Eight Guiding Principles for Creating Marketplace Conversations

1. Don't Pay It Forward

   When trying to establish or create marketplace conversations always start with the end in mind and work backwards. Ask these questions:

   What do we want prospects to think about you 12 months from now?

   Where would like to be?

   When you can envision and answer those questions create an Integrated Marketplace Conversation plan that will help you get where you want to go.

   

   Conversations require content and everyone at your organization needs to collaborate on new content strategies ... news, video, audio, web, blogs, documents, Twitter tweets, Facebook channels, etc. ... each designed to keep prospects engaged with you and move them into awareness and from there into interactive relationships that lead to qualified leads and pipeline activity.

2. Each Marketplace Conversation is focused on brand awareness to raise your visibility, using multi-step, multi-media campaigns that integrate:
   • News (multi-media news releases and feature article placements)
   • Opt-in emailed newsletter articles and promotions
   • Direct communications to generate awareness with targeted individuals
   • Direct promotional communications to create qualified sales leads
   • Content creation, distribution and monitoring social media, particularly blogs, podcasts, and video
   • Participation and monitoring of social networks
3. Each Marketplace Conversation to focus on people issues and how they relate to your products.
4. Each Marketplace Conversation is chosen to implant the selected conversations in the minds or your various target audiences.
5. Each Marketplace Conversation is an extended dialogue, with multiple prongs and enhancements to keep it going across an extended time frame.
6. The distribution media will be selected around the target audience for each topic, some will be broad in distribution and others will be slivered around specific prospect segments.
7. Each Marketplace Conversation needs to have attention-getting qualities—human drama, entertainment, controversy, humor or other attention getter so you do not get lost in the clutter.
8. Each Marketplace Conversation to provide validation to support the stories.

Courtesy - Dale Wolf, Perfect Customer Experience Blog