Build revenue by engaging your customer

There’s a lot of buzz about engaging customers using social media, and marketers in Singapore are beginning to embrace the idea a solid digital marketing strategy requires more than Facebook, Twitter, and other established public social media sites can offer.

Online product platforms and Web2.0 “community interaction” sites offer new and intriguing ways to engage the customer, while sharing (versus “managing” or “controlling”) the online experience, and are becoming recognized as more effective ways to move into that ever-compelling and revenue-generating world of digital engagement.

The concept is simple – one-way marketing (corporate websites, printed publications and other traditional marketing tools) provides little understand about whether people are even interested, much less ready to buy your product. In contrast, two-way marketing generates measurable interaction, drives brand enthusiasm, provides targeted content distribution, and results in customer initiated leads.

It all sounds so good, but is it achievable?

Over the next few weeks I’m going to do my best to guide you through a couple of online products that I work with regularly, along with a couple of very practical applications that I’ve seen, to hopefully offer a simple-to-understand primer on digital marketing products, and how they might fit for you.

Online Product Platforms
In short, a Product Platform is a web-driven, lead-generating product showcase. A product platform is a private, branded website, where companies invite customers to view their products and services. Product platforms help you to qualify your prospects by allowing you to track their movements through the site, thus providing an indication of their interest in specific products from your product line.

The beauty of Product Platforms is that they are dedicated to promoting your products, and drive engagement with your customers and prospects.

Product Platforms offer innovative (and fun!) ways to generate high quality leads for your sales teams, at significantly lower costs than the traditional marketing/advertising spend.

Product platforms allow marketers to promote key messaging in a video-intensive environment (through product demo’s, for example) that engages the audience, and results in new and expanded revenue from existing and prospective customers.

A well-designed product platform is easily scaled to include new products, and easily updated to include new messaging and information over time.

Once guided to the site, your customers sign up to view your products, allowing you to track their on-site movements, which products they’ve reviewed, which video demo’s they’ve watched, and which white papers or brochures they’ve read.

Sales teams can interact with site visitors real-time, or following the visit, and some companies even allow site visitors to interact with one another during their visits.

The beauty of these product sites is the ability to generate concrete site tracking information that helps to indicate whether any given site visitor is browsing or is a qualified lead, and more specifically, is a qualified lead for a particular product!

Let’s talk about ROI for a second now. As I’ve mentioned, online product platforms can drive revenue, by offering your sales teams a new way to target customers, since they already know what products those customers have specific interest in.

Furthermore, product platforms drive time-on-site statistics, and support brand-name recognition among other traditional marketing objectives. They will extend the life and reach of your marketing, reduce investment and risk of your marketing spend, and showcase your products in a fresh and compelling way.

Product platforms offer you qualified leads and improve your lead-to-sales ratio, and on top of that, they support your “Green” strategy by reducing your carbon footprint!

Stay tuned… Next week I’ll provide a few real-life examples of how companies are using online product platforms.

Anne LeBoutillier heads Decisive Media in Asia, and works with organizations throughout the region to define and deliver their web-based marketing and online product platforms. Anne doubles as a virtual tour guide, if you would like to experience an existing lead-gen platform first-hand. Please feel free to contact Anne directly at anne.leboutillier@decisive-media.com.