The continued obsession with social media channels like Facebook, Google+ and Twitter makes it easy to overlook the role of content marketing in your brand’s customer engagement activities. Using these channels to start a conversation with customers is an important first step but the novelty can soon wear off if you stop feeding your customers a regular diet of quality content that draws people in and keeps them coming back. A good digital marketer knows how to develop content that serves a human need, solves a problem or inspires passion.
 

Having spent the first 10 years of my career working in Direct Marketing, I am well versed in the idea of marketing as a campaign. 

The process is:

1. Client briefs agency “we need to sell 2,000 mortgages this quarter”
2. Creative staff work on the design and data planners work back from that 2,000 figure (with expected response rates and conversion rates) to identify how many prospects need to be contacted/exposed to the ad.  If they are more sophisticated, they will have data (triggers, profiles and predictive models) to help them identify the best prospects.
3. Campaign is launched and after a period of time, the number of new mortgages is calculated
4. The agency can calculate the ROI from the campaign and then rest easy with a G&T at the nearest swanky bar

In exactly one month I will be off on a 4 week trip around South-East Asia with my partner. We’ll be covering 3 countries (Cambodia, Laos & Vietnam) and stopping in at least 8 different places which means a whole lot of hotels, transport, tours & activities to be organised.

My first big overseas trip was about 7 years ago, a 3 month stint in South America, and back then most of my travel planning was done by consulting my trusty Lonely Planet guide. Things have certainly changed over the past few years and while I’m still not ready to ditch the Lonely Planet guide, most of my planning for this trip has been through social networks.

I’m a firm believer in “what gets measured, gets better” and so I often suggest to clients that they not only track the quantitative side of their relationship with customers (value, recency), but the qualitative side as well (satisfaction, attitudes, advocacy and ideas).  This could include gathering comments from the multitude of customer touchpoints including call centres, your Facebook page, online community site (or any form of social functionality within your brand

A couple of us Resonate peeps attended the Google Creative Sandbox event at CarriageWorks in Sydney on Tuesday night and got a sneak peek at some Google’s latest tools and applications. The event resembled some sort of construction site and we were served cocktails and canapés by wait staff dressed in high vis vests and hard hats.
 

Making sense of large quantities of customer verbatims has been a challenge for researchers for many years and more recently for people working in social media.  This includes everything from questions that have opened ended “Other” responses to paragraphs of customer verbatims that describe their response to a question, reason for a particular NPS score, innovative idea (for co-creation with a brand) or even complaint.