Agility
While the concept of being agile in order to respond to a rapidly shifting market has been around for quite some time, it’s never been more important to be agile than in today’s market. With a rapidly shifting digital landscape as well as shifting trends in social media.
Social media is an extremely fluid marketplace that requires constant maintenance as well constant customer engagement. What is different in this day and age is the speed at which consumers communicate with each other and share their opinions. With this shift in the dynamic consumers are much more likely to act as a flock or a herd than ever before. Please them and they will flock to your door but if you ignore them they will stampede to the competition.
Creative Alliances
Being agile entails a streamlined use of resources and the ability to quickly respond to positive opportunities. When marketers leverage their in house relationships via cooperation with other teams duplicated efforts fall away and laser like streamlining occurs which brings about greater agility.
On the external side the ability of a company to positively impact word of mouth advertising to increase sales has never been greater. And engaged conversation with your customer base will do more to increase good will and consumer positive associations than millions of dollars of print ads could ever accomplish. Winning over the influencers in your market and making those people allies has never been more important.
Direct Relationships are Key
Webinars, tweets, hosted chats, and FB direct engagement is the new multi-million dollar ad buy. Creating valuable content for your customers to read and comment on will also go a long way toward building direct customer contact and engagement. If it is great content, your customers will share it and that is priceless. The takeaway here is that your company should build a plan for customer engagement and execute it on a regular basis in order to court and sell to your base.
Get Real About Your Numbers
With the unprecedented flow of data into the company about it’s customers it’s going to take time to mine the data that is presented however, with a bit of work the marketing department should be able to develop an unprecedented sales driven relationship with the customer base. If your bottom line isn’t being effected by this data flow then the way the date is being used is faulty and it’s time to rethink the methodology.
Content with Real-Time Data
When assessing social listening efforts key in on key words that are relevant to your market. Understanding social media trends inside of the entire market will give your company an edge in determining how to move specifically. Your marketing people will have the latest trends available to them and they can develop content that is actually relevant for the market that is fresh, engaging and drives sales.
Only Automate When There is No Other Choice
While the burst of automation options cast a wide shadow, today’s social media values direct engagement over large scale push advertising. This means that instead of a mass email, direct social media mentions are much more likely to build loyalty and sales.
As a pioneer in marketing automation, LeadMD pairs its services with bleeding-edge marketing automation software. Karen Khan writes independently with an interest in marketing software development.
