John Hayes posted on March 10, 2011 |
The other day I visited some marketers who have a very niche engineering product. Their total addressable prospect pool was only a few thousand worldwide. But when they buy, the transaction size is large.
The challenge for these marketers was to stay in touch between buying cycles so that they could showcase their product advantages repeatedly. Their challenge is how to engage their target market over a long period of time.
We talked about banners and emails, but they couldn’t find a magazine or online publication that fully serves their small niche. They also couldn’t imagine banner or email content that would keep engagement high over the long haul of a sales cycle. We talked about social media, and while helpful, that wasn’t enough.
Eventually we arrived at a content strategy. The company was already sending a monthly email newsletter full of customer testimonials. But the list wasn’t growing and the open rate was disappointing. Our new content strategy had to take their great customer success stories and tell them in a more compelling way. These new stories would also form the content core to the social media strategy.
The marketers has started down this path by hiring a professional content writer. We then decided to explore making their content even more engaging by translating their success stories onto video. By telling their stories in a more interesting way and including industry news and information they provide a valuable service for their target market. Their goal with this new content will be to make every message they deliver something that their prospects look forward to.
We’ve been doing this with the Product Design Show since January, so we’ll see how well video works for a smaller niche.