“Meet your customers where they are.” You have likely seen this phrase in plenty of marketing blogs. While it seems redundant, this sentiment is the foundation of many successful campaigns today. It’s crucial to offer your target audience the support they need when they need it. This means creating and delivering content that answers their questions, solves their pain points and encourages them to invest in your product — all at the right time and place.
But many companies make the mistake of relying too heavily on intrusive marketing tactics like cold calls, pop-up ads and sponsored posts. Overwhelming consumers with content they do not ask for can impact brand loyalty and credibility. This is where reception marketing comes into play.
This article explores three ways to enable customers to take charge of their buyer’s journey with “reception marketing.”
Understanding reception marketing
Reception marketing offers buyers content that aligns with where they are at any given moment. Rather than bombarding buyers with pop-ups, cold calls or spam emails, you can provide information that individual consumers want to engage with. These strategies can go a long way in setting your brand apart from the competition.
The key to implementing reception marketing is understanding your users’ behaviors and crafting and delivering content that directly addresses their needs. Consider the following:
- 69% of consumers first try to resolve their issues independently, but less than one-third of companies offer self-service options, such as a knowledge base.
- 51% of customers say they would be less loyal to a brand if their online experience wasn’t as enjoyable as their in-person experience.
The reception marketing solution? Ensure your website has content to help consumers troubleshoot issues, just as an in-store associate would.
It’s time to start making content that resonates with your audience’s needs and desires. Here are three insights for brands looking to implement reception marketing strategies.
1. Leverage consumer data insights
The first step to reception marketing is analyzing your consumers. Leverage audience data insights to understand what they are looking for and when. Research their buying behaviors, interests and the content they click on most often.
Up to 66% of consumers expect companies to understand their needs, and 70% of consumers say they’re highly likely to purchase exclusively from brands that understand them and their needs — making this consumer research a crucial step.
This is the foundation of an owned asset optimization (OAO) strategy, an innovative way to maximize the content you create to meet today’s ever-evolving consumers where they are. Owned assets like a corporate website must be optimized for success.
And marketing companies like Terakeet are “supercharging” these strategies for their clients by making consumer research the cornerstone of their plans. The OAO partner uses proprietary technology and search intent insights to learn what their clients’ audiences are looking for in real time. Then, paired with this unbiased consumer behavior data, they create reception marketing strategies that fit their needs.
Dig deeper: 3 ways data can steer you wrong — and how to glean better insights
2. Create more effective content mapping strategies
Once customer data is turned into actionable insights, content mapping can begin. Focus on all possible paths consumers can take to interact with your brand. Jot down those pathways and consider any questions, thoughts or feelings your buyers may experience during their journey.
Identifying potential questions or needs along the pathway can help you understand the types of content assets you need to create to support your buyer through the funnel and where each asset should appear in the buyer’s journey. In the earlier example, creating content to help customers troubleshoot issues was a great type of content that can help buyers post-sale, which leads to customer retention and loyalty. But what about prospects who haven’t yet converted?
Each phase of the buyer’s journey — the one Google calls “the messy middle” — requires the right marketing assets at the right time. The challenge is that the messy middle isn’t linear or the same for every prospect. This is why understanding how customers come to you and what information they may need — from the trigger point to the point of conversion — is vital to successful reception marketing.
Dig deeper: The ROI of personalized experiences: Content measurements
3. Provide support at each part of the sales funnel
While, as noted, reception marketing is nonlinear, some types of content are more popular than others within each stage of the funnel. How-to guides are most popular for the top and middle of the funnel phases, while product overviews are more popular at the bottom of the funnel, per a Semrush report.
Still, consumer behaviors aren’t permanent and treating your audience as such will backfire. Over 50% of consumers expect their buying experiences to be personalized, and 64% of customers under 40 feel that customer service is an afterthought for most of the businesses they buy from, according to Zendesk.
Providing support to your audience at each phase of their buyer’s journey as part of reception marketing means “receiving” feedback from your audience and using it to inform your strategy and interactions going forward.
At a time when consumers are more discerning and autonomous than ever, companies that bombard their audience with salesy marketing assets and offers will fail. Instead, we must focus on truly adding value to our customers’ journeys based on what they want and need from us.
Dig deeper: Customer engagement: Moving from value creation to value expansion
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Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily MarTech. Staff authors are listed here.
