Be your own infochannel

Businesses are starting to embrace social media as a marketing and engagement tool, with an emphasis on the latter. This is good thing, as it is driving companies to provide relevant useful content to their customers, rather than simple banding and impulse based advertising.

The logical extension to this trend is to establish a one stop shop online to engage customers and build loyalty. The trick is to consistently deliver quality content. 

Think of it as your business’ own TV channel, it’s not as much of a stretch as you may think. If you have a customer base, know your own product and the needs of your customers – you are in a prime position to capitalise on that knowledge to benefit your bottom line. At a time when the focus is more on retaining customers rather than new business development, an info channel approach may be a smart change from a traditional media marketing spend.

Whole Foods in the USA have done an outstanding job and should be treated as a benchmark for this approach. Obviously not everyone will have the resources that Whole Foods does, but considering the audience engagement achievable with this approach – it certainly beats riding the coat tails of another media channels content with banner ads, for instance.

Consider it as the alternative to a relatively small annual TVC budget for one commercial. Let’s say complete production of the commercial comes to $60k and media is around $300k – this could be folded into large amount of hand shot video (if that would be applicable to your brand), lots of good imagery and buckets of relevant copy. Throw in user interaction and you are creating a hub for you customers to discover your products, help them become evangelists, receive feedback and engage in promotions.

Even with a modest budget, the creation of compelling original content is easily achievable. Consumers are online, and diverting funds from traditional mediums to make a hub for interaction with your customers makes sense.