Episode 5
with Simone Douglas
The relationship debate – are you burning contacts or creating raving fans?
This week, Simone will be looking at how to improve the customer’s experience?
How do you surprise and delight them in some way? The one percenter that creates raving fans and memorable moments.
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Chris Irving 0:10
Welcome to the confident networker podcast with your host Simone Douglas. In each insightful episode, Simone does a deep dive into the strategies, tactics and tools that will help you be a confident networker.
Simone Douglas 0:33
This is episode six the relationship debate are you burning contacts or creating raving fans, as the world of sales continues to change and evolve, so has the number of sales tactics and various technologies to help businesses find new customers and retain their current ones. Many of the old school sales tactics don’t have the same cut through that they used to have before they’ve come to a point of redundancy almost, and having too many new ones in place can cause its own unique challenges for an organization. It’s a tough world out there for salespeople, especially in business to business. But there is also a wealth of knowledge and techniques out there that will help sales teams achieve success and reach their goals. The question becomes what are the must dues in the modern era of selling and what are the nice to haves, there is still one sales tactic that every salesperson should master but few truly do. And that’s relationship selling. Satisfied Customers are loyal but appreciated customers even more. So the best way to make a customer or a prospect feel appreciated is to do something that delights them. By pleasing an existing or potential customer, you encourage them to enjoy the process of being part of your customer base. It’s an incentive for them to come back to the business if they have any other work or an opportunity to refer you into their networks. Today we’re going to be talking about how to build stronger relationships with your customers, which in turn leads to more revenue. By the end of the show, you’re going to understand why stronger relationships with your customers lead to more revenue, how to build stronger relationships with customers that stand the test of time and the road bumps along the way, how to turn these relationships into more revenue through repeat business and referrals. Today, we’re going to engage one of the most enjoyable parts of doing business. And coming into the Christmas season is the perfect time to start thinking about how we provide the unexpected for our customers and bring unique experiences to them that will continue to build on our relationships in positive ways. Then we’re going to chat about the difference between delight and customer satisfaction. Bearing in mind customer delight is the process of surpassing customers expectations to build a long term positive experience around your product or service and your business. Customer satisfaction happens when you simply meet customers expectations. Who wants to be in the business of simply doing anything? Let’s be honest. So today we’re going to take a really close look at the effectiveness of surprise and delight as a customer engagement and retention strategy. It really depends on what type of loyalty mechanism is in play between you and your customers. A study by marketing Science Institute points out that customers are loyal because of three intrinsic behavioral mechanisms. First up is habit, memory based loyalty formed from consistent and automatic spending patterns, notably in customers whose usage does not change over time. And we have dependence rational loyalty given by a cost benefit analysis of switching costs, particularly in customers with a wide product holding. And finally relationship social and emotional loyalty built on the trust that arises through multiple interactions. Typically in long tenured customers. We’re going to look at how we talk to each of the four different customer segments based on how we categorize customers according to these mechanisms. We’re going to have a look at loyalists who have high levels of all three loyalty mechanisms, dependence that have a broad product holding with you but a low habit and relationship level. Sleeping Dogs these are customers that are bound mainly by habit, and skeptics, these customers have low levels across all of the three loyalty mechanisms. And we’re going to explore how that impacts on our surprise and delight strategy as a whole. We need to take a look at the key issues from the owner perspective. So first off, why do you need to work to surprise and delight your customers? Well, the reality is that you gain the power to please your customers to the point where they are grateful for doing business with you. By creating a sense of gratitude, you create a memorable moment between your business and the customer