, systemize and simplify processes like never before. Robots are literally coming to the rescue, we just need to humanize them a little more. This means businesses should always be willing to go the extra mile through offline efforts, such as sending your VIP client a book on golfing, their favourite bottle of wine (yes please!), a ticket to a show or a box of their favourite chocolates.
3. Engagement: People don’t want to buy from faceless, characterless businesses, they want a human touch and they want to feel engaged. Take it one step further by creating heart-warming and captivating content to further connect, engage and make your customers feel something towards your brand. It could be as simple as sharing a video of you or your team at work creating their design, or a quick sequence of images with insider access to a sourcing trip. Be open to let customers be involved in the entire product development.
Finally, we need to consider how engagement internally could improve your business. By involving team members in decision-making processes you’ll have an involved, inspired and innovative team to help you create a successful brand. I am a true believer of giving team members the opportunity to take charge.
The more you engage through clever marketing, the more you become ‘talkaboutable’!
I’m really excited to see what 2017 holds for us!