It’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to…
Over five years ago, CMOs and Marketing Directors raced one another to the starting post to invest in social technologies that they could use for business applications, in an effort to find the holy grail of customer engagement and connection. Many are still at it. Some very brave companies took a ‘build it and they will come’ approach. Only they haven’t. Come that is.
Recent information from the CMO Council reports that businesses spent over $3billion last year in web-based communities and user generated content tools, but according to Gartner, nearly 70% of customers never log in.
McKinsey has estimated that the costs of loyalty programmes have swelled to $50billion, yet more than half of the customers in them are inactive. The conversion rates through social media sites remain unimpressive at 3%.
So what’s happened? Or more specifically, what has this extremely clever bunch of CMOs and Marketing Directors missed in the race to deploying social media as an engagement tool for their businesses?
The most important clue may lie in the fact that on average, people’s attention spans are only about 4 seconds. We live in what’s known as the ‘Attention Economy’ where millions of people, products and content, social media channels, and communities not to mention our families and our jobs are all competing for our attention. Social media has contributed to the deluge of information and choice with the result that the window for reaching anyone is shrinking. The engagement challenge is therefore growing and a critical engagement crisis continues to loom ever larger.
CMOs need to discover what motivates their business customers to interact with them. It’s important to understand how to engage and sustain engagement and further, turn that engagement into a positive decision and set of actions that converts into business.
Getting under a customer’s skin, on their radar, and in their hearts and minds when you’ve got 4 seconds or less, on average, means identifying the motivators that will attract their interest. Consensus amongst those in the know is around focusing on the key intrinsic motivators of individuals, status and reputation.
The intrinsic motivators for most individuals are:
Feeling Smart
Feeling Successful
Feeling Socially Valued
And Making sense of everything – in other words, having a structure.
This fundamentally changes the engagement model of the modern CMO. Content needs to shift from the features and benefits of your business offer to content that makes your customer feel smart, successful and socially valued.
Tears could dry up if you get this right.
For further information on how Marketingmoves can help you find the right CMO, Marketing Director or Marketing Executive for your business contact us at info@marketingmoves.com or on +441932253352.
