Facilitating conversations

Ideally you want to talk one on one with every single one of your customers and respond with solutions to their problems or better, learn enough about them to anticipate what you product or solution you should be building. 

This requires you to build huge content repositories which your "conversation engine" can pick from; either to start or to continue a conversation or even to close it. You also need rules; decision trees which anticipate how conversations can progress and point to the right response to be picked. 

All this is a lot of work and investment in time and money when you are starting off as a small enterprise. So, take small steps. As you start to move away from mass-marketing and move towards one-on-one marketing, there will be slow progress. You will first talk to smaller groups and then, yet smaller groups as you get better with customer profiling and targeting your messages to the audience. All the more reason for you to remind yourselves of micromarkets. 

If you pick well targeted benefit statements that appeal to the micromarkets and if we manage to build a well structured "dialog" with each micromarket, the results can be very gratifying.

It does not have to be the net..

.. but

Think of the dialog process again. When did you last carry out a conversation where you spoke a sentence or a paragraph and waited for th answer for a week or two? This is what you must do when you depend on a paper mailer to communicate.

How many customers will take the trouble to write back to you in response if they had to depend on putting pen to paper?

Accept it. The net is the reality. And the reality is that every time you are sending a mailer out to hundreds of customers, you are creating opportunities to have conversations with them; not one way, not one-off. Will the conversations be in tens in number or hundreds or in thousands? How meaningful will they be? How much will they advance your communication objective? That will depend on how prepared you are with relevant, precisely targeted content that enable this whole dialogue process. 

More conversations with your prospects/ customers and more meaningful ones at that. Will you sell more or less as a result? 

"Does it also do that?"- the need to have a dialogue

Content is king; knowing your product's key benefit to the target segment is important as is having as many support points as you muster. Customers do like the benefit statement spelt out in easy to understand personal terms. Product usage examples, testimonials from othert users, application hints.. they are all good. Keep them coming and organize them in a way that you can find them when you need. 

Internet enables faster delivery of messages. Remember, it also enables faster trashing of irrelevant messages. So, having something useful to say is your best chance of being read in the long run. Communication is a two-way street; so, more relevant your messages, more is the chance that the customer comes back to you; with a question, with a comment or a feedback or even better an intent to purchase! Start a dialogue.

Prepare ahead of time

It is no good to be underprepared for a customer meeting. Don't be caught in a situation where you have to communicate to a potentially large customer segment but either your benefit statement is not ready or you do not have adequate support points behind your benefit statement. You need a lot of content to facilitate dialogue with a large customer base segmented into micro-markets. Get started on generating and organizing content today; before your "strategy boys" are done with their market segment definitions.

Some answers and some questions

Customers, especially in a B2B setting, spend precious little time searching for a product till they have a need. The implication is that even if you spend a lot of money and creative energy getting to be known, you are pretty much wasting your time if your message reaches a customer who is not in “active search” mode. This is why the most expensive marketing campaigns tend to be for new customer acquisition.

Contrast this to the situation where you have a specific group of customers who have purchased your product in the last 6 months and your objective is to ensure continued satisfaction. Will your communication be different? Of course. What do you think would be a few things you would like to tell your user base? Would that include a short introduction to your company? I hope not!

While the customer is in comparison mode, the opportunity is in trying to get into a close dialog and close communication. Anticipating the information needs at this stage and highlighting your advantages are key. What are some of the innovations you have seen in this space?