The most successful marketing efforts often don’t just rely on a one-way interaction from brand to customer. Instead of relegating the audience to being passive recipients, these marketing plans welcome customers into the project and make them active and crucial participants. When done right, they can strengthen the connection between customer and brand.
Interactive marketing is at the center of emerging customer-centric approaches to marketing. It encompasses a variety of tools designed to give your audience a central role in the process and to help personalize the marketing experience for them. When your company uses interactive marketing, you are striving to give your customers and prospective customers a way to tailor part of the marketing experience to best fit their interests and needs. If you are a brand seeking to build more powerful ties to your audience, Fryed Egg Productions can help you integrate interactive marketing into your plans in a meaningful, productive way.
Here are some keys to understanding interactive marketing and how it can bolster your customer relationships.
Putting customers in the driver’s seat
Interactive marketing is based on the responses and actions of customers and prospective customers, distinguishing it from a more campaign-based approach. Interactive marketing works when customers are the ones who help to shape their experience, making decisions that trigger responses and give them an approach specific to them. In this way, a brand can seek to meet the particular expectations and demands of each customer. The more personal a marketing interaction feels for a customer, the more likely they are to form a bond with a brand.
Giving customers a voice
Organizations are turning to a variety of interactive marketing devices to connect with customers. These include activities for customers that not only engage them with the brand but also provide invaluable data for businesses that they can use to improve their services and marketing efforts. This often means giving customers a means to provide input. Surveys and polls are among the most popular of these tools, often employed on social media. A poll gives customers a chance to weigh in on a single question, while surveys can cover more ground with multiple questions. Both give customers a clear way to make their voice heard on a topic, while engaging with the brand. Quizzes and games similarly engage customers directly, and the results give the organization important data points for decision-making.
Personalized content
When you know your audience, you can develop content that speaks directly to them. That means using data about your customers to create ads and other content that will most speak to their interests. It also means using search engine advertising, email advertising and other forms of digital advertising that are designed to reach customers who are most likely to be interested in your products or services based on their online activities. In this way, you can provide them with discounts and other offers tailored to them and ensure that they are receiving advertising and other information most relevant to them. However, you want to build a tailored experience that is not too intrusive or overbearing in the process.
Dynamic storytelling
Creative and dynamic storytelling is a form of interactive marketing. Often, the most effective efforts in this area involve multimedia content, such as infographics, blog posts and – most of all – video. An important interactive element of this kind of content is using the storytelling as a launch pad for sharing additional information and giving audience members the capacity to explore and discover more related to the content. This gives your customers layers of experience that are unique to them, and it also provides details to them in easily accessible and digestible increments that make it more likely to resonate and stay with them than if it was provided in one large chunk.
Fryed Egg can help build a new level of brand affinity for your business, identifying and engaging the audiences most important to your growth. If you want to learn more about how Fryed Egg can help, contact us at (813) 478-0494 or [email protected] or visit www.FryedEgg.com.