What It Means to Participate: 1st of 6 Posts

More and more companies are realizing they need to engage with their customers, prospects, influencers and everyone else who has a stake in the market conversation, but what does it mean to engage or participate? True participation in the market conversation is much more than just talking—that’s what marketers and sales people have been doing for years (i.e. commercials, print ads, radio ads, email blasts, newsletters, direct mail brochures, website banner ads, etc.) True participation is a mixture of:

• Listening to current customers, prospects, industry experts and other influencers in the market space and internalizing what you hear to improve your business.
• Speaking to the overall market conversation with quality, supportive and helpful content that people want to respond to, inquire about and pass on to others.
• Caring about what is being said about your products, your company, your competitors and your industry, but even more important, care about helping your customers and prospects fulfill their wants and needs..
• Sharing your experiences—positive and negative—and your insights as you grow your company and evolve your product lines.
• Building relationships with market conversation Influencers, Participants and Listeners based on the mutual interest of the consumer problems that need to be solved with product innovation.

I had a meeting with a client today who had never thought of marketing in this context before, so I thought it was a good time to reiterate it here.

There is endless advice on how to engage with customers, how to build relationships with influencers and how to use social media for marketing. These bits of advice and best practices are usually written for a general audience of marketing or business professionals and is intended as general knowledge, not as specific suggested courses of action for your business.

The amount of each participation element your company should engage in to meet your goals will be specific to your company, taking into account your industry, your goals, your resources, your product roadmap, your current customer base, your brand personality and corporate culture, etc.

Not every company needs to put the same amount of focus on each participation element, nor is there a set percentage that is standard best practice for the amount of resources to devote to each element. Over the next couple of weeks I’ll be doing a series of blog posts to cover each element that should help give you guidance on determining how much your company should be devoting to Listening, Speaking, Caring, Sharing and Building Relationships.