As millions of re-vamped Timeline profiles take over Facebook, smart marketers will get an unprecedented Christmas gift — mountains of the most intimate and personal customer information ever available in one place.
Let that sink in…
On Friday, we discussed how Timeline will be an incredible tool for brands (once Facebook launches Timeline on brand pages). Today, we’re going to peek into just how big Timeline is for marketers…
…we’ve saved the best stuff for part 2.
From a user’s perspective, Timeline is a glorified scrapbook — a place that catalogs your entire life in photos and status updates.
For marketers, it’s the most complete customer profile ever assembled — without stalking, private eyes, or wiretapping. It’s almost criminal.
Seriously, for a savvy marketer, Timeline is the easiest way to do research on a prospect or customer EVER.
And of course, if you subscribe to the marketing vision outlined in Gary Vaynerchuk’s The Thank You Economy, you know how valuable this is.
As the ROI of “push” advertising declines — i.e. shoving your marketing message in your prospect’s face via commercials, banner ads, email blasts, etc. — marketers will need to know their customer WAY better than they have in the past century. Because the next decade will be all about the “pull.”
Using a customer’s Timeline to provide exceptional personalized service is one of the best ways to learn how to “pull” in customers by being a good friend — which will dramatically boost lifetime value.
If you can appeal directly to what you know a customer is interested in, or even reward that customer with something they’re truly interested in, they’re going to want to come back to you. According to almost every marketing visionary, this will be the recipe for success in the future.
Before social media, this type of person-to-person marketing was virtually impossible — except in very small towns. With Timeline, Facebook has made it incredibly easy.
