Tickle: Digital marketing for tech companies

Guide to digital brand strategy for technology companies

A "tickle" is the gentle touch that you use to build a relationship with an important customer. Your tickle could be a thoughtful email with an interesting article, retweeting their tweet or congratulating them on a company announcement. A small tickle is a reminder of your relationship and helps you get to know your customers on a personal level.

Stalking the big fish

Social media can now be used to research and build relationships with high value customers. This is allowing a new breed of sales teams to target their prospects in increasingly inventive ways. Today's marketing team is using the full arsenal of public relations, targeted advertising and personalised content. Tickle contains secrets from cutting edge PR, advertising and digital experts who are building relationships one person at a time.

Digital strategy process

Tickle includes an eight step process for embedding customer focused social media into your organisation. You will learn how to build your brand online:
1. Hygiene - Do you have your house in order?
2. Audit - Where do your customers already spend time?
3. Plan - Where to play and how to win?
4. Listen - Your customers are talking about you right now, are you listening?
5. Curate - People who just talk about themselves are boring, share interesting content from wherever you find it.
6. Create - Content drives conversations.
7. Host - Customers talking to each other in a setting that you created will do your job of marketing for you.
8. Convert - An escalating transaction model where you start with small purchases and build them into a large sale.

Technology companies should be the best users of social media for sales and marketing because large technology sales are always built on relationships. But too many technology companies have become bland corporate automatons with no social media personality.

The book is filled with examples, case studies and checklists to help you implement the recommendations. Tickle draws together techniques from public relations, design thinking, lean branding, customer experience design and consumer psychology.