Have you ever sat in a meeting with a vendor and felt like this guy behind the desk?
This hilarious video made me laugh so much because it hits squarely on the head the absurdity of our current digital marketing situation. Between all the technobabble coming out of vendors and the industry as a whole business people like myself are often left holding the terminology bag and still not driving revenue up. I think I know why. We have to get back to basics.
Customers don’t care about our latest cloud based solution and neither does your CEO. What they care about are the basic key principles of good customer service delivered to them where ever they are. Yes, we all need our website, Facebook page and Twitter feed but all too often we’re not thinking about the tone of what we’re saying and doing. We’re only thinking about the next greatest coolest thing we can deliver. Here are a few notes from my own thoughts about doing this better:
1. Have Real Conversations: Pretend you were standing there talking to a customer. Yes, I mean live, in the real 3d world. What would you say or show them about your product and how would you do it? Translating a this personal experience to the web is the holy grail. You can’t do it if you’ve forgotten what the real human experience is like.
2. Know Your Customers Consumption Device: Pictures are worth a thousand words. We all know this but all too often we talk too much and show too little in a useful visual way. Remember the lowest common denominator of device that someone will be viewing your digital product artwork on?
3. Workflow Your Customer Service Process: Yes, folks good customer service does not happen by accident. It is a process. What happens when someone wants a return. What’s the conversation you have with them at that time. How do you gather metrics throughout the process? What about exchanges and credits? This may sound operational but at every step in this phase you are informing your customer about the integrity of your company and that is brand management 101.
4. Evaluate your Competitors: Usually you have successful competitors. Know what they are doing. Too often we are buried in our own work and forget to look up and around at what other people are doing until its too late. You don’t want to see your competitors new tool from an article on Mashable.
5. The Web is About People Not Gadgets: I could write an entire article on this thought alone. Technology is meant to bring people together in a web of knowledge and shared experience. The toys and gadgets are secondary to this true purpose. Stay true to this concept and you’ll be that much closer to elevating your brand beyond the basics.
Happy digital marketing folks. I hope you enjoy this video as much as I did. Thanks to Mark Miller from Global360.com and NothingButSharePoint.com for posting this to his Facebook feed. It made me laugh out loud!
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