Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Who Sees & Who Believes – Part 2

When virtual environment organizers take full advantage of the entitlement/user path options available in a virtual platform, they get far more than cost savings – they get actionable customer intelligence.

While the diagrams below may look like simple sequences, they are extremely powerful for marketers. This measurement of activity, followed by direct action, is really only possible in two ways: super-expensive websites or a cost-effective virtual platform.
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By utilizing the reporting generated by your custom user paths, you create a clear set of next steps for your sales, marketing or senior management teams. Steps that will enhance revenue, grow your user base or promote alliances – it all depends on what your goals are.
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Last week we looked at the Who Sees portion of our mantra: Who Sees & Who Believes. We learned that you can control who sees what content in your virtual environment through the creation of entitlement-based user paths.

Beyond controlling what is seen by whom, what’s important about this is that you can use the information you gather about who was engaged (Who Believes) to dictate your follow up activities.

Let’s get back to our example scenario in which we have three target personas: 1) executives, 2) ultimate decision makers, and 3) technical advisers.

Using engagement benchmarks provided by your virtual platform provider, you can decide the parameters that, when satisfied, constitute a high engagement visitor vs. a lower engagement visitor. Then, for each of the three personas above (again, these are only for example), you can drive follow up contact or programs that continue to move the needle for your organization.

In our example, target persona #1 is executives. In our simple example below, we’re showing only two options: high engagement and low engagement. For each, we see the subsequent activity triggered by the engagement measurement. 


For persona #2, ultimate decision makers, the follow-on activity is different, but both intuitive and easily implemented by almost any organization. Virtual platforms with proper pricing structures won’t charge you more for continuing to use them in this way.


Last, our persona #3, technical advisers. For these folks, the path is clear, too.


You get the idea: the combination of custom persona-based experiences, access to specific content, measurement of engagement, and the use of the virtual environment to continue the customer communication is powerful.

To see how all this can be used to help you reach your business objectives, visit us at 6connex.com, or email us at marketing@6connex.com.

Friday, April 8, 2011

Who Sees & Who Believes - Part 1

Sometimes virtual environment organizers fail to take full advantage of the significant opportunities for customized user paths in their quest to save money and leverage the many benefits offered by virtual platform vendors.
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By utilizing entitlement, environment messaging, and some basic planning, owners of virtual environments can create incredibly powerful and highly customized experiences for their target audience personas. 
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Let's take a quick look at what's possible:

Let's say you're an event organizer putting together a customer-facing virtual trade show. And let's assume your three target personas are 1) executives, 2) ultimate decision makers, and 3) technical advisers. And the goal of your trade show is to move prospect customers through the sales funnel more efficiently.

By utilizing entitlement, you can create an experience for each group that caters to their needs, saves them time and, best of all, enables you to control what is being consumed, and by whom.

At 6Connex, we call it: Who Sees & Who Believes. In this post we're going to look at how you control Who Sees.

Back to our example use case. 

You want executives to receive high level information, treat them to high-touch contact with your company's experts, and then have them exit feeling as though the experience was beneficial. Their user path might look like this:

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When you target ultimate decision makers, your goals are different. In this case, you'll want to have them to take a deeper dive into your marketing communications, participate in live Q&A with product experts, and attend informative sessions. Their user path would then look like this:


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And then we have the technical experts who advise the decision makers on vendor options. This target audience requires a different type of experience, one in which the marketing spin in minimized, and the sales engineer availability is paramount. Sessions and data are important, but so is live interaction with technical experts from your company. That user path might look like this:


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Of course, all of this interaction is measurable, giving you tremendous customer intelligence (which can be integrated with your CRM tools). This is a very powerful concept for marketers, one that is difficult to achieve without the flexibility of a virtual software platform. 

To see how entitlement can be used to help you reach your business objectives, visit us at 6connex.com, or email us at marketing@6connex.com.

Next up, we'll cover the Who Believes portion of the mantra and explore how measuring engagement can direct you to a clear path for follow up and continuing sales funnel acceleration.