Editor’s Note: This is a sponsored post.
Customer engagement.
These two words are on the tips of marketing communications executive’s tongues from coast to coast today. Without significant and meaningful customer engagement, marketing programs die a silent death. When that happens, Chief Marketing Officers and others are forced to find new jobs.
Know Your Audience and How to Reach Them
There’s an old adage in the advertising business. It goes like this: Show, Don’t Tell. What it means is you risk losing the prospect when you fail to speak plainly, and fail to demonstrate why your product or service matters.
When your team is struggling to get its point across, internally or externally, consider using fewer words and more pictures. When you add custom illustrations and an animated video to the picture, people pay attention. Animated video is engaging because 65% of people are visual learners, and 90% of the information transmitted to the brain is visual. Also, visual information is processed 60,000x faster than text.
Bottom line, t
You can create an animated video on just about any topic. Many of them look like active drawings on a whiteboard, and they’re proven to engage your target audience when they’re online. The more interesting you make the video, the more likely prospects are to learn more about your company and eventually purchase your goods or services.
To start the process, work closely with your marketing team to generate the one true idea you need to get across. For example, if you’re an accounting service, you might want to make it an interesting video about taxes and how a good accountant saves you money. From there, you needn’t break the bank by hiring an expensive video production crew.
Spread the Good Word at Trade Shows and Branded Events
When you run a retail store or any business that operates primarily offline, you’re tasked with using online engagement (as described above) to drive foot traffic. Often times, online programs need to be augmented by
Trade shows and branded events are great for meeting prospects in person. With eye-catching displays or hands-on demonstrations to draw visitors in, you’re able to make an impact that will help people remember your company long after they’ve left the event.
Planning a large corporate social event is complicated work. Decisions must be made about the venue, food, entertainment, featured speakers, guest list and how to best promote the occasion. With this many moving parts, it’s smart to find an experienced event management team to assist you and help ensure that your company event is a huge success.
Focus on the Content that Converts
Every company is a media company today, but, not every company has a decent handle on brand publishing and customer engagement opportunities.
“The current wisdom that brands need to be content machines is simply not supported by the data,” says Jennifer Zeszut, CEO at Beckon. “Brands might be shocked to hear that while branded content creation is up 300 percent year over year, consumer engagement with that content is totally flat.”
Engagement is flat because brands are boring people with me-centric lists of features and benefits, instead of finding ways to include people in the brand story and consistently demonstrate relevancy and value. With the proper content strategy in place, and a “show, don’t tell” approach, you open up space for people to be interested in you and your story and how you deliver it.
