Successful marketing all boils down to your ability to understand your customers and consistently communicate with them through creative advertising.
In the past, customer insights were the topic of focus groups and research, but that can be expensive and unnatural. Is an isolated room full of strangers the best place to pick your customer’s brain? Not really. Today, 61 percent of consumers report that social media impacts their buying decisions…so why not use that to your advantage?
Turn your customers into your biggest advocates by using technology to collaborate with them. Not only does this give you valuable insights, it can propel you to up your creativity game. Let’s examine.
Good Creative Always Starts with Customer Insight
A good insight bridges the interests or desires of a customer with the features of a brand’s product. Nothing should be sketched, white-boarded or written without it. When the insight is on target and is translated it into unique and brilliant creative, an emotional connection is made with your audience. With so much customer segmentation and rapidly shifting demands and consumer trends, identifying customer insights is more critical than ever.
The good news is that customers are flooding the social mediasphere everyday with potential insights. Check out what people are saying about your brand online. Do customers love your product? Do they hate it? Do they want more from it? What are their pain points? They are telling you right now. You only need to know what to look for and how to listen.
Inspire Your Target Personas
Creating target personas is always an early step in our creative process. In order to really get inside the heads of your audience, try to map out as much detail about them as possible. Don’t simply look for the standard data, like age, income and race.
Take a good look at your Facebook and Twitter fans. These are your customers and, more than likely, your best ones. Study their profiles and really get to know them. Go beyond what they are saying about your brand or product and dig into other things that interest them. What television shows do they watch? What music do they listen to? What turns them on? What turns them off?
Pulling these insights and documenting them in a target persona ensures that you have painted a very real picture of who your audience is and what makes them tick. When our creative team has an intimate knowledge of who they are talking to, they begin to generate real empathy for the customer.
Add User Generated Content to Your Moodboards
Moodboards are an excellent way to bring visual clarity to an emerging concept. But gathering images that convey the thoughts and ideas associated with a particular project is simply not enough these days. There has to be assurances that the images are aligned with what resonates with your customer.
Adding in user generated content adds that extra layer of authenticity. When you add in a layer of user-generated content, such as photos of fans interacting with the client’s products, our moodboards feel more grounded.
Additionally, customers can be incredibly creative, so there’s never a shortage of interesting ideas or visuals. The most effective moodboards don’t rely on only visuals, either. Overlaying a few key phrases and text adds more context to the ideas you are trying to convey. A few quotes or comments from a customer’s tweet or Facebook post can help establish the right tone.
Invite Customers an Opportunity to Contribute
You’ve probably seen a number of consumer-created commercials on television lately. Brands like Doritos and Coca-Cola have not only been able to source good ideas from their customers, but they’ve taken customer engagement to another level, creating an army of brand advocates and co-creators.
But effective customer contribution doesn’t have to involve expensive campaigns and media buys. Look for ways that your fans and followers can contribute to your advertising or content. It helps when you steer the conversation a bit and provide some sort of inspiration.
Contribution can come in the form of feedback too. Social media channels can be a great proving ground for concepts and ideas that you are trying to test out. Knowing with certainty which concept is the right direction is not always easy, so put them out on social media to test out. Watching for comments, likes and shares gives us a gauge on how well the content is being received and can help us make more informed choices.
Form a Virtual Customer Advisory Board
Customer advisory boards are an effective tool for brands to ensure that their current business direction aligns with their customers’ needs and desires. But finding the time to meet regularly and at a pace that matches the speed of business today can be challenging. Forming a virtual customer advisory board with your best fans and followers from social media can be just as enlightening as a traditional model but at less cost and time.
A virtual customer advisory board can not only lead to good insights that lead to great ideas, but they also empower your best customers to take part in your business. That instills a tremendous amount of brand advocacy.
Challenge your company to view the customer journey from the inside out for an inspired creative process. Research and understand your audience. Invite them to become part of your business. When you incorporate customer creativity and invite collaboration, you’ll be amazed to find new customers motivated and excited about your brand.