Marketing in a world when the door is already shut!

I am bombarded in a day with hundreds of emails and SMSs- many of them are promotional emails and SMSs. I simply ignore them.

I sit in front of the TV to watch my favorite program and I see a ticker running with messages.Just fails to grab my attention.

I am out to watch a movie and suddenly I realize there are "product placements" intelligently( supposed to be) weaved with the script. My mind shuts immediately as I realize I am being marketed at.

Many consumers like me are getting a lot a savvier than ever before and in one of my conversations with my clients, she was telling me how the hell do I market in a world where most of my best prospects and customers are in Do-No-Call or Do-Not-Disturb lists! 

How does one do marketing in a world when the door is already shut?!

Welcome to the world of relevance marketing. This is increasingly becoming important as many marketing messages are just being ignored or it's money wasted as the consumer is just indifferent. How does one practice the art of relevance marketing.

1. It starts with being genuine and authentic. Facebook fan club/Apps has become a fad. Soon it will lose its relevance after the initial hysteria is over. May be start a help desk page in Facebook for your brand to answer any queries or may be even have a click-to-call service as an app in your Facebook page,twitter or mobile which connects the customer with your already existing call centre.
2. Follow the customer learning journey   - It is important to understand at what stage is your customer or prospect at. It is important not lose the communication script & trigger at each stage. As the customer or prospect knows more about your brand, the intensity of her queries or help is different. It pays to focus your attention to this detail. 
3. Bring the data together for the dialog - Many a times the availability of multi-channel options creates fragmented knowledge across the company among customer facing executives. How can we identify repeat customers or  visitors and make them know enterprise wide, how can you fuse the data available at the call centre with web, how can your link service data with customer billing/purchase data? Start the data journey with small experiments and accelerate them with quick wins. Knowing this can help relevance marketing greatly.

My friend Sandra Zoratti has written an interesting article on this topic:

Step 1.Consumers want precision marketing. On the brand side, this process must begin by first deciding what problem, or pain point, you are seeking to address.

Step 2. Next, marketers need to evaluate and then leverage the data and campaigns currently in place.

Step 3. The next step is to synchronize your campaigns and determine the best message for the channel.

Step 4. Once a test campaign has been launched, the next step is to measure the results based on a wide range of criteria and, most importantly, bottom-line measures.

Step 5. After the initial test, it's time to refine and repeat the above steps to produce the same or different results.

Read more here

Comments

[Keith Gerr]

totally agree - while marketing intrusion increases, the tools to keep brands out of our lives has increased as well. at the end of the day, your product/service either delivers value or not. and that value-delivery (or lack there-of) is either going to potentially ignite some word-of-mouth. consumers certainly are savvy and hip to the marketing playbook. i've done a deep dive on this topic in a presentation: The Sovereign Consumer: http://www.slideshare.net/kgerr/the-sovereign-consumer

good post - regards,
- Keith

[Mobile Marketing]

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