How To Keep Customers Coming Back: 6 Trends You Should Know

by Eric Tsai

Living in southern California I love going to restaurants, cafes and retails stores to experience what companies are doing to attract customers.

From merchandising to customer service, I’m gradually seeing three popular marketing trends that everyone is doing to spread their brand voice.

First, almost every company is in on the social media bandwagon specifically leveraging Facebook and Twitter to engage with their fans and broadcast their offerings.

Second, companies are finding ways to collect your contact information to build their email list by offering discounts, coupons or customer loyalty programs.

And third, businesses are aware of their reputation online on places such as Yelp, Consumer Reports, OpenTable, BizRate, Amazon and CNET.

Some of using these information as a way to improve products and identify service gaps.

All three marketing tactics are proven to be somewhat cost-effective in terms of managing their reputations online while funneling leads and converting sales.

There is enough free information out there that business owners and marketing managers can find to start immediately so I’m not surprise that everyone is doing it.

In fact, I always check out the Twitter or Facebook page of where I’ve visited to see what level of engagement and following they have as well as to identify how the platform was utilized.

The result I found is that companies fall into two categories of social media marketing buckets.

First are the highly engaged profiles with regular updates and a large following that creates instant social proof. Second are the uninspiring profiles with the lack of updates and little to no interactions.

This is the same observations made by Jeremiah Owyang, who recently posted on his blog that, “many brands are jumping on the social media bandwagon, without giving proper thought about the impacts to their marketing effort. In particular, many brands are putting ’social chicklets’ on their homepage to “Follow us on Twitter” or “Friend us on Facebook” without considering the ramifications.”

This is the problem with low barrier to entry tools such as Twitter and Facebook that many brands are using without a real deliberate strategy.

I encourage those of you that are serious about your digital marketing efforts to use Jeremiah’s matrix to help make your decisions.

Keep in mind, you must understand not just the rules of the game but also how it applies to your specific industry, your customers and your organization.

There is no doubt that the internet has made it easier to find what you’re looking for while connecting you with like-mined individuals from networking to referrals, relevant information is available in abundance.

The questions is where do people get those information and how will these content providers be perceived?

First you need to realize that all of the answers have changed.

Same Questions, Different Answer

Although the internet has forever changed our expectations in media consumption and in communication, one thing remains constant for businesses today: the question of how do we attract more customers to us?

How do we get customers to spread our brand? How do we get customers to buy more and buy often?

As a marketer today you must realize that we’ve been asking those same questions for decades and in order to answer them now you must first understand the following 6 fundamental social change in customer perception and behavior:

1. Choice overload: Customers are bombarded with choices; the market is saturated with selection.

And people get frustrated when they have to make a decision from tens and thousands of product categories, brands and price points.

Everything looks the same, everyone sounded alike and it doesn’t help when people have shorter attention span as we become more distracted everyday.

2. Conflicting information: We’re in a hyper-connected marketplace where people are using social media to discuss new products, do their own research, cross referencing information in the blogosphere and everything goes from frustration to confusion.

There is simply too much information and how can an average consumer know who’s right and who’s wrong?

3. Customers know marketing: Over time, customers understood the game of marketing regardless of B2C or B2B.

Described by Tom Asacker: We’re no longer passive consumers but active discerners participating in how products are marketed at us.

This is why there is an increasing trend in banner blindness and average web users will give you only 8 seconds to decide if they’re going to stay or not.

4. Lack of trust in the marketplace: There is a sense of distrust in the marketplace. People simply don’t trust individuals let alone corporations.

We’re conditioned to identify the tactics such as sense of urgency (buy now and save!), risk reversal (money back guaranteed!), or scarcity thinking (for a limited time!).

Watch any TV infomercials and you’ll find those tactics in most of them.

Simply put, these tactics are losing their effectiveness and even if they worked that led to engagement opportunities, you must meet the customer expectations otherwise it’s hard to fool them twice.

5. People define your brand: Brand messages only sets the initiate expectations of your target audience and ultimately people make meaning out of things themselves.

When push comes to shove, people go with what feels right not your product features or service benefits.

It’s how you make them feel, not what you tell them how they should feel. If they can relate to your message, it only means they’ll give you a few more seconds to keep going down your path to purchase.

Your brand is defined by how you make people feel about the decisions they’ve made not just your messages.

6. The shift towards frugality: This is the simplest concept to grasp as the recession has permanently changed the way consumers behave and perceive value.

It goes beyond pricing strategy and product promotions.

