CMOs: 3 tips to engage your customers in the digital world

As a CMO, you know the importance of engaging your high value consumers in today's highly competitive digital world. As a graduate student in Integrated Marketing Communications [IMC] program at the Northwestern University with an interest in digital marketing, I have found two insightful articles on how to engage consumers in the digital world.  

The Article “These 3 digital marketing strategies are making ads more relevant for all” published in April 2015 by Tessa Wegert , interactive media specialist, provides three effective tips to create relevant ads and thus to increase customers’ engagement. These three tips are leverage programmatic ad, go niche on social media and finally match ad format to audience. By following the three steps, companies are more likely to create advertising relevant to consumers. 

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Another article published in April 2015 by Roger Katz , CEO of Friend2Friend, talks about “How customer engagement campaigns impact customer experience”. In this article Roger talks about the benefits of engagement marketing and six ways to further engage the consumers. The six ways include: 1) Personalize the matching of customers with products and services. 2) Help customers to learn something about themselves. 3) Challenge customer knowledge. 4) Invite the best customers to the inside track. 5) Ask customers for testimonials. 6) Ask consumers for content. By following the six steps, companies are more likely to engage with consumers through positive experience.  

After reviewing these articles, and based on my experience through the IMC program, here are three action items any CMO or marketing manager should immediately begin to think about and take actions on:

• Understand your consumers – Understand your consumers’ life style and interests. Use social monitoring system to find customers’ motivation to engage with your products.

• Create relevant content – Based on the understanding of your customers, marketing team should create relevant content that is contextually meaningful to your consumers to draw their attention.

• Interact with your consumers to engage them – Interacting with consumers on social media. Encourage consumers to take part in product design and brand storytelling to build stronger relationship with consumers.

Taking customers as our centroid is the basic principle for Integrated Marketing Communication. But marketers often forget to apply this principal to the daily marketing practices. The three steps allow marketers to know more about the customers and build more meaningful relationship with them. When customers have a strong relationship with the company, they are more loyal to the brand.

Ada Cui is a M.S. candidate in Integrated Marketing Communication program at Northwestern University with interests in digital marketing. She worked for FocalPrice and LightInTheBox, two China-Based online global retailers as Digital Marketing Manager targeting at Hispanic market. She is passionate about digital marketing and will graduate from Northwestern University in Dec 2015.

You are welcome to follow her on Twitter: @Ada_Wendong or get connected with her on LinkedIn.