that goes beyond the transaction and it creates a relationship. So surprise and delight deliver the kind of customer support that inspires gratitude in your customers. Once you achieve that loyalty will follow but loyalty is only good if it lasts and longevity takes more than tactics to fulfill on its promise. The surprise and delight technique needs to become part of your business’s DNA. Will it be a three month experiment where you change things up a little? Or will it become the reflexive instilled in your business that inspires your customers to tell their friends and delivers the results that promised, it’s time to start thinking beyond the transaction in a space where loyalty is scarce, a little extra loyalty can go a long way. We also need to take a look at how we personalizing each customer interaction and ingraining a customer centric culture within all parts of our business. People throw the term culture around like confetti. But when you think about it, it’s surprisingly difficult to define exactly what we mean by culture and company culture is no exception. Luckily, it’s something people have spent a lot of time thinking about. So in the handbook of human resource management practice, Author Michael Armstrong defines company culture as a pattern of values, norms, beliefs, attitudes, and assumptions that may not have been articulated, but shaped the ways in which people in the organization behave. So if we put it simply then company culture is the way things are done around here. Placing customers at the very heart of everything a company does makes total business sense. In fact, research by Deloitte shows customer centric companies are 60% more profitable when compared to companies that don’t focus on the customer. Most companies fail when it comes to customer centricity, not because they don’t have the right intentions. But because they’ve failed to create a customer centric culture. Good intentions are meaningless without a solid strategy behind them, so it’s well worth getting it right, because the positive benefits include increased revenue, customer loyalty, less purchase, abandonment, word of mouth, and then we need to have a look at what assets do we have available to us that will allow us to build stronger relationships with our customer. But this is just the start. being customer centric is good for your staff as well. Among people who say customer satisfaction is a key priority for their company. 83% think that they will be working there in two years. Among those who don’t see customers isn’t a high priority, it’s 56%. So bearing all of that in mind, great word of mouth is a priceless asset for any small business and word of mouth marketing is hands down the most effective and reliable type of marketing you can access, we need to come up with a customer centric narrative that we put through the whole business. So stories bring meaning to our lives, issues of morality, the purpose of life, the beliefs that strike to the very core of our humanity all come from the stories we encounter. So what is your business’s story? It may seem like a rather tall order to create a company story on this scale. But by breaking it down into little chunks that’s quite manageable. You need to create a core purpose statement. It’s about your customers. Ask yourself why your company exists. What do your customers want from you? And what do you want for them? democratize this process to ensure that everyone feels like they’re a part of it, and then condense the result down to a short snappy core statement relating to the customers. From there, you’ll be able to identify the marketing and sales collateral that fits this and create new stuff to fill the gaps. Remember that your number one asset here is your human capital. So happy employees are a brilliant asset for your business, your employees, the ones who are going to be looking after your customers. After all, doesn’t matter where you are in your business right now, it’s definitely the time to be taking a solid look at exactly where you are and making some realistic decisions about where you want to go in 2021. One thing is for sure, in order to deliver on a positive experience, you have to know your customers better than ever before. Businesses exist only thanks to their customers. So putting them front and center of everything a company does makes complete business sense. But creating and successfully maintaining a customer centric culture is no easy task. It takes hard graft and an endlessly proactive approach. If this is your first time listening, welcome to the world of seriously social sales and marketing my relationships, we knew the sales if you’re a returning listener, thanks for being part of my seriously social Global Business family.
We’re now gonna take short two minute break. And when we return, we’ll dig a bit deeper into how we can achieve delight among your customers using some basic building blocks.
