Your best customers are worth far more than your average customers. Yes, Seth, we agree that your best customers are far more valuable than your average ones. And you get the best by continuously winning new customers, don’t you?
Think about the process of developing and managing customers’ relationships with your firm – through the Website, a loyalty program, the contact center, at the point of purchase, or in after-sale service. All take continuous attention to detail.
Business is a “people activity” … people like to do business with people they know, like, and trust. Ones with whom they have relationships are at the top of the desirable business option list. The stronger the relationships with your customers, the greater will be their trust and loyalty in your business.
Studies show time, and again, your best and most loyal customers are the aptest to tell their friends about your business, creating strong word of mouth marketing. Word of mouth marketing is the most important element of any marketing campaign.
Making new friends is becoming the most important element of social commerce. Creating positive experiences for building customer relationships often will take some serious thinking. But hopefully not at the expense of the things you can do to build customer relationships.
So there are many important reasons to focus on building strong customer relationships. Here are eight tips to help you forge new, and strengthen existing, relationships:
How to identify customers.
Identify customers
Do this on an individual basis, as you can’t have a relationship with an audience or a population. So before you start relationships, you must target your priority customers.
You don’t have to have each customer’s name and address, but you need to know that the customer on the phone right now is the same one who was in the store yesterday, or on your Web site the day before that.
Acknowledge that I am there
As soon as you possibly can. Don’t make your customers frustrated by making them wait. If you are busy with another customer, inform them you will be with there shortly.
Be friendly
Smile and introduce yourself. Have a nametag and personalize it to help create a meaningful conversation.
Differentiate
All customers are different from each other, regarding both their value to your business and what they need from your business. What a customer needs from you will drive behaviors that you can observe. And behaviors will create (or destroy) value. So pay close attention.
Be knowledgeable
Know all about your products and services. Always assume customers have done their homework and product research. If you don’t know, DON’T BLUFF, but make an offer to do some research. If you don’t have a product or service that can solve their problem, recommend someone else’s product if you can.
Offer free resources, information, and solutions … with no strings attached.
Don’t sell
Use your knowledge and experience to help customers decide. Help them in their search. Pushy sales pitches turn customers off. But personally relevant and interactive conversations switch them on.
Engage
Interact with customers. Almost by definition, a relationship depends on some engagement between the two parties. You want those interactions to be cost-efficient, so drive more and more interactions into more efficient channels. But you also want them to be effective — that is, to tell you something about their needs or value, for instance, that you can’t learn simply by observing. Make customers feel important. Create conversation … seek out common interests by asking effective questions.
Hear and remember the ‘remarkable’ for their next visit. Make sure you understand their question(s). Then answer them as simply as possible.
Help them save time
Time is the customers most valued passion. Help them save it. Avoid seeking other help, or ‘handing them off.’
Be easy to work with
Exceed expectations whenever you can. If your business doesn’t have what the customer wants, offer alternatives, including other businesses.
Be honest
If you don’t know, say so. But use that question to research to be prepared next time. You don’t want to be saying you don’t know often.
Alwaysdo what you say
Do what you say and keep your promises. Not an option.
Follow through promptly
Keep them informed until you can close. Remember time is of the essence.
Tell the truth
Always tell the truth with no hidden agendas and ulterior motives. Marketing puffery is not the truth. Remember consumers are very educated on products and services.
Customize
The “pay off step” for managing a customer relationship comes when your business behaves differently toward each customer. We call this “customization” even though we’re not necessarily talking about it regarding literally customizing the product or service. But whenever I treat Customer A different from Customer B, based on what I think I know about their differences, I am “customizing” the customer’s treatment.
These are not things that we do not already know, of course.
These little things list simply reminds us of what we already know but may have forgotten. Then it is up to us to put these lessons of building customer relationships into daily use through persistence and practice.
Remember … all customer-facing employees need to be engaged in customer relationship building.
Does your business focus on relationship building? Do you have any stories to share?
Customers, any adders to this list?
Businesses, do you refresh this list with your staff frequently?
So what’s the conclusion? The conclusion is there is no conclusion. There is only the next step. And that next step is completely up to you.
It’s up to you to keep improving winning new customers by relationship building. Lessons are all around you. In many situations, your competitor may be providing the ideas and or inspiration. But the key is in knowing that it is within you already.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new lessons.
When things go wrong, what’s most important is your next step.
Try. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy to improving the customer growth in your business?
Do you have a lesson about making your growth hacking better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add to the section below?
