Marketing

Digital Strategy Guide How are organizations using social media most effectively? This collection of articles from MIT Sloan Management Review examines the value of devising a clear strategy, offering incentives for participants, and preparing for social media disasters.

Online and offline customer conversations about your brand require separate marketing strategies.

Research has exploded the myth that Twitter is an “echo chamber” — with implications for marketing.

Digital customer service platforms offer better service when they use customer-centric language.

Retailers can boost profits and prevent abuse by tailoring their return policies with analytics.

Companies marketing B2B services often like to tout their business “solutions”, but most of these address problems they think potential customers have — not the ones they actually have. To offer companies value, B2B products and services need to be outcome-oriented and meet the customer’s needs.

Customer relationships can evolve through four stages — they can be transactional, transitional, communal, or damaged. Understanding each of these stages, using them to classify customer relationships, and tailoring CRM efforts accordingly can enable your company to better deploy its limited CRM dollars. Not all outreach efforts work equally well in all stages of a relationship. And without this kind of tailoring, you’re likely wasting some of your CRM budget.

Launching a peer-to-peer knowledge-sharing platform is not easy. Online support forums have two distinct segments: those who seek product support, and those who provide it. Knowledge seekers are hesitant to ask questions if knowledge contributors are few and far between, and knowledge contributors will not sign up if there are not enough problems to solve. It is a classic chicken or egg challenge that can be effectively addressed by seeding the platform with expert knowledge.

Today’s retailers need to adopt a data-driven view — with the goal of understanding how website features and advances in AI will affect consumer behavior.

Traditionally, big energy companies focused primarily on power generation, not customer-centricity. But that’s changing — and today’s digitally empowered customers have opinions about everything from where their energy should come from to when their bills should arrive. Lynn Good, CEO of Duke Energy Corp., reflects on guiding her company through this transformation.