Your best clients see thousands of messages every day both in publications and online. What makes your message stand out from the crowd? Do you have a digital engagement strategy?

What is a digital engagement strategy? To me, it’s a series of decisions that support the best options for helping your client through their buying decision process. It’s knowing how to structure your interactions with clients so that each connection builds on an earlier interaction while supporting you as the best possible option for the client’s needs. It provides a predictable path for your client to travel to determine what’s the best solution for their unique challenges.

I believe many organizations are still using marketing strategies that do not incorporate a more personal approach to customer interaction that a digital engagement strategy enhances.  Engaging through social media can change the way you work with clients forever.  Many organizations are still running marketing campaigns that were used prior to 2010. The communications is all one way. There is limited customer engagement throughout the sales process.

This includes big numbers that miss the mark, focusing on who they are and not really providing significant value to their clients. Let’s see if I can share several ideas that can help you engage and empower your best clients through your digital engagement strategy.

The first rule for a digital engagement strategy is to invest time in knowing who your best clients are. This means investing time knowing your clients’ world. Share content and ideas that not only resonate with your clients, but help the potential client focus on key elements required to help them excel both personally and professionally. A strong digital engagement strategy supports both person and professional agendas.

Have you ever read a beautifully written white paper only to discover at the end that your company can’t use the solution being proposed? It’s critical for your organization’s sales success that you become very good at knowing who your best clients are. Does your digital engagement strategy remove people who are not qualified for your product or service?

It is also crucial to know what kind of clients you are attracting to your digital engagement strategy. It’s just as important to know who your clients aren’t and to remove people from the pipeline that may take significant resources with little possibility of success.

The most successful organizations are very good at investing their resources where there is a high possibility of success.

Before sharing content, a successful digital engagement strategy has the marketers asking themselves if this information helps clients gain more clarity on the challenges they face.  Their messages focus on the client, not what your company does. This doesn’t mean you don’t share your solutions, you just make sure it’s written from the perspectives of your potential clients. Today you know so much more about your potential clients than ever before. Are you leveraging this information in the development of your digital engagement strategy?

The best digital engagement strategy is very good at listening and responding to changing market conditions. We have moved into a time where a marketing team’s ability to listen, interact, and then create is going to change how we interact with our best clients and partners. Speed is a critical element in your digital engagement strategy.

Your sales teams can use new technologies and social selling to listen to client conversations on a regular basis. These technologies support a digital engagement strategy. It’s critical to help your sales team see the possibilities of a stronger digital engagement strategy. They will be rewarded for this by creating unique opportunities with their best clients and markets that are driven by real time events to help create a stronger connection with clients faster.

Speed and agility are required to seize new opportunities in growing and expanding markets. It’s as important today to be able to create opportunities that addresses a client’s needs in real time.

A digital engagement strategy can come in many different forms. Some of the more common ones employed by many software organizations are building real time responses to information requests. You download a white paper and open it up. You then get a call from a sales professional to see what they can do for you.

The problem is that the customer is given a chance to eliminate suppliers before the nurturing process occurs naturally. A successful digital engagement strategy is needed to complement this accelerated sales curve. This digital engagement strategy needs to support the sales professionals to reconnect in a reasonable amount of time to the client who may be at the beginning of their product or solution research.

On Friday, we will return and talk further about how we can use a digital engagement strategy to change your relationships with clients forever.

See you Friday.