Whether you’re a retailer, a B2B service provider or a marketer, this means extracting deeper customer insights to build meaningful, differentiated messages that communicates relevancy.

This is best described by a recent article “The New Consumer Frugality” in Strategy+Business, by Booz & Company, in which the authors defined six frugal consumer segments.

After a thorough understanding of the above trends, you should also be aware of the fact that brands are becoming publishers creating opportunities that’s leveling the playing field.

And in order to be successful moving forward, you either have great content strategy or you have unique customer experience (in product or service innovation).

Content Marketing Creates Relevancy

Recently Joe Pulizzi of Junta42.com, a content strategy evangelist published a post after speaking at the Online Marketing Summit 2010 on how companies focus solely on Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and social media that produce without a real content strategy.

Specifically he noted that “any online marketing, whether social media, email marketing, search engine optimization, landing page conversion, etc., does not work without first having content strategy.”

As a brand strategist that focuses on marketing integration, I couldn’t agree more.

I’ve heard business owners and marketing executives realize the need to change their strategy, but it’s often due to the need to “keep up” with the current trend. “We must get into social media because everyone’s doing it,” or “We need to engage our customers on Facebook and Twitter.”

But what does engagement mean to your organization? How will that benefit your bottom line or increase sales?

It’s easy to setup a WordPress blog, a Twitter account, a Facebook fan page or a LinkedIn Group.

The key is what will you be pushing out to generate meaningful conversations?

How will you provide value that sparks engagement?

Why would people spread your idea or pass on your name?

What’s the call-to-action when people get to your website, your blog, or your social media pages?

Product Innovation Creates Loyalty

The other way to win in the marketplace is to deliver awesome products or services that build brand loyalty via innovation.

An easy example would be what Apple is doing with their continuous innovation in products from iPod to iPhone to last weekend’s release of iPad.

Amazon’s endless pursue to have everything available, fast and easy via their online store regardless what you’re looking for.

Zappo’s unmatched customer service in finding and delivering not just the shoes you ordered but what you may also like.

For restaurants, it’s the food you cater, the service you provide, the price tag you put on as the total experience that says “we’re different.”

Customers will automatically go on to Yelp and OpenTable to give you reviews and recommendations. Your customer will decide what quality is and what value means to them.

I love what James Surowiecki wrote in an excellent piece in The New Yorker: “the more information people have, the tighter the relationship between quality and price: if you can deliver a product or service that is qualitatively better, you can charge top dollar. But if you can’t deliver the quality you can’t get the price.”

You’re going to struggle if you don’t deliver brand experience that’s worth talking about.

Everyone have access to the same tools and resources, if you can deliver a mix bag of value using content marketing strategy on your innovative products, you win.

The take away: Brands must adapt to the new realities that everyone is a content producer and we are no longer competing on eyeballs and clicks only, but value that builds long-lasting relationships in a trust-driven era.

It is essential to establish clear, integrated marketing strategies for various media channels in order to deliver personalized messages that properly aligned with your business objectives.

If you don’t know your desired outcome, why are you implementing tactics where you can’t see what success means to you?

If you don’t have exceptional products perhaps its time you should rethink your product strategy.

Are you re ready to get actionable to integrate your marketing efforts?

Why Social Network Engagement is About Conversations

by Eric Tsai

With the recent acquisition of Zappos by Amazon, many companies are now taking a serious look at social innovation especially after the latest Engagement report by Wetpain and the Fluent report by Razorfish on social influence marketing. Basically these reports prove that brands with high social media activity increased revenues while the less active ones aren’t as profitable.

smreport-rf-eg

The statistics not only adds fuel to the social media hype but helps to convert the naysayers to believers.

Even Twitter is leveling the playing field by publishing its own “Twitter 101” guide, which contains ideas, tips and case studies intended for businesses to make the best of the service.

The beginner’s guide to Twitter is intended to lower the learning curve but could evolve into the ultimate Twitter knowledge base.

This is actually a good thing because it allows users to focus more on the strategic usage of Twitter rather than the tactical side.

It also forces the “experts” to elevate their game to the next proof of concept level on those “how to use social media” content.

Recently I’ve notice that there has been a lot of coverage on social media from the mainstream authorities from Wall Street Journal to Reuters, another tell that the knowledge is becoming ubiquitous.

While the nature of using social media has low barriers to entry, some brands are still struggling in defining their social media strategy.

