Blog | Sequentia Environics | Connecting you with your customer community

Going beyond tangible benefits

by Ujwal Arkalgud March 14, 2012

Every Wednesday morning at Sequentia, we indulge each other in an hour long session reserved to discuss anything from the ideas we’re working on to the problems we’re trying to solve for our clients. This morning the conversation centered around the intangibles in an audience-brand relationship – elements that go beyond serving a tangible need or pain point. Elements that seemingly serve a need for self-actualization (if I am to use Maslow’s terminology).

Through this conversation, I was reminded of an interesting blog post by Grant McCracken in the Harvard Business Review a couple weeks ago, where he talked about the strategy a local library adopted to make itself culturally relevant to younger readers.

In this particular case, the library focused on an understanding of the intangible need it served – providing a unique magical ambiance where ideas are born. So they created just such an experience where they invited local kids to leave their stuffed animals overnight for a “sleepover” at the library. The next morning when the kids came to pick up their furry friends, they were charmed with photographs of their animals’ mystical journey overnight.

Doing so allowed the library to create a magical, intangible connection with this younger audience.

In the digital context, we often forget about the intangibles when creating experiences. We focus too much on servicing audiences, fulfilling known needs, and we don’t pay enough attention to the brand experience delivered (or desired) every time an audience member interacts with a brand/product online.

So here are a few questions you should be asking yourself:

What are the feelings you’d like audiences to associate with your brand?
Are there emotional elements your audience would like to associate with your brand?
What feelings are currently evoked when your audience interacts with your brand online?
Is your online experience consistent with your offline experience?

Related:

Here’s a past article on how you can study culture to better understand your audience online.

Image source: http://arvinabrown.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/hpim2422.jpg

Social Readers: By The Numbers

by Chloe Perelgut March 13, 2012

Social Readers (also known as the social edition of publications such as The Washington Post) have skyrocketed in popularity since their inception on Facebook in September of last year.

The apps have the unique ability to let users see what their friends find intriguing in the news and allow them to read the same article, spreading it even further across a given social network. The only downside is that these updates can be numerous and take up a good chunk of someone’s timeline.

The Washington Post's Social Reader

Some months ago, Allfacebook.com compiled a list of the top 4 applications and given a breakdown of how many users are spreading the news.
Yahoo News: More than 10 million users have activated the feature.
The Washington Post: 3.5 million active users a month.
The Independent: Over 1 million active users a month.
The Guardian: 4 million active users monthly.

For more statistics on social readers and their impact in the market, check out this article. What remains to be seen of course is the impact these readers are going to have on the publishing business. It’s certainly driving the necessary eyeballs.

Staying true to your content marketing principles

by Andrew Wahl March 9, 2012

Anytime you try to embrace a new way of doing things, you always run the risk of slipping back into your old, comfortable habits. Many marketers experience this with content marketing.

As much as B2B marketers might claim to understand the principles behind creating valuable content that focuses on addressing their audience’s needs and not promoting their brand, it’s easy to regress. And then you’re on a fast track to being overlooked by your potential customers.

As this post from Michael Brenner correctly notes, content marketing is a new buzzword, but the concepts are not new — 90% of companies say they use it, according to research by leaders in the field. The real problem is that most marketers do not do it well. Not all content is created equal.

A fundamental challenge is when organizations only think they know their audience. But if you’re going to try to solve their problems, you need to have a genuinely accurate picture of who they are, what their problems are and where they search online for solutions. Without that information, content marketing becomes thinly veiled outbound “push” marketing messages.

Sound familiar? “Is Your Content Boring? Here’s 6 Steps to Great Content,” is a good refresher in the principles of effective content marketing. It also includes slides from a presentation called “Good To Great Content Marketing“ delivered at the Online Marketing Summit by Content Marketing Institute founder and author Joe Pulizzi.

Great content marketing takes commitment and effort — but all good things in business do.

Advisory communities: Why build them?

by Ujwal Arkalgud March 8, 2012

Advisory communities are typically small (anywhere from 100 to 1000 members) closed communities that house your most impassioned brand fans/enthusiasts. They are built with the purpose of empowering your audience, by providing them a direct feedback funnel to your brand. Such communities tend to be seasonal or periodic in nature, often utilized to seek direct market feedback on new product/service offerings, marketing materials/campaigns etc.

There are tons of benefits to building customer advisory communities online. Here are a few:

Save money on annual market research.
- Receive honest and open feedback from members who have the added advantage of communicating in an online setting where they (community members) lead the way.
- Context is everything. If you’re seeking information about digital behaviour, or about the relevance of a new product to an audience online, there is no better place to do that then on the internet.
Create advocates.
- Your empowered audiences will be your most prolific advocates. In fact, you’ll often find advisory members wanting to participate in a greater number of brand-facilitated community initiatives.
Test new products and services before it hits the market.
- Community based testing is particularly relevant in cases where new products and services are delivered over the internet.
Stay attuned to changes in market dynamics.
- The best way to keep tab over the evolving digital behaviour of your audience is to regularly communicate with them online, in a setting where they are less inhibited to speak their minds.

So if you’ve never thought of communities from the standpoint of building an ongoing advisory/research panel, this might just be the right time to do so.

Want to know more? Feel free to check out our community needs assessment.

Image source: http://femaleimagination.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/advice.jpg

How to define buyer personas to facilitate measurement

by Jen Evans March 7, 2012

Your marketing team probably uses buyer personas — most companies do — but how confident are you in their effectiveness?

Personas are meant as a way to define your audience of potential customers so you can focus your content and maximize your budget. The problem with most personas is that they are each created as isolated depictions of typical buyers. Without a common thread running between them, it’s difficult to ensure that you are addressing the entire spectrum of your audience needs. More importantly, you can’t accurately measure how effective your efforts are.

Fortunately, it’s easier to develop effective personas than people think, even if you can’t budget for any research just now. The simplest way is to divide any audience into thirds by the amount of existing knowledge or experience they have with a subject. Then by developing useful content that targets each group, you can measure how many people of each group make up your audience.

Here are some examples:

Product: Enterprise data accelerant system that offers huge cost benefits

Segmentation criteria: Amount of experience with data accelerant systems

New — people who know nothing about enterprise data acceleration (these could include people in Procurement, RFP researchers, transferred executives looking for information on a new portfolio, employees at new companies after a lateral career move into a new industry)
Experienced — people who have enough knowledge about data acceleration, but function in other areas (such as CFO, CTO, product managers of similar or integrated products, potential integration partners, prospective employees, independent consultants)
Expert — people who provide organizations with technical expertise about data accelerant systems (technical experts, journalists, pundits, scientists, researchers, analysts)

Product: Women’s jeans

Segmentation criteria: Amount of fashion knowledge

Fashion learner — girls and teenagers forming their opinions and tastes
Fashion sophisticate — women with more than a passing interest in fashion who like to dress and look good, they are still looking to be educated on the latest trends in an efficient, easy-to-achieve way
Fashionista — people who want the best or daring fashions and know trends before they’re a trend, including professionals, designers, bloggers, socialites

This type of segmentation will allow you to target your content and gather metrics such as which segment is biggest, which content performs best for each, and whether there is any evidence of research cycles. Simply by segmenting your audience in terms of the depth of their knowledge and experience, you can get a clearer picture of what kind of content resonates most.

What Fibonacci Said