Today's issue of The Wall Street Journal. highlights how savvy companies and their agency partners are tapping conversations on the web to create messaging and campaigns around company product and service offerings.
While leveraging the "voice of the customer" research when developing messaging and programs, social media platforms make it easier and more timely to create and test messaging and campaigns prior to launching. Not only does this bring more relevance than ever before to a company's marketing outreach, but it puts it within reach of even companies with the most modest budgets for research and testing.
I think what's interesting is that the article (page B8: Marketers Find Web Chat Can Be Inspiring) discusses this like harnessing the insights of customers is a breakthrough resulting in learning how customers use a product or service vs. what the features and functions of the product and service include. The best companies have always focused on how a customer benefits from the product or service -- effectively looking at outcomes the customer experiences.
In the WSJ article, one of the examples is about a campaign Lotus business software, a division of IBM, created with its agency. The agency looked at customer web searches and comments they posted on YouTube and at conversations on social media sites like Twitter. They discovered that potential customers cared less about its technologies themselves than what those technologies could do for them. Instead of talking about VOIP or using the cloud as a delivery mechanism, the customers were talking about having conversations and meetings. That insight, in this instance, led Lotus to create a new print ad with the text, "Lotus knows you're trying to reach the person, not their phone."
While marketers shouldn't stop doing traditional research and testing of messaging and campaign-specific elements like what headlines and photos work best, this article is a good reminder that companies need to be considering a wider range of ways to gain customer insights as they shape their go-to-market strategies for 2010.
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