Having a presence doesn’t necessary mean a good thing, the fundamental of networking online is essentially the same as offline – engage in meaningful conversations with your audience.

In my opinion, that’s the core element of any networking beyond the high-level fundamentals that we all agree: be authentic, credible, and identifiable. If not you can read the post “Why You Should Always Be True to Your Brand.”

Let’s look at the change in social media to better understand how it should be used in conversation marketing.

World-of-Mouth Consumption to Production

In the social marketing landscape, word-of-mouth (WOM) starts playing a factor immediately effecting restaurant reputations to box office numbers.

You no longer need to wait to meet someone in person to discuss a movie you watched, a product you’ve purchased, or an event you’ve attended to get feedback.

Simple use your internet enabled mobile device to start aggregating content into your social networks letting everyone know your views.

For live events, people are broadcasting themselves via Twitter or Ustream for real-time content production not to mention the interaction as others tweet, retweet, comment, like, or post reactions.

The traditional “push” communications techniques are becoming less effective while still costly.

We’re transitioning into a media environment meant to be about conversations where the media and its message, instead of articulating the endpoints of meaning, represent the staring point for the production of meaning in social media.

Digital media has relinquished the control to the increasingly social crowd as both the conductor and engineer.

Viewing a TV commercial, reading a blog article or listening to a radio ad are all forms of production as the viewer or listener interprets and makes sense of the message. Following the consumption of the content is a reaction which could potentially spiral into further conversations and that conversation can get into another network and so on and so forth.

If you’re actively using social media, you have a higher chance of being heard, connected and engaged because you’re part of the viral WOM network.

This is why brands care more than ever about you, what you say, and how you say it. They are actively listening and participating in order to humanize the relationship through interactions. Or simply put, managing their reputations.

Influence the influencers

Whether you’re a blogger, a marketer, or an entrepreneur your opinion counts and can be contagious.

It’s now possible and easy to circulate your message via the new digital channels like Facebook (fan page), Linkedin (groups), Twitter (tweets) or Youtube (videos).

The key is to facilitate effective word-of-mouth campaign through these communities spreading horizontally rather than vertically described in Clay Shriky’s book “Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations.”

Each time you’re able to influence experts, opinion leaders, or people with authority you’ll instantaneously gain a little more credibility and access to their fan base.

Then the collective minds with shared visions will continue to spread your message forming the viral wave pushing all the way to the long-tail shores.

If you want to attract “relevant audience” to your branded social network, you must do more than just spam visitors with self-promoting ads.

In fact, you need to offer compelling value that keeps your audience engaged as well as perpetuating the interaction.

The more interactivity a social network platform allows their users to have, the more engaged users will tend to be which often leads to a greater chance of influencing the network effectively.

This is why blogs are still amongst the most influential social media because they encourage bloggers to interact with their audience in a simple and easy fashion.

A recent NY Times article points out how Procter & Gamble focuses on getting honest opinions from bloggers rather than paying for positive press is the perfect example of targeting the right influencer.

However, P&G knew they had to leverage bloggers strategically because bloggers are being viewed by their fans as one of the trusted source, thus the pay-for-favorable-endorsement doesn’t work as well as the pay-for-your-opinion.

In addition, according to a recent article from eMarkters, majority of the social media marketers “rated social media marketing effective at influencing brand reputation, increasing awareness and improving search rankings and site traffic.”

smbp

As you can see, social media is largely used as a mean to manage reputation and generating awareness.

Notice that the top 3 most effective tactics used are also the most interactive platform thus generating the most influence: user reviews or ratings, bloggers or online journalist relations, and forums or discussion groups.

Conversation and Behavioral Targeting

Great product and services can strike a stimulating discussion and ultimately leads to consumer buy-in.

The goal is to have a strategy that will allow you into the ongoing conversation or to create the opportunity to start one.

Social conversation is not about UVP (unique value proposition) or the USP (unique selling propositions), instead it’s an opportunity to discover and learn about the networking ecosystem (you, your audience, their audience etc.) in order to earn trust through caring and helping.

UVP and USP are important but should come later during the engagement cycle.

Think of the social media conversation as WOM on steroids.

Once you have an understanding of your ecosystem you can then create targeted advertising strategies within social networking.

The whole idea of collecting data is to learn and anticipate what your audience might be interested in based on their behaviors.

This enables advertisers to develop the proper call-to-action that could lead to conversions via conversation marketing rather than accumulation marketing (focus on quantity instead of quality of the traffic).

