Although the social universe is still an essential element of your brand’s outreach in the coming decade, it’s time to look beyond social media. More specialized web platforms for brand engagement are out there, and they can help you create a seamless buyer’s journey for your prospects and customers.
As Brock Stechman points out, reach, engagement, and sales lie at the core of a successful content marketing strategy. That’s from your brand’s end.
However, that’s only half the equation. When you tackle these goals from your audience’s perspective, you’ll discover that yesterday’s tools just won’t cut it when it comes to brand engagement in 2021 and beyond.
The following web platforms will help you put your audience squarely in the center of your marketing, sales, and customer service strategies.
Audio Platforms
Like the decade’s signature parachute pants, talk radio ballooned during the Nineties. Similarly, a panoply of fresh voices on digital media have arisen to capture the attention of 21st-century audiences. When you leverage these audio platforms to make your brand one of those voices, you can transform your industry.
Clubhouse
Probably the hottest new audio app on the planet, Clubhouse exploded after its April 2020 launch. An invitation-only audio chat app, it’s a perfect spot to grow your brand’s engagement among new audiences.
Part of its allure, as Fast Company’s Damian Radcliffe observes, is its exclusivity. Not only must users wait for an invite, but it’s also only available on Apple devices (note: the Android app is coming). With no text messaging, images, or video, it channels the intimacy of a chatroom with the warmth of human voices.
In other words, it has all the charm of 20th-century radio, but with the additional option for two-way communication with your prospects and customers on a one-to-one basis. With both public and private virtual rooms, your teams can listen to your prospects, engage them in conversations, or create large-scale events that showcase your expertise with customer-centric information and advice.
Apple Podcasts
Podcasts can grab the attention of niche audiences, empowering your brand to produce content that addresses their specific needs. Formerly known as iTunes, Apple Podcasts gives your brand access to Apple’s massive universe of users.
Video Experience Platforms
YouTube might be the first platform you think of for widespread brand promotion, but there are a variety of other video platforms that can provide your prospects and customers with specialized content without the distraction of cat videos on the sidebar. Use these video experience platforms to engage them through a multi-sensory approach.
Vidyard
While YouTube has the advantages of familiarity and a reach in the billions, it’s simply too distracting for a focused sales presentation. As a tool to educate or entertain, it definitely belongs in your toolbox.
When your prospects are ready to convert, though, they need a platform that directs them back to your website, where there’ll be no competitors’ ads or music videos. Vidyard provides your sales teams with such an experience.
Partnering with sales, your content team can create a custom video experience for your prospects, complete with a call to action and forms to fill out, right on the video. On your end, you can look at how each member of your audience engages with your content.
Additionally, the platform includes analytics so that you can see which videos perform better with various customer segments. And, you can email the videos to prospects in your subscribers’ lists.
Wistia
Designed for marketing teams, Wistia allows content teams to easily create standalone videos or series with equal ease. Beyond the creation process, though, it provides your teams with heat maps that capture the moments where your audience stops watching, allowing you to track viewer interest.
Prompts that ask for a viewer’s email address to continue watching your video help you turn top-of-the-funnel audience members into email subscribers. Analytics that measure play rates and other critical numbers provide you with the information you need to drive them further down the sales funnel.
Content Experience Platforms
Content experience platforms make it easy for brands to provide their audiences with personalized experiences as they interact with the company’s content assets. They enable content teams to organize their content by category, tagging them by the audience segment they reach best or their use case. Audience insights and content analytics allow content marketing teams to adjust each piece of content to perform better with its target audience.
Uberflip
Uberflip stores all your content – including that on third-party platforms – in a central repository. There, the platform analyzes it for its relevance to audience segments, campaigns, and audience intent.
When you need content for your sales teams to make a pitch, a promotional campaign, or to drive a prospect to make a buying decision, its AI-driven content recommendation feature can have it at your fingertips in mere minutes. It’s almost like reading your prospects’ minds.
Personalized branding provides the icing on the content cake, engaging prospects with messages that put them in the driver’s seat. Delivering the right content at the optimum time and place along the buyer’s journey, Uberflip empowers your audience to nurture their own customer journeys, resulting in a firmer commitment to doing business with your company.
PathFactory
PathFactory provides B2B buyers with the exact information they need to move further along in their customer journeys as they consider a purchase. Instead of counting clickthroughs and requests for information, this tool allows you to see the content that your prospects have consumed – down to the very second where they click away. This AI-driven feature identifies the spots within a content piece where attention drops, allowing your content teams to edit the piece for a better experience.
Lead scoring, therefore, depends on content consumption, allowing buyers to find the content they need to make a decision. At that inflection point, your marketing teams turn the leads over to sales.
ABM and Personalization Platforms
B2B marketing and sales teams must find a way to answer the questions of several decision-makers on their prospects’ corporate boards. Account-based marketing delivers personalized experiences that target messaging to each decision-maker’s specific interests.
Terminus
With a comprehensive data mine it calls the “Data Studio,” Terminus identifies promising accounts through a wealth of data that encompasses relationship, psychographic, firmographic, engagement, and intent information on your prospects’ decision-makers.
Then, it empowers your content teams to personalize messaging across a variety of channels, delivering the exact information that each decision-maker needs to pull the trigger on a purchase. Even better, it aligns marketing and sales teams to ensure that messaging is consistent across departmental silos.
Folloze
Using a content-centered model, Folloze empowers your teams to create data-driven experiences that engage prospects’ hearts and minds with hyper-personalized experiences. With statistics showing that B2B decision-makers prefer personalized approaches even over a better price, this platform builds relationships with your brand at every point along the customer journey.
Customer Experience Platforms
Empowering your customers to drive your brand voice with their own, gives them a sense of ownership in your business. Build customer loyalty one customer experience at a time with these platforms.
Qualtrics XM
Combining design improvement with brand experience into a single platform, Qualtrics provides companies with the ability to discover what their customers want and deliver experiences that meet every expectation.
Engaging each customer segment on their preferred channel, the platform enables companies to understand each segment’s needs. Using customer feedback, teams can design experiences that drive sales and loyalty.
Medallia Customer Experience
Integrating data from every touchpoint – messaging, videos, social media, and web interactions – this powerful platform provides your brand with a 360-degree view of your customers’ voices. Using machine learning, the data tells the story of each person who interacts with your brand.
Identifying both risks and opportunities, your teams can respond in real-time to ‘influence experiences as they happen,” differentiating your brand from those with cookie-cutter interactions. The result? Increased retention rates and decreased support calls.
The thread that connects all these brand engagement platforms is communication. With your content teams’ help, you can create a consistent brand message throughout your audience’s preferred channels.
To coordinate everything from content planning to automating its distribution, a comprehensive content marketing platform can provide your teams with everything they need to plan, create, and communicate your message. DivvyHQ is a one-stop content hub that gives you everything you need to coordinate it all.
Even better, you can give it a try for 14 days on us, with no obligation on your part. Sign up for your free trial today!