Weekly News: New Marketing strategies after IT development
How do the marketers do after adapting the development in IT?
Rapid development in information technology has altered the way we do marketing.
Before businesses single-handedly pass on all the information to their potential customers. Customers perceived all the information and decide whether or not to carry on the purchase.
Today though, the landscape has changed significantly. The social media boom has allowed anyone to pass information to everyone around the globe in a single click.
Successful marketing these days should not only utilizes the conventional one-sided marketing. Instead, businesses should also incorporate the power of their customers. Driving existing customers to testify their user experience to a wider public could be a key to a successful campaign.
To do so, one thing which businesses could do is to cultivate their own customer community. A customer community is a kind of platform where customers could share their product-using experience. There, customers could also interact with other customers and the business itself.
In recent years, GoPro is a showcase of how community involvement could boost the product brand and attract potential customers. GoPro buyers are not simply one-time transaction customers. Instead, a purchase of GoPro is the beginning of an exciting journey for a GoPro User. The firm developed its own platform where clients could upload videos they shot with GoPro.
By developing the user community, businesses transform customers to become natural brand ambassadors of the product.
This kind of testimony possesses something potential customers nowadays have longed to see from advertising: honesty.
When seeking through those past user experiences, prospects know that they are not seeing an artificial script prepared by the businesses. Instead, they are witnessing genuine stories of people who used the product before them.
These honest stories indeed would be more persuasive in convincing prospects of buying the product.
To enhance the community, businesses could also involve the field-related Key Opinion Leaders (KOL). These KOLs are people with expertise in certain fields. They usually also have accumulated quite an amount of fan base.
Businesses could incentivize this KOL to use their products and contribute to their platform. This way, businesses could attract more customers from those KOL fan base.
Besides, having an expert on the particular field to endorse the firm’s product would be good for the product image. The product would be seen to possess good enough quality to fulfill those experts’ standards.
Another method businesses could do to develop their user community is to organize real-world events. The advantage of this type of event is the recognition of the product beyond the virtual world.
Take the example of Harley Davidson community. By organizing large motorcycle parade, the firm is able to promote itself to a large population. People aside from its users who witness the parade might be interested in the product and community after those events.
Last but not least, businesses could also supplement the user experiences platform with materials of their own. This could be in the form of articles giving more technical details of the product. Or comparing the product to other similar products in the market.
Surveys and statistics could also be used as tools to convince prospects. Numbers showing previous customer satisfaction could be a great indicator that customers are liking the product.
By combining both user experiences and firms’ own materials, businesses could create a relevant content marketing strategy.
Doing things this way, businesses could promulgate informative yet intimate advertising, which would tackle all questions the prospects have regarding the product. Plus, having a sense of honesty and intimacy in the answer.
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