As someone who started a career as a designer (graphic/web design and product design) and now providing brand strategies, I see the core elements in social media similar to that of communication design and user experience.

The difference is that a brand must communicate like a person optimizing the experience to initiate interaction.

The intention should be to focus on adding value to the conversation, prolonging the dialogue and elevating its relevance to the participants.

Not only will people come to expect more of the same great value you’ve provided but they may become your brand evangelist spreading your messages, advocating your brand.

You can have the greatest product or the best selling book, if you don’t care about others the chance are, they won’t care about you to take actions.

Even if someone is influenced or bought the idea it doesn’t mean he or she will take action.

So position yourself as a prolific contributor will definitely help but don’t loose your personality that’s uniquely you, and if you don’t have anything to say, simply listen first.

Don’t become those annoying people who always talk about themselves and don’t listen to others. Another example what NOT to do in social networking is to just repeatedly blast out press releases or spam-like promotions ignoring the two-way communication dynamics.

socialgravity

Remember, anything that you put out there in the community can come back to you in a heartbeat.

Monitoring the conversation is the foundation of engagement.

If you’re going to play ball, be ready to follow through and make it fresh and keep it real.

Love to hear your tips, success stories, and pitfalls to avoid in the comments about your social network engagement experience, how are you engaging your audience?

The Evolution of Media Content Distribution: Circulation 1.0 to 2.0

by Eric Tsai

I often get asked on the benefits of Social Media: “How should we leverage social media for advertising and marketing?” or “What do we need to consider when incorporating social media into our existing strategy?”

There are still a lot of questions surrounding social media.

The simple way to get a grasp on it is to first understand how information flows through social media.

Visualizing The Circulation Evolution

I like to visualize information so I’ve created the following graphics to describe how content travels through the traditional media channels.

circulation1_0

As you can see in the traditional model, content gets created (by few sources) then aggregated into the circulation 1.0 channel of print, radio, television, and the web.

These “read-only” materials get pushed out on a one-to-many process requiring users to retrieve them.

Take newspaper as an example: it all starts with the editor creating the content, then it goes through a review process before it gets printed on paper, and finally delivers to you so you can start reading the content.

This is a top-down approach for content distribution with maximum control

Now let’s looks at how social media elevates the content circulation in the 2.0 model.

circulation2_0

In this model, everyone is a content producer enabling user-generated content to scale efficiently.

When you have millions of people contributing content, it creates a many-to-many race to publish and distribute information.

As a result, the content now comes to you, pulling you to consume.

In addition, the nature of web 2.0 allows content to be syndicated and shared almost instantaneously.

Finally let’s incorporate circulation 2.0 as part of the circulation 1.0 and you get the “hybrid” model:

circulation1_5

I call this circulation 1.5 because it retains the traditional media’s channel of distribution while adding web 2.0 into the mix.

The concept is to leverage the best of both worlds from 1.0 and 2.0 to gain maximum impact for brand exposure and brand awareness.

Beyond Circulation 2.0

Most brands are still on circulation 1.0 networks and many are on the path to circulation 2.0 by adding social media to their traditional media channels.

The great thing about circulation 2.0 is that everyone is pulling your content creating a natural word-of-mouth marketing that’s pervasive.

However, as the speed of these dynamic conversation becomes even more instantaneous, in the case of Twitter, the content producer have less control.

Content can get interpreted out of context and then passed along down the line just like that telephone game we all played in kindergarten.

This is why many companies are using social media primary as a service function for reputation management and customer support.

That’s exactly what Zappos, PizzaHut, Intuit, and Dell have done by leveraging Twitter for those purposes.

This creates transparency and adds authenticity to the brand which is where social media has taken us to so far. Moving forward brands must rethink the intend of their products and services and manage expectations carefully through positioning and messaging.

After the financial meltdown last year there is a lack of trust for brands and a definitive shift on perceived value.

That’s why there is such an acceleration in social media because people demand to know the truth and in many ways social media allows us to get closer to what really is happening.

When Twitter was first launched in July 2006 (happy 3 year birthday!) it was intended to be a quick update for your groups of friends.

Today it has evolved to a social networking tool to report, react, and discuss anything from news to random thoughts.

It will probably continue to evolve because of the fluidness of the platform has allow users to take the service in completely unexpected directions.

Now that’s good for innovation, they just need to figure out a business model for monetization.

The fact is traditional media still reaches far more audience than social media as I write this post. I’m sure I’ll circle back in the future as things may change in unexpected ways too.

Let me know what you think.