So what do we need to know let’s dig a little bit deeper and talk about how you can achieve delight among your customers by running through the basic building blocks of what we’re going to look at today through the lens of who, what, why and how. So the first thing that we need to do really well is solve our customers problems. This is where most businesses fall down. Your potential and your current customers will from time to time experience dissatisfaction or challenges with your product or service. We can’t get to delight if we don’t start here. One of the things that you want to evaluate is how you can use technology Ajit to make your company easily accessible through omni channel support. Letting customers choose how they interact with your brand means they build a relationship on their terms and they’ll appreciate your flexibility long term. We need to make sure that you’re timely in your responses. A big component of customer delight is the ability to be available and responsive whenever your customers reach out. Have you ever thought about how your customers feel about wait time in a phone queue? Does it really have any worth when you say to them, Your call is important to us. A survey by American Express found that the maximum amount of time customers are willing to wait is 13 minutes. My preference is like 60 seconds. Businesses can align your customers expectations with reality by deploying new technology to provide real time support to your customers. Great customer experience can be achieved by using live chat software and live engagement tools that boost customer satisfaction rates. And live chat is the most preferred channel over other communication channels such as phone and email these days, the real time support it delivers to customers makes it popular. 79% of customers say they prefer to live chat because of the immediacy offers compared to other channels. So live chat will instantly connect with your customers and assist them in real time. And you can even trigger proactive chat messages to guide customers in their buying journey and improve their experience. This is where your chat bots become quite important. We want to make sure that we’re always being helpful. So going beyond the immediate solution to provide information and ways to help your customers manage their challenges, creates bonded customers that we talked about last week in the show. Recognize that when your team embodies your six word story, this is when customers really feel the true value of a customer centric culture. So we want to make sure that we’re harnessing tales of employees going the extra mile for the customers and make them legendary within the organization. These stories will be retold and shared. And it helps forge that collective sense of purpose and identity in your team and in your business. Whilst always going the extra mile for your customer. Old school service is still something that helps businesses succeed, we want to make sure that we’re helping our customers succeed. So when you truly understand what it is people need from a product or service like yours, you’ll be able to target those pain points and solve for them to exceed customer expectations. But more importantly, when you truly understand your customer’s business goals and needs, then you can support them in achieving them in all sorts of interesting, personalized and memorable ways. And this is a big part of where delight comes in. It’s about helping customers achieve their success. Now look in a retail environment, you’re going to simplify that model a lot. Okay, but if we’re talking about business to business in the consulting space, this becomes a really big part of it is your customers want to access the power of your networks, we need to make sure we’re listening to customer feedback. So if a customer comes to you with a complaint, remember to listen. Analyzing feedback involves identifying customer needs and frustrations of customers so that businesses can improve customer satisfaction and reduce churn. feedback analysis needs to be done wisely by following some simple steps. Make sure that you’re categorizing all feedback into categories. It might be product delivery speed, after sales service, customer service approach etc. Once you’ve categorized them, you can divide them further and work out which ones deserve immediate attention. We need to identify the nature of the feedback. So it comes with negative and positive comments, the positive ones bring in concrete ideas and what can be extremely effective in building customer loyalty. On the other hand, the negative ones provide insights on improvement areas. You want to make sure that you consolidating your results, okay, and making a plan of action as to how you intend to respond to each of the issues raised, make a feasible and effective plan that would address all the problems your clients think your business is having, while keeping the good services still functioning. And then let’s think about it. Honestly, we want to be enthusiastic throughout every interaction your business has with potential and current customers Be sure your team maintains an enthusiastic, positive and welcoming voice that complements your brand persona and your six word story that we talked about right at the start of the season. The unexpected customers expect to see their needs fulfilled Absolutely. But a truly delighted when your team goes above and beyond in the customer experience. Customers experience businesses through end to end experiences not touch points. So it’s about the journey and how you can delight them unexpectedly over deliver throughout the process and that will lead to a happy customer and a plus one on the relationship. Lastly, we need to consider how we build a community. People enjoy the feeling of belonging, talking Community Oh great, whether it’s structured or unstructured, and that feeling of belonging contributes to a customer’s wider sense of happiness. And customers love to be part of a community or group. So building those communities that benefit customers create a positive feeling