Marketers know that the best way to reach their audience is to drive an emotional connection between the brand and the end user. With the advent of social media and mobile marketing, we have an exceptional advantage to driving that connection.
Customers are no longer sharing their experiences of your brand between the hours of nine to five, Monday to Friday via the 800 number they were traditionally pushed through. Their experiences have become part of your brand’s story, online, for the world to see, 24 hours a day. So how are you telling your story?
Consider the 4 E’s: Engage, Educate, Excite, Evangelize. Here are five tips all marketers should consider when crafting the story for their brand.
Engage:
Identify your target audience. Decide what the key words are for your industry. Embrace the opportunity to engage with your community in two-way conversation daily. Trust and loyalty are built over time, as with any good relationship. Remember, if you suck offline, you suck online!
Educate:
Your customers don’t know what they don’t know. By engaging in communities where your customers are, you are raising awareness about what it is your business does, and adding value to the relationship. Joining the conversation could be as simple as answering questions they may have, ie. friendsourcing. This allows an opportunity to learn from each other; you educate them and they educate you. Then you’re on your way to positioning yourself as an influencer and industry leader.
Excite:
Be authentic, be positive, be transparent. I align my business with leaders: are forward-thinking, action-oriented risk-takers, who maintain a positive outlook. There will always be those who are not (ie. twankers). By engaging positively, you’re able to insert your unique value proposition into the relationship, and instill excitement around your product/service.
Evangelize:
Identify the influencers within each community: hashtags are an effective method of organizing tweets around a particular topic. They are created around an event or an existing community. Use them! Once you have an engaged, educated, excited community, the evangelizing will happen naturally.
Make this a priority!
Don’t be left behind, the conversations are going on with or without you. And remember, incorporating a social media policy is vital when your team is representing your business.
Guest Post by:
Jeffrey Hayzlett, Bestselling Author, Global Business Celebrity & Sometime Cowboy
JEFFREY HAYZLETT is a global business celebrity and former Fortune 100 c-suite executive. From small business to international corporations, he has put his creativity and extraordinary entrepreneurial skills into play, launching ventures blending his leadership perspectives, insights into professional development, mass marketing prowess and affinity for social media. He is a well-traveled public speaker, the author of the bestselling business books, The Mirror Test and Running the Gauntlet, and one of the most compelling figures in global business.
Jeffrey is an esteemed business and marketing expert, appearing frequently on programs like Fox Business News, MSNBC’s Your Business, Bloomberg West, and NBC’s Celebrity Apprentice with Donald Trump. Drawing upon an eclectic background in business, buoyed by a stellar track record of keynote speaking, and deeply rooted in cowboy lore, Jeffrey energizes his role driving and delivering change. He is a turnaround architect of the highest order, a maverick marketer who delivers scalable campaigns, embraces traditional modes of customer engagement, and possesses a remarkable cachet of mentorship, corporate governance and brand building.
Great guest post by a top speaker and Chief Marketing officer. Big win for Digital Ethos!
Excellent article. It distills the vast amount of info on social media and connecting with your customer into 4 understandable themes. Thank You!
Do you feel these concepts if utilized can give America an edge in marketing over China?
I don’t see the Chinese as “liking” the customer or giving any added value to a product…
It can. Like everything depends on how well you execute. Does not matter who your competition is or where it is— you will always have it. Can you execute to exceed customer expectations and build raving fans— if you can, you win. Don’t, then join the heaps of boring , average companies.
Engaging with your audience by adding value and likability brings quick customer loyalty.
I see this work engage a lot. But the industry measures engagement with likes comments and shares. That is not engagement. When you put your butt in the driver’s seat of a new car and take a test drive, THAT is engagement. What is the online equivalent of this? Fortunately, we DO have an answer…
Engagement means getting your hands dirty and putting the time and effort into reaching out to your fans and followers. In order to stay relevant and establish a relationship with people, this is a must. Your efforts pay off in the number of followers and qualified business leads you get from that work.
Excellent article.
Great post,but I was wondering a bit about where folks should be engaging. Do you notice any movement toward the competing sites coalescing? Google seems to be setting up to bring their properties together.
Google is doing a good job of bringing the best of social media together under one umbrella. Google+ is currently the second most-used social media platform behind Facebook! But where to engage depends on your message/content. Like I talk about in my book, Running the Gauntlet, LinkedIn is like your storefront on Main Street, where people like to browse. Blogs are like a public diary on any topic you want posted on bulletin boards all over town. Facebook is like a living room where you can have longer and deeper conversations and interactions, but to do so you need to sit down and stay for a while. Twitter is like your front porch, where quick and easy conversations happen and people tell people what other people said.
When it comes to influencers, how do you feel about things like Kred, Klout, PeerIndex etc… do you find these tools useful in the identification?
When leaders are engaging their followers with good content and meaningful conversation across their social media channels, they further position themselves as experts. What good is the information you have if you don’t share it? If they’re active in the industry, it shows they want to learn and improve their own standing. Great characteristics to have in an influencer.
Great Post – hope many will understand….