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed at how reasonable we will be.
More reading on continuous learning from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
Mike Schoultz likes to write about the topics that lead to small business success. He also likes to share his many business experiences. Find him on G+, Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, Pinterest, and LinkedIn.
I love finding brilliant social advertising creative that makes me wish I thought of it. And I especially love it, when it’s for a client that’s trying to make the world a better place.
That’s what social marketing is all about. And because it’s only “sell” is to try to get us to change our behaviors or attitudes about something, it can be powerful when done well.
What is social marketing?
Social marketing seeks to develop and integrate marketing concepts with other approaches to influence behaviors that benefit individuals and communities for the greater social good.
Although “social marketing” is sometimes seen only as using standard commercial marketing practices to achieve non-commercial goals, this is an oversimplification. The primary aim of social marketing is “social good”, while in “commercial marketing” the aim is primarily “financial”.
Increasingly, social marketing is being described as having “two parents”—a “social parent”, including social science and social policy approaches, and a “marketing parent”, including commercial and public sector marketing approaches.
So what, exactly, is social marketing? In Social Marketing Report, it’s defined as, “the application of commercial marketing techniques to social problems.” It means to take the same principles used in selling goods–such as shoes, television shows, or pizza–to convince people to change their behavior
Acknowledge that I am there
You should do this as soon as you possibly can. Don’t make your customers frustrated by making them wait. If you are busy with another customer, inform them you will be with them shortly.
Be friendly
Smile and introduce yourself. Wear a nametag and personalize it to help create meaningful conversation.
Don’t sell
Use your knowledge and experience to help customers decide. Help them in their search. Pushy sales pitches turn customers off. But personally relevant and interactive conversations switch them on.
Listen well
Make sure you understand their question(s). Then answer their questions as simply as possible.
Help them save time
Time is the customers most valued passion. Help them save it. Avoid seeking other help, or ‘handing them off’.
Be easy to work with
Exceed expectations whenever you can. If your business doesn’t have what the customer wants, offer alternatives, including other businesses.
Be honest
If you don’t know, say so. But use that question to research so as to be prepared next time. You don’t want to be saying you don’t know often.
Alwaysdo what you say
Do what you say and keep your promises. It is not an option to ignore follow up.
Stages of social campaigns
What is involved in the stages of social marketing? In a nutshell, when conducting a social marketing campaign, consider the following:
Identify your customers
Whose behavior do you want to change? It may be that you want to change the behavior of several different groups; in that case, you may want to influence them in different ways to bring them closer to the desired behavior. Such groups are often separated, or segmented, by age, gender, level of education, or race.
Identify what behavior you want to change
For example, increase prenatal counseling among expectant mothers.
Identify the barriers
This is donethrough interviews, surveys, focus groups or other methods; you’ll want to find out what makes it difficult or unattractive for people to make these changes. Do pregnant women feel uncomfortable at the area clinic, or are they made to feel stupid when they talk to the doctor? Is the clinic too far away? Can they not take the time away from their jobs?
Pretest your ideas
You then need to apply what you have learned according to your results.
You have to show customers what you have changed and why. This will help customers see the benefits in a way that will draw them to take advantage of your efforts. Let people know what you’re doing to help them–the best program in the world won’t be used if people don’t know about it.
And of course, people need to understand the benefits of the behavior change. A pregnant woman will probably want to do what’s best for her child, but may not know that she needs extra iron during her pregnancy. It’s up to your organization to tell her.
And, although it’s not technically a part of social marketing, you’ll probably want to…
Assess your results and see if you have created the change you wanted.
How are these beliefs shaped and decisions made? Well, generally speaking, the following activities need to occur:
Create awareness and interest
Change attitudes and conditions
Motivate people to want to change their behavior
Empower people to act
Prevent backsliding
Conducting a social campaign
So how do we propose conducting a social marketing campaign? Here are ten tips to a campaign I recommend to our clients:
It starts with great employees
Employees are your service. Hire for their friendly, caring attitude and train for skills and knowledge. Empower them to be customer advocates.
Share all great service stories
Share them as soon as possible with all of your team and celebrate even the smallest of successes.
Show common courtesy
Show courtesies all the time. This leads to customer respect, which leads to conversation and the building of relationships and mutual trust.
Analyze when things go right.
When a company receives a complaint people usually have discussions to find out what went wrong and how to prevent it from happening again. Next time you receive a letter of praise, meet to find out what went right and how it can be repeated.This action is equal as needed for learning.