and improve your brand image. Communities can be used as a resource for sharing useful information related to products and services, branded communities are 13% more likely to have an impact on customer experience than social media communities. So when you foster a special place for customers to interact with one another, your business is adding extra value to the customer experience both before and after the purchase, generally, and customers will trust other customers when they intend to purchase. So this can be a really powerful way of then growing that brand and building those relationships. But the question, I suppose really is when you look at all of these things, how successfully is your business doing any of them? When customers come into your business from whatever channel they found you on in the first place? Are they having an experience that delights them? If you were to go and be served by your teams, in somebody else’s business, would you be happy or horrified. So I think that this becomes a really important thing to look at. Often, we need to take our rose colored glasses off, and really take a look at where we’re failing to communicate that customer centric culture and bring it into the business in a way that’s super successful. So I know myself, you know, I talk about the Duke of Brunswick a lot. So today I’m going to talk about a different business. So one of my other businesses is BNI, Adelaide and also business network International. And so it’s a membership organization and our customer service and our relationships is what will keep that business successful because members make decisions as to whether or not they renew their membership every year. So that means that I have to earn my stripes, I have to continue to surprise and delight those customers every year. And the way that we go about doing that is that we start with a really simple six word story. So we start with that anchor, which is every member is family to us. Now. I was talking to a client yesterday that doesn’t sum up, or talk about anything that we actually do. In that process. It doesn’t talk about anything that BNI provides for my members. It simply encompasses the felt sense of how we will approach our customers, okay, and that’s by saying their family. So we’ll do whatever it takes in order to help them to succeed, whether we like them or not, because realistically, sometimes our family irritate us a lot, but we will still put ourselves out to make sure that they have a great experience. So getting clear on that customer centric culture is one of the most important factors in garnering success for your business. And then from there, you need to allow your teams to have buy in into that process. So start having conversations with them about where do we fall down in that story? Where are we burning those contacts that we were talking about before? So what are the speed bumps within the organization where we say that we will do one thing, and we do something completely different, because that’s going to be a challenge for you, you can write down all of the beautiful strategies that you like if the execution isn’t there. If it’s just words, for words, sake, then your business is not going to bear the benefit of all your hard work. So get your team involved, start having conversations with them, and find out what all of those little moments are the little moments where you can make a difference in every customer interaction. Whether it’s something as simple as being cheerful when you answer the phone, all the way through to ensuring that somebody gives the customer the right instructions to use the product or service that they’ve they’ve bought from me. All of those things will make a difference. Or it could be something just like remembering their birthday and the fact that they like a particular good single malt whiskey and sending it across to them. Again, you can match those things with the value of the relationship that you’re trying to cultivate. So we’re now going to take a short two minute break. And when we return, we’re going to cover off on what you need to do to action the key elements contained within these topics and why they matter in your quest for a fantastic 2021.
So what is it that we actually need to do today? We need to first off start with the end in mind, what are the goals for your business when we educate helping inspire others with our experience and expertise? We’re building the foundation for trust that underlies relationships that endure. So when we blog, create content speak do a workshop or webinar writing a book or go to events we’re serving and helping but what are our end goals? So which aspects of the business are we trying to grow? Through which segments of our customers do that we need to have more solid relationships with. And how are we creating assets and content that are going to support that process at any given time. We also need to identify the customer delight touch points and map them out. So creating a relationship with both new and potential customers allows businesses to offer a more personalized and enticing customer experience. And it’s exactly the quality of the experience you offer that will determine whether or not you’ll establish long term business success. In a recent study, 86% of customers claim their experiences are just as important as the actual product or service they purchase. Research from Aberdeen Group found that businesses with a consistent service quality across multiple channels were able to retain 89% of their customers. In contrast, businesses that were unable to provide a consistent experience on multiple channels retained only 33% of their customers. So we need to understand what that omni channel God we love buzzwords in marketing, but that omni channel experience looks like. So how are we helping our customers to play where they like to play? It means that businesses are not only required to provide products or services that their customers need. But they also must deliver a great end to end experience across every single touch point. I don’t know about you, but