STOP [story]TELLING and START LISTENING to Your Customers!

Enough of storytelling! While you can tell the most engaging stories and craft the most immersive experiences for your consumers, are you making an equal amount of effort to [constantly] listen to your consumers? Because just by developing a se*y and innovative digital platform for your campaign may win you awards but may not result in intended marketing objectives!

So what should Brands start doing to achieve intended campaign outcomes?

The answer is simple! Stop your core storytelling process (for a moment) and start the "listening" process - a scientific process that will require patience and analytical skills. And also will require creativity of a different kind, when you tweak your story to cater to what your consumers are talking about!

Here's how you (Brands) need to roll -

Once sufficient engagement or inflection point from your target group is achieved for your campaign, 

Brands should carefully listen, understand, analyze and amplify earned media by continuing to invest in paid media channels, but this time the investment should be towards the objective of improving campaign messaging to sell what customers are talking about in earned media channels. 

Constant monitoring and analyzing of customer conversation that reveal topics trending, brand sentiment, influential customers, engagement analytics, etc. is necessary for this approach to work. 

This evolving, iterative approach to improving ad communications and reach also optimizes media spends for the brand. 

Couple the social interaction data with transactional data (CRM system) and form a more meaningful and complete view of your consumers. If the campaign manages to go viral then Big Data scientists need to work with Media and Marketing professionals to separate the noise from the signal. There are many social analytics tools (free or low cost: Peoplebrowsr's Playground, Social Mention, Bottlenose) available to derive social business intelligence. 

The true measure of success of a campaign is the sustainability of benefits derived from story refinement, because ultimately the Brand is what the customer says it is and not the other way around!


Continue reading about the new brand tree and growing the fruits of earned media here.
So how are you tweaking the mood and content of your campaign to incorporate the voice of your customer? What techniques have you used to optimize your media spends?