The Good Karma effect as Email and Social Media Targeting Strategy

Building a captive audience has been one of the main topics of discussion here at Lightspan recently. We found that knowing our customer, tailoring messages based on customer type but also adding a good-karma approach to our digital marketing give us the best captive audiences.

Why is this topic so important? Our philosophy is that marketing must always be done with purpose. And when done so, it becomes a numbers game. There’s an easy way and an effective way to drive toward a numbers goal. The easy way is to hit as many people as possible with our marketing message. That’s why spamming is so widely used, because it is an easy route to getting sales.

To effectively sell and promote, especially via email and social media marketing, we must build captive, targeted audiences. By captive we mean audiences that will not discount our messages, audiences that will interact with us, audiences that will give feedback, and audiences that will not just respond to our message once, but become long-term customers.

A solid starter strategy for building a captive audience is to be realistic, selective and pragmatic about how we define our target customers. That’s where the good karma effect comes in.

The karma effect association came to me in the past few years as I learned the true value of surrounding myself with good people. These are people who at their turn surround themselves with the kindest, most open, enchanting and worth-being-around people. These people are generally people connectors, but not necessarily wealthy or “popular” in the celebrity sense. They are people who have friendships based on real respect. These are the people you mostly hear saying “I love that guy,” “I love that business,” “what those people are doing is amazing.” They are appreciative of life and others, they don’t take things for granted and don’t act entitled.They may be skeptical but are never cynical.

These good, kind, real people have an accelerated growth effect on positive new relationships. And when we emulated them we become part of that web of positive connections. As a result our quality-friends network grows at an accelerate pace.

In the old-school outbound marketing model a customer was a customer was a customer. We offered discounts to acquire new customers and forgot about our loyal customers (oh wait cable companies are still notorious for doing this even in the year 2010).

In the age of Twitter and Facebook (inbound marketing) a customer is not just a customer, a customer is a referral hub to multiple potential customers. A customer is a relationship. A customer is a brand advocate and ambassador. The right happy customer can turn an unknown brand into an overnight celebrity.

So how do we reach those hubs of positive and valuable customer interaction? The same way we go about befriending those good, kind, real people.

We need to know who these good customers are and strengthen our relationship with them. We need to show them we value them, and their network of friends.

If we focus on growing a social media network with positive, valuable connections (as opposed to connections that just fill a slot on the friend or follower list) we will break through the clutter of empty marketing that’s filling the social media channels.

Have you seen this effect in your social media marketing?

Leave us a comment, we’d love to hear how it worked for you.

P.S. We’ve been getting questions recently as to why Lightspan moved into the Big Teeth Video HQ instead of other available and very attractive options. Many reasons, one of them being that they are good people – “appreciative of life and others, they don’t take things for granted and don’t act entitled.They may be skeptical but are never cynical.”