Mappting Your Position on the Digital Spectrum
01 - Sharing Your Story 02 - Starting the Dialog 03 - Engaging in Conversation 04 - Understanding the Dialog
Keyword: Mining
05 - Refining the Dialog 06 - Mass One-on-One Dialog 07 - Become a Digital Business
assets

By now, your digital assets are a selling machine and you are regularly socializing with your customers. It is now time to get intimate with the data provided by your customer interactions. The next assets to acquire are:

Customer Relations Management (CRM) System

Customer Relations Management (CRM) systems are fairly common now, but they vary in effectiveness from one organization to the next because data input is rarely well organized. If you haven't implemented a CRM, do so with proper guidance. It can quickly become an expensive platform.

Customer Knowledge Base

A Customer Knowledge Base is an FAQ section on steroids. If you have a product or service that invites frequent user questions, a digital knowledge base is great for business! Internal groups must maintain the content, but the resources required to do so are far less than fielding the same questions over and over again through chat, phone or email. And external audiences love it because the answers are at their fingertips. Just ensure your digital knowledge base is easy to use and quick to search.

Help Desk / Technical Tickets

If your product or service requires user adoption, a Help Desk or Technical Ticketing System is ideal. Users can ask questions inline with using your product, and yet customer service representatives can serve up researched answers in an organized and timely fashion.

Key question: With all these interactions/touches, is anybody or any system capturing each point of data provided by your customers? Do customers have a way to get information (sales or technical) from your greater community? Are you logging, then mining the data that is provided in each interaction?

marketing & sales

Now that you are engaged in a digital dialog with your customers, you should now manage the interactions and serve content that is more specific to your various customer segments (e.g. by market, by application). Your marketing and sales systems should begin to have a customer-facing component which are actively managed by your team. You should also be able to advertise on platforms with refined geo- and demographic targeting capabilities:

Reputation Management / Influencer Engagement

Reputation Management is one of the "new kids on the block." With the massive amounts of information that can posted on your company, it's important to manage that reputation if reviews greatly impact your business. These can be product and service reviews or cultural reviews where employment is concerned. Influencer Engagement is about promoting your reputation with digital readerships such as popular bloggers or social phenoms.

Lead Scoring

If you use a CRM, then Lead Scoring may be one of the next tactics you want to deploy. Instead of passing every contact from your marketing into your CRM, many companies choose to qualify leads by scoring them through website visits, source of leads and data cleansing.

Social Advertising

Don't end your social engagement with social posting. Social Advertising is a sometimes great way to target consumers in a very granular way because the demo-, geo- and psychographic filtering available on a social advertising platform is unequaled. But don't expect great click-thru rates. Social Advertising is truly about brand-building!

Profiling

Profiling is a wonderful way to lead score if you have developed personas within your digital assets. By profiling, you can turn a casual site visitor to a warm lead by identifying a user based on common navigation patterns. From there, you can display specific content and gather user information.

Video Advertising

Video Advertising may be the next hot media. While is remains on most media planners radar, video advertising may soon become hot due to the on-request video content consumers are demanding. Pre-, mid- and post-roll video ads sponsor online content that has targeting methods built in.

Key question: Who handles the data mining for your organization? Are your systems or is your personnel doing the heavy-lifting of gathering and analyzing data? Are you relying too much on a system and experiencing garbage-in/ garbage-out? Are you taking advantage of highly targeted advertising platforms (e.g., Facebook)?