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Captivating, Content, and Community are as important to interactive marketing as the three R’s are to education. The goal of interactive marketing is to captivate your current and potential customers. The best way to produce a captive customer is get them to want to be captive. The question is how do you get your customers to want to be held captive?

In their recently published book, Get Content Get Customers, Joe Pulizzi and Newt Barrett explain providing content that makes a purchase decision easy enables a company to build a trusted relationship with current and future customers. This is accomplished with captivating content. Captivating content is “comprehensive and easy to use” according to Pulizzi and Barrett in their recent case study of MillerWelds.com in Chapter 8 titled Yes, Content Marketing Can Make Welding Cool!. Without captivating content you cannot have captive customers.

How do I motivate customers to stay captive? Captivating content is only part of the equation. Content is a one-way communication tool. You speak and the customer listens. Content is a passive tool. As Jeremiah Owyang a social computing senior analyst at Forrester Research put it in a recent blog post, it is like playing a game of solitaire at a party. Active communication is what motivates customers to continue to come back day after day. Creating conversation is what captivates customers. They want to participate. They want to be heard. Participation is achieved through community.

Communities come in two forms: organic and inorganic. An organic community is a community based either on your product or on what makes your product necessary. These communities spring up naturally in different places such as FaceBook or Flickr. Inorganic communities are the ones you create to fill the void. Artificially pushing a niche community over the tipping point where one doesn’t exist currently. The beauty is that either type of community is built in a similar way. Larry Weber, author of Marketing to the Social Web, lays out seven steps to building a customer community: 1. Observe and Create a Customer Map, 2. Recruit Community Members, 3. Evaluate Online Conduit, 4. Engage Communities in Conversation, 5. Measure the Community’s involvement, 6. Promote Your Community to the World, and 7. Improve the Community’s Benefits.

The three C’s, Captivating, Content, and Community, are a vitally important addition to your companies marketing strategy. Today, Envano has services to assist you in all of these services with a proven portfolio of interactive media success to back it up. Contact Envano today to learn what interactive media can do for your business.

In an interesting find today, Brian Woodward, a Senior Consultant with GCI Mannov (PR Firm in Denmark), pointed to Miller Electric’s social media efforts in a recent blog post titled “The Case for B2B Social Media”. Mr. Woodwards post is a brief introduction on the use case for social media in global B2B companies. The three example companies he used were Chevron, GE and Miller Electric.

Talk of communities is all the rage on the web these days. But does building a community really matter? Isn’t having a company website enough to reach my customers? The answers to these questions are yes and no respectively.

To understand why building a community matters we need to understand an idea called the Law of the Few popularized by the author Malcom Gladwell in his popular book The Tipping Point. According to Gladwell, a tiny percentage of people (called connectors, mavens, and salesman) do the majority of the work to build momentum. It turns out that this is a restatement of an old idea, the Pareto Principle (or better known as the 80-20 rule). The main concept is 20% of your customers are able to reach 80% of your customers. That is a reach that beats a typical e-mail marketing campaign. So how do I reach the 20% that are the buzz makers?

It turns out all you have to do, if I can steal a phrase from the movie Field of Dreams, is build it and they will come. Create a community, engage that community, and then sift your data to identify your buzz makers. Once identified, a little care and feeding is all they need. You have just extended your marketing reach well beyond traditional methods. Traditional marketing is important, but people rely on the recommendation of friends when purchasing products. Here is a way to influence that opinion.

If you want expert advice on community building contact us here at Envano and we will create a plan that will extend your marketing reach.