According to a recent survey on advertising messages through various media, on an average working day where you travel in the morning to your office, spend a full day in office to the time you go back and sleep after watching your favorite TV channel in the evening, you are most probably going to be targeted by approx. 3000 marketing messages.
Knowingly or not, you get subjected to these messages in forms of Billboards, Radio Jingles, TV ads, Online banners, Emails, etc. These can be friendly, unfriendly, solicited, unsolicited, relevant, irrelevant messages which you would have to go through. Almost all the marketing messages come through well crafted marketing campaigns where a huge amount of time and money is spent.
However, how many of them have the “Engagement Value” perceived for the targeted audience?
According to the Economist Intelligence Unit's survey report, of sales and marketing executives worldwide, more than 80% of the executives believe that they lost the sales because they couldn’t engage their prospect enough to get them interested to buy. While it is challenging to engage prospects in the communication process, marketers are using newer techniques on their websites like, videos and rich media to engage their audience. However, the report says 47% of respondents suggested that it’s really difficult to measure how the engagement mechanism affected the purchase behavior, among the gamut of activities in the engagement process.
If it was 1950, it would have been easier to get someone to endorse the product and broadcast the message to everyone. This PUSHing the message technique worked, when people had no clue about their personal choice of “media” and their choice of “time” to access that media. However, this pushing the message across has created the biggest challenge for the marketers of this age where we have to become over cautious to choose:
• what to market?
• whom to market?
• when to market?
• which media to market through?
not only these Ws, but also how often to market.
In today’s world, consumers are essentially the sellers too. People turn to existing customers to influence their own buying behavior. So pushing the message out is completely DEAD. Is that a conclusion? PUSH marketing is really Dead? YES and NO.
YES – You can’t expect the sales through pushing the message out.
NO – You can still expect the sales through pushing the right message out.
NO contd.: - Right message defined – So, now we know, that people are buying based on other consumer’s opinions, so let’s push the other people’s opinion crafted in the manner we want, to the consumer and help them make that buying decision. The right message is the message which has the engagement value, an existing customer’s voice and a perceived need, buying urgency and a definitive benefit in it.
Is pull marketing Dead? - Yes and NO
Yes - When everyone tries to pull the customers/prospects, then you don't know if your pull worked or not.
No - Definitely the pull marketing is the future however, customer centric behviour with the following 4 Rs approach definitely can be a great marketing strategy of Future!
A complete Paradigm Shift
4Ps --> 4 Rs
Dictating --> Listening
Researching --> Understanding through analytics
Push --> Community opinion building
Broadcasting --> Interest based Targeting
Recently I saw a presentation from Matt Langie on 4 Rs of marketing. The basic idea is as follows:
4Ps of marketing – Product, Price, Place, Promotion used to take prospects from the buying cycle moving from Awareness, Interest, Desire and Action. However, in today’s world of marketing, consumers are interested in listening to the crowds or their closed group while making a buying decision.
This has lead to the New approach of consumer centric marketing or 4 Rs of marketing - Reveal, Reward, Respect and Retain
1. Reveal – Understand your prospects and customers recent traits and past history to come up with a planned, targeted, focused, need based marketing effort.
Various tactics: -
• Monitoring unique visitors
• Online engagements
o Voting
o Surveys
o Referrals
• Referrals from other websites
2. Reward – While you gather valuable information from customers it’s essential to reward them and keep them engaged to buy more, profess more and keep them delighted.
Various Tactics: -
• Reward the customers to engage them more into your brand.
• Ask for their opinions
• Appreciate them on your online forums
• Give out some special coupons
• Give out something which they are definitely looking out for. etc.
3. Respect – A very well crafted, targeted, engaging campaign over time will build respect for your Brand. This gained respect with customers is something which will help you engage with other prospects.
While you are listening to the consumers, you are hearing what they would like just apart from your products and what values do they stand for. This is something which you can leverage to further engage with audience (customers and prospects) to further enhance the adoption.
4. Retain – Stimulate interactions with products through fun and imaginative extensions of the concept.
The basic idea is keep’em engaged.
HALT.
This brings me to a basic communication concept of networking, keeping the conversation on-going and reaping the benefits over and over again. Will talk more about it later.
CONTINUE…
A 360˚ view of the visitors or interactions:
-Listen – Survey, Onsite search, Website
-Learn – Offline Data + CRM
-Act – Email, Direct mail, Behavioral targeting
Question: How customer profiling with this 360 degree approach helps?
Answer: You can build a profile of a customer with demographics; likings etc and leverage that data for targeted marketing.
Tying it back to the Idea - Give the right information to the right audience at the right time, the way the want it and how often they want it.
To be concluded...
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