Your stories must find your customers

Yes, the web has huge potential, with much of it yet to be explored. And yes, it’s easier and cheaper to communicate with your customers digitally than by print. But just publishing stories on your corporate website, posting on your blog or making digital ads doesn’t automatically get you attention. Search-engine optimization is, of course, good, but far from the whole solution. Optimizing content for searchability only helps you get found by those who are actually trying to find something. Those who are not looking will not find it – search-engine optimized or not.

I got some interesting advice last week from Sarah Rotman Epps, eMedia analyst at Forrester Research. She gave a presentation at the Custom Publishing Council in New York, and she told the audience that “you’re in trouble if you think your business is to make websites and publish content on them.” Well, ouch, that hurt…

So, what is our business then? It is of course to make sure that our stories actually find their way to our clients’ customers. We need to reach the target audiences in the way they want to be reached in the place where they like to be. Take the US custom publishing company Meredith and their client Pepsi. Meredith finds out where the most desirable Pepsi customers are and publishes content on the sites they use. And we are not talking banners. We are talking stories, real content. Stories told in blogs, or in forums frequented by the target audience. Different stories for different audiences.

You need to invest time and money in getting to know your audience – where they are, what they do, and what level of online presence you can expect from them.

These are Sarah Rotman Epps’ tips for us:
1. Aggregate content and functionality needed to meet key audience goals.
2. Syndicate broadly to engage your audience wherever they are.
3. Use social technologies to get your audience to engage with the brand—and each other.

Read more about getting to know your audience in this excerpt from Groundswell – winning in the world transformed by social technologies (pdf).

/Sara

Andra bloggar om: kommunikation, företagskommunikation,
communications, editorial, integrated communications, social media