The trend is consumer engagement, wherever you look. We have to listen to consumers. Basically as a company you have 3 consumer touch points: marketing, sales and support. Which one should lead your brand web site?

Nowadays it is Marketing that is leading the site. The trend is that you have to be where the consumers are. Give up the idea that consumers will come to you. Use existing or upcoming channels where they meet. Sponsor them where they meet. Only if your brand is strong enough you will get fan-sites. Don’t start your own. Consumers in nature distrust your marketing speak. They look for neutral representatives and they find them: expert bloggers, forum discussions (yes, still), comparison sites, shop reviews, etc etc. Communities are being built more and more online. Are you present there? Your brand site as it is now with product listings is dead.

Sales: if your business has never been to directly sell to consumers, don’t start now. It is a different business altogether. Concentrate on referring to good online/offline stores. Create a shop-in-shop technology so people can start their own shop selling your goods. Again, the thing to do is to go where the consumers are. You wouldn’t think to open a very expensive shop in the outskirts of a small town, would you? You want to be where the consumers are. Your brand site for shopping is dead as well.

Support: none of the aforementioned channels however will want to organize the knowledge and expertise around supporting consumers. And you as a company are perfectly suited to do this. Consumers will visit you to find out all the details on your products. This is your chance to excel in showing of your knowledge, in engaging consumers in Q&A discussions. This is where consumers trust what you say (can I put this software on my machine or will it ruin it?) You can help them with cross-sell info and promise them coupons if they help you out. You will have tons of cool ideas, once you start thinking this way. So your brand site is dead? Long live your brand site!

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 11th, 2010 at 10:46 and is filed under Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.