All the time
Amazing companies don’t always deliver ‘Wow!’ type experiences, they are just a better than average all of the time. All of the time is the secret sauce.
Improving the social in social marketing
In truth, social marketing [G2] can achieve it, right? Not that new, but good refreshers. There are recommendations on how to beef up social marketing everywhere you turn.
How many times have you seen companies requesting people to friend them on Facebook? Like farming, followers was the name of the game. Sad but true. The truth is that [G3] social marketing tactics are really about cultivating relationships with potential customers. Fan ‘skins’, by themselves, are of very little value.
What is the importance of social marketing to your business? Dialog with customers for sure. What about reading your content and remembering? Appreciating your help? Building relationships? We believe it is all of these things, but the bottom line end state is relationship building.
In the ever changing landscape of social networking, you might be wondering if you are getting the most out of your business’s social marketing tactics. Here we define social community engagement as the process of gaining customer website traffic, attention, interaction, and ultimately relationships through any and all internet sites.
In part it is true, but things get complicated by all the misinformation circulating about social marketing. From leveraging tactics to tracking issues, you are bombarded with conflicting messages, including whether social marketing is worth using at all.
Here are ten ideas we use most often to help improve social marketing with our clients. We believe they are the ones most critical to its success:
Listen and engage
Listening comes first and foremost to understand what customers are saying about their needs and perhaps about you. Once you have heard, then engage in as near real time as you can.
Your personality and voice
This one is pretty simple, but takes lots of practice in the beginning. Be YOU and be consistent. Remember customers deal with people and not businesses.
Don’t be a robot
As we said previously, social marketing takes a lot of time and energy. There many good tools in existence that will help in the workload. But keep this in mind, customers take note when it seems they are dealing with a robot. Don’t be that robot.
Be part of the community
Remember you are dealing with consumers that are part of a community not part of the audience. Pay special attention to adding value in that vein.
Commit to a plan
If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there, as the saying goes. Know your objectives and establish the best plan to get them accomplished. Remember this plan needs constant attention, iteration, and adaptation.
Emphasize friendly
One of your key business objectives is to build relationships with customers. That end game results in customer advocates and trust. This process takes constant attention to being friendly on a very consistent basis.
Measure results
This entire social marketing process is a constant iteration. Establish a few key measurements and pay attention to how well you are doing.
Analyze, correct, iterate and learn
Analyze your measurement results, and continuously make corrections, iterate, learn, and most importantly, adapt.
There are a lot of misconceptions about social marketing. Just because you read something in a blog post or hear something from a credible source doesn’t mean it is true or true for you and your business.
Always do your research, and continually try to improve. Social marketing is here to stay, and it can drive a lot of business for you, assuming you are leveraging it correctly.
Paying attention to your listening.
Focused listening is the lynchpin
These days more and more companies are turning their attention to focused listening for social commerce business. Meaning ? The simple meaning is they believe that they need more attention to building customer relationships.
From customer relationships comes trust, the most important factor in a customer selecting a company with whom to do business. The secret to building customer relationships is customer engagement, and there are many ways you’ll need to engage customers.
What is focused listening?
Focused listening is the art of discovering valuable customer insights. Remember that the real value is what we hear, not what we say. A very important concept for marketers that is often difficult to learn.
Strategic listening action
Starts with showing appreciation … for customers.
Who and how
With whom and howdo you engage? Carefully select your targets for the community you want to build.
What are the barriers
Barriers that have a way ofpreventing optimal consumer engagement need to be defined.
Interactive customer engagement
Customer engagement is a high priority for any brand, and they continually look for new ways to collect inputs from customers. A good current example is the Ben and Jerry’s ‘Scoop Truck’, which travels around the country giving out free samples of new products and soliciting customer inputs.
Look beyond
Look beyond how customers have interacted with you in the past. Constantly test new ideas.
Use customer collaboration
Solicit customer collaborationto obtain customer ideas. Fans inspire lots of new ideas if you just ask them their opinions.
Use the insights
These insights will continually update your ideal customer persona.
The bottom line
In this article, we’ve explored a multitude of creative ways to use social marketing to increase engagement and build customer relationships. The key is to know your audience and what they’re most likely to respond to. Give them more of that.
It’s OK to promote your company and products, but do it in a way that capitalizes on your audience’s deepest interests and connects with them on a personal level. Avoid selling.
Here’s the thing, social isn’t just a new way of marketing, it’s a new way of running a business. Social companies certainly have figured this out and are using social marketing to grow their business rapidly.
