Introducing CLOE, or, how a community raises a child.
Written by Benn Price, SDC Founder.
For better or worse, I have spent much of the last twenty years working on developing marketing strategies for my organisation.
Over that time, there have been quite a number of structural and strategic decisions that have influenced how those strategies have been formulated, implemented, carried out and even whether they have been completed or not. Indeed, I currently sit with my back to a wall full of mindmaps and post-it's that not only serves as a reminder of one of the largest pieces of incomplete strategic work I've undertaken, but also as the central core of our team's business objective, the one thing that has unflinchingly remained at the centre of our outlook - the constant desire to add more people to our audience.
It shouldn't come as any surprise for a marketer or business itself that some form of audience growth is fundamentally at the heart of any organisation's desire for increase. Whether the need for bigger and better numbers is purely a answering the desire to have a large footprint or the, understandable, business aim of income growth, it seems unarguable that as an organisation you need to grow your populations and you only manage this through your marketing.
The one thing that has unflinchingly remained at the centre of our outlook - the constant desire to add more people to our audience.
The marketing team's value exists in reach and engagement - reaching to raise awareness, increase 'uptake' and deliver engagement leading to "sales" and retention. It was from this perspective during one of our many (increasingly loud) creative sessions that our team settled on the idea that whatever the reason for an increase in these areas, the central gamut is centred around people becoming engaged with what you are doing.
We surmised that in order to grow an audience, people's first impression needs to be peaked by what your offering is, therefore your output, content, or service needs to be as good as it can be - not inherently anything new, however, we also have the knowledge that one of the quickest and most successfully retentive ways to bring people in to your circle is through the experience of others, hence the prevalence of reviews, prompts toward 'sharing' and appreciation of and acquisition of "brand advocates".
Part of the advocate process is building a relationship directly with members of the audience who are then brought, the response mechanisms and relationship, into the inner circle - there are many ways to bring people in; exclusive content, exclusive knowledge, tours, one on one relationships with team members, etc. and these are the areas where market research, integrated web, mobile and social media systems become perfect tools for learning about and then inviting people in quickly and easily. By responding to people openly and quickly, we are able to increase awareness of our plans and build trust directly with the individual but also with the wider witnesses (either through those viewing response across online platforms or through the word of mouth of the person in conversation with us) which naturally forms a deeper level of engagement.
growth is fundamentally at the heart of any organisation's desire for increase.
At this point we were beginning to form a more complete idea of where the user journey begins to really take shape and following this path began to lead us to encapsulate that in order to increase, you have to engage; by offering great introductions (a solid handshake, easy access points, interesting content or services responding directly or indirectly to specific needs) you encourage people to begin to care about you, only then they care about what you do (engage) and, thus, by engaging you increase your audience as they begin to get involved with what you do and share it with others who then also get involved.
The final piece of the puzzle is retention. We have managed to think through getting people through the door and bringing them into the conversation, how do we make sure they stay involved?
Here we arrived at a simple idea, as retention also comes through engagement, albeit requiring continuous development and growth of the person's relationship interactions, that everything begins and ends with engagement (and we are using the term in it's broadest sense to cover everything that could encapsulate).
Thus we derived the Continuous Loop Of Engagement and created C.L.O.E.
Our C.L.O.E. philosophy works likes this:
As someone UNDERSTANDS who we are and CARE about what we do, they ENGAGE by RESPONDING which GROWS who we are, what we do and, by default the amount of people in our audience.
Or, even more simply: Understand, care, engage, respond, grow.
Each person added then goes through the same journey, thus completing the loop which becomes möbius as it is perpetuated through everything we do once adopted as the basis of an organically sourced, long-term, mar-comms-lead growth strategy.
Say hi to C.L.O.E. for us, we hope you like her as much as we do.
