New year, new thinking for your business
The holidays are over and done with, the ball has dropped on Times Square and the Christmas lights are coming down in neighborhoods all over the country. It’s a brand new year, and smart companies are seizing this blank slate as an opportunity to rethink the way their business communicates with the world around them.
By now, you’ve probably heard for years about the gradual shift away from “push marketing” and the way that social media has upended the way we try to reach our targeted customers. In a recent AdAge article, writers Doug Levy and Bob Garfield have identified our current marketing landscape as “the Relationship Era,” which falls right along the same lines of thinking that we’ve been preaching at TRAFFIK for a while now: establish trust and truly engage with your audience.
How to do it is another ball of wax, but here are a few thoughts to get you rolling.
Embrace Conversation. One of the earliest tenets of social media marketing is truer now than ever before: people are talking about you whether you like it or not. Make 2012 the year that you start listening to the chatter instead of just tuning it out if it isn’t positive. Ignoring it doesn’t make it go away.
Who Are You? If you can’t say what your business is all about in five words or less, how do you expect your customers to know? Get to the essence of who you are as a company and make that the cornerstone of your communication strategy. Give people something that they understand and that works for them.
Inspire, Don’t Influence. Today’s consumer is surrounded by marketing messages to the point where they may just shut out anything that looks remotely like a pitch. Even something as innocuous as “Follow me on Twitter” sounds fishy. If you give people something to talk about instead of just telling them what you want them to know, big things can happen.
So is 2012 the year that you begin to leave the “old ways” behind? I hope so. Give us a call and let’s talk about the ways that we can inspire trust and build a truly engaged, emotional connection with your customers. It’s a new year—anything is possible.
