“My dear, here we must run as fast as we can, just to stay in place. And if you wish to go anywhere you must run twice as fast as that.”
When Lewis Carroll wrote those words into his famed story Alice in Wonderland, I’m curious if he knew how much relevance it would have to the marketing world today.
In an era of digital explosion — where new technologies, best practices, and challenges seem to sprout every single day — modern marketers feel that they too must run twice as fast to get ahead of their competition.
Digital marketing is certainly a much longer and more exhausting race than that depicted in Carroll’s age-old novel, right?
If done effectively, digital marketing allows companies to customize content for each stage of the buyer’s journey. If this is the case, then all digital adopters should be generating loads and loads of high quality leads, right?
Not so fast. Even Lewis Carroll knew this when he said, “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.”
At the core of any successful marketing campaign lies fantastic content. Content is what drives emotion on your social channels, sparks action from your emails, and converts website visitors into sales.
But just as Alice was confused and sometimes frustrated through her journey in Wonderland, the same is true for your customers; 7 out of 10 consumers get frustrated with irrelevant web content, leaving an opportunity for a company’s competitor to get a leg up on them.
Here are a few core competencies for effective digital content, inspired by examples from Bonobos‘ social channels.
1. Generate Relevant Brand Awareness
Any effective content marketing strategy first starts with understanding your buying personas.
Here we see that Bonobos capitalizes on the attention of the World Cup while simultaneously promoting a product they know resonates with their audience.
Game at noon, what to wear to work? #torn @ussoccer #usmnt #USAvsGER #Brazil2014 pic.twitter.com/AaPjyvFGsU
— Bonobos (@Bonobos) June 26, 2014
Bonobos clearly understands their target demographic of 18-34 year old males who enjoy higher-end fashion products. Their most engaging pieces of content are relevant and contextual. They’re aware of what their audience cares about and their marketing is consistent across a number of digital channels.
2. Understand What Your Customers Care About
All too often we see companies running contests or giveaways for things we don’t really want. By combining a popular holiday for their demographic with an item they already know is popular, Bonobos runs a contest that drives some of the highest levels of engagement they’ve seen their Facebook Page.
Understanding what would be valuable from the point of view of your customer and not your own point of view is essential to creating ROI yielding offers. To do this, marketers should create conversational and interactive content to better understand what motivates their target customers to buy.
3. Engage To Increase Lifetime Customer Value
The buyer’s journey doesn’t end at the point of purchase, but very much begins. Customer loyalty is the driving force behind incremental revenue gains and separates a great brand from a mediocre brand.
For marketers, they need to understand that not every piece of content should be created to acquire a new customer. In many cases, producing engaging content for your existing customers works better as they’ll turn from one-time customers to repeat customers and eventually to brand ambassadors.
In Bonobos’ case, they utilize a number of different social channels to routinely engage with their audience. As you can see, one of their most engaging posts on Instagram had nothing to do with their products, but rather features a relevant, brand-lifestyle post they knew their customers would enjoy and identify with.
Creating customers for life also means that companies need to have open and honest communication with them. Social media provides organizations the opportunity to talk with their customers for little to no cost at all.
When your customers turn to you for recommendations and advice, that’s your opportunity to be a true trusted advisor and strengthen the loyalty they have with your brand.
Conclusion
Even though Bonobos exists in a more B2C oriented industry, there is still much any marketer can learn from their marketing efforts. Regardless of the space that you’re in, your customers should always be looked at as an audience to not only understand, but an audience to educate, assist, and delight.
Long gone are the days where marketing can be approached as one-way communication. Brands must listen, analyze, and intimately deliver content that entices their audience to communicate with them — not at them.
As we look back on Alice’s journey through Wonderland there comes a time when she asks the White Rabbit, “How long is forever?” to which the rabbit so aptly answers, “Sometimes, just one second.”
As modern marketers we must seize those seconds that could last forever. After all, wouldn’t you much rather emerge from the rabbit hole with customers that last forever versus wandering aimlessly through your own marketing Wonderland?
Only you can decide…