Viral vs. Sustainable marketing
Where there is an amazing product, there should be an equally amazing marketing strategy to back it up. David Feinman, a friend of The Frontier podcast, shares what it takes to drive a marketing strategy to lead a product into a success. David is the CEO of Viral Ideas Marketing. We met him in his role as one of the Community Managers of Online Geniuses, a huge internet marketing community known for their industry leader AMAs.
When it comes to any type of marketing, the most important thing is to think about customer experience from start to finish. The connection between a product and the consumer has to be unique in order to lead B2C or B2B sales. You have to find something within your product or service that can tell a story, fulfill a need and is also eye-catching.
It doesn’t always have to be something that goes viral. Like this:
David: It’s always better to create a sustainable way to market (what’s) creating the customer experience through marketing. If you can create that sustainable marketing, you can create a sustainable and predictable form of lead flow and a sustainable form of customers reaching out to you.
Consistency in Customer Experience
The starter lead continuum starts with a marketing video, graphics, etc. Visuals are the easiest and most impactful way to grab the attention of a consumer. Whatever marketing medium you are using, it’s imperative that the voice and message stay consistent. Consistency is a huge part of controlling customer experience, whatever social platform or ad your consumer comes in contact with, the messaging should always be the same. The best practice to ensure a consistent message and voice is maintaining a word bank that is used in all areas with specific points as a guide. If you’re not on top of customer experience from start to finish, and the customer experience isn’t uniform, your audience is going to get a different signal as soon as they get the product.
You really have just one shot at launching a successful marketing campaign. If your customer experience isn’t fluid from beginning to end, it isn’t salvageable because your targeted audience has already lost interest in something that didn’t make sense nor appealed to them in the first place.
Marketing Technologies Are Ever-Changing, But They’re Getting Simpler
Many ventures start out on the back of Facebook ads and video marketing. Quite literally, entrepreneurs have built entire companies making videos and running Facebook ads. That’s all it takes a lot of the time. And in the context of customer experience, a lot of businesses are experiencing a coalescing of the product and engineering function.
This is a huge opportunity for companies to take advantage of that “streaming” space of using shows, podcasts and online video to sell what they are doing. With the power of the modern smartphone, complete with the ability to record almost instantaneously without a huge professional crew, one can start getting a lot of footage to edit for their business’ marketing. There are also companies out there that can simply take your footage and edit it for you within days. It’s much cheaper and simpler to create quality marketing videos for customer engagement than ever before.
David: There has been this sort of shift away from the typical “one and done” kind of viral video marketing. Now, companies are using video as a sustainable practice for communication.
This means that the only way to get ahead is to master a very particular type of marketing formula that coincides properly with the customer experience:
Dozens of videos for marketing per month, rather than the “one and done” approach
PLUS
Quality writing and filming that doesn’t waver, as if you invested everyone in that “one and done” video
PLUS
A way to tie in that viral marketing item with your product in a way that allows for consistent customer experience and engagement
EQUALS
A successful marketing campaign using new marketing technologies that satisfy the need for constant customer experience
Successful content marketing with a focus on customer engagement from start to finish is not as complicated as it seems. Successfully turning leads into users through marketing engagement has changed a lot in recent years, but it certainly isn’t out of the grasp of even the smallest startups.