The Engaged Consumer

From time to time, my man, Bill Fanning, in our BizDev group gets fired up and throws a post together. You hear from him semi-regularly as he shares his wisdom on the Weekly Social Marketing Links posts I put up. You may also remember him from the Would you Join a Toothpaste Community post we co-penned several months back. Anyway, check out his latest as he talks about "marketing to marketers."

-Aaron

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I read an interesting blog post this morning about cold calling.  It got me thinking, how do Marketers wish to be marketed to?…a topic I’ve been interested in since joining the business development team at Powered a couple years ago.

The truth is, I don’t cold call prospects…there, I said it.  When I say cold call, I mean calling someone I don’t know, who doesn’t know me and probably is not familiar with my company.  I know traditional VP’s of Sales and Business Development are shaking their heads at me in disgust as they read this post but let’s be honest, the odds of getting someone to respond to a true cold call are very slim…even more so today than several years ago.  If you do get a response, you’ve effectively started your relationship by saying “Hey, I want to sell you something…”  Not the best way to kick off a trusted relationship.  I don’t know about you, but I don’t react well to people trying to sell me something.  Actually, I don’t react at all.  I simply tune them out. 

The recent increase in options for us, as consumers, to ignore traditional interruptive marketing tactics has changed how we are willing to interact with vendors / brands in our day to day lives both personally and professionally. 

• Caller ID allows me to screen my calls so I can decide which call to answer…I haven’t answered a telemarketer’s call in years.
• Tivo and DVR allow me to record shows I like and fast forward past the advertisements (I do watch the FreeCreditReport.com and E*Trades commercials though…very funny).
• I have XM in my truck and use Pandora or iTunes at home…no commercials there.
• I generally discover interesting brands and vendors from trusted sources through social networks, my Google Reader and off-line word of mouth from friends and associates.

The point is, traditional interruptive marketing tactics are becoming less affective and not a good way to develop relationships with consumers.  True cold calling is about as interruptive as it gets.

We try to apply the same philosophy to our prospecting efforts as we do when building strategy with our customers to engage their consumers. 

• Provide valuable information/resources to consumers.  In our case that means providing information on our website about Social Marketing in general in a variety of formats (articles, blog posts, podcasts, etc.)  Not just information about our offerings.  Share valuable, thought provoking information to prospects via e-mail and Twitter.
   
• Give consumers a means to interact with the company.  Anyone can add comments to our blog posts, share and rate content.  We have a Facebook fan page and company Twitter feed in addition to many of our employees active on Twitter (Aaron Strout, Doug Wick, Kathy Warren, Natanya Anderson, Ryan Joy, Jay Macintosh, me…just to name a few).  As appropriate for our consumers, we will add additional means of interaction on our website in the future.
   
•  Intelligently merchandise products and services in a non-interruptive manner.  We learn as much as possible about our prospects before engaging in conversation and certainly before making any recommendations.  We try to engage folks in a natural non-interruptive manner through our website, twitter, e-mail, leveraging existing relationships, etc.
   
•  Measure activity to understand what’s working and what’s not.  We measure all behavior on our website, webinar registration vs. participation, pipeline and forecast etc. and evolve the process as needed.     

Simply put, we want to be a valuable resource to consumers interested in Social Marketing.  If we do our jobs right, it should naturally drive more interaction with our prospects and industry experts. 

Back to my original question, how do you wish to be marketed to?  How can we improve?

Photo courtesy: http://www.urban-ninja.com.za