I’m a little exhausted just thinking about that. So let’s just start with the first step. Where are those touch points. So we’ve already covered that in a previous show this season. So you can go back and you should be able to listen to the podcast that’s relevant for that. But basically, we need to think about when we’re engaging with our customers in all of these places. Where are we treating them, like human beings and not numbers, not dollars in the bank? Not someone that we’re doing a favor by serving or by taking their money. But where are we treating our customers like the most important people in the room? Okay. And again, importantly, like human beings, where are we making sure that they feel like they’re seen and that they’re heard and that they matter. And either their dreams, hopes, aspirations, or goals are as important to us as they are to them. And so this is an important thing to think about, then I’m going to want you to go and identify who in your networks he needs to be working to delight more often, it takes a dedicated amount of time and energy to build good, strong, lasting business relationships today, the n is such an integral and necessary part of success, but people don’t seem to want to put in the work. Lasting business relationships just don’t happen and develop without the dedicated consistent work and effort. Our business network should be a qualified selective group of people we count on, tap into and rely on for support direction and insight, we have to find that balance of being givers and takers, we can’t just give or take, we need both. Far too many people don’t ask for help when they need it. And that can be fatal in business. selectivity, consistency, and engagement are essential finding great people and growing your relationships with them. So ask yourself the question, how do my referral networks feel about doing business with me? What are the things that I need to put in place? Have I spent too much time taking from the bank instead of making deposits, and I think this is something that we all fall into, with a sense of urgency in the moments when business is tough. So sometimes when we’re under stress, we default to spamming our networks with sales offers and things in the vain hope that someone’s going to latch on to it and give us some money. What we need to do is actually have a solid long term strategy for our referral networks. Because what that allows us to do is not to be stressed, to take the time to make sure that we’re supporting each other in the process of growing our businesses. And then what you will find is that when you really need those relationships, they will be there to lean on to carry through the difficult times. You need to educate your team members who are responsible for sales in your business to also be able to do the same thing. So relationship based selling is a skill. It’s a difficult one to acquire. And it’s the first one that most sales professionals will abandon if they’re under stress. But good solid sales professionals understand that taking the time and growing those relationships is a critical success factor. All right. You also need to then review and tag your customers on where they sit on the surprise and delight journey. So to look at the impact of special benefits and experiences that go beyond the core offering you need to tag customers to against each of the three mechanisms that we talked about earlier. As a habit that memory based loyalty formed from consistent and automatic spending patterns, dependent rational loyalty driven by a cost benefit analysis of switching costs, particularly in customers with wide product holding relationships so that social and emotional loyalty built on the trust that arises through multiple interactions. Again, you should be able to identify then for customer segments that will respond differently to a surprise offering making a good guide to who should be the recipients of surprise and delight investment. According to a study conducted by the marketing Science Institute, there were four key groups identified and their reactions were categorized after receiving an offer of two months free service from their telco. There will loyalists so loyalists have high levels of all three low two mechanisms. These customers are the best targets for surprise and delight as the gift signals that you still care and not taking their loyalty for granted. So churn in this customer segment dropped 5.1% Following the offer, although there was no expansion of their business, and then you’ve got dependence they have a broad product holding with you but low habit and relationship levels. You need to be careful with these customers because defection although defection rates did drop 5.3% The likelihood of them expanding their business also dropped by 8.6% In that study, perhaps because they were nervous to add to their dependents. So it’s best to combine surprise and delight with socially orientated activities to build trust in the dependent bracket. Sleeping Dogs so these customers are mainly bound by habit, you need to be careful about waking these customers up with a gift. As they may play, I expand their business a tiny bit or bite. So it defection increased in that bracket by 3.3%. So better to wait until dependents and relationship grew before you play with your sleeping dogs. Finally, we have the skeptics so these customers have low levels across all three loyalty mechanisms. So don’t engage with them in this particular capacity. In this study, they viewed the offer with suspicion perhaps assuming it was to compensate for an inferior product and increase their churn by 5.8%. So the conclusion here is a little ironic, it looks like at face value in that study. The effectiveness of surprise and delight depends on the extent to which your customers are already loyal. So from there, I think it behooves us to personalize and create a contact plan for each loyalty segment. We’ve all heard about return on investment or ROI a performance metric used to evaluate the effectiveness of money being spent, and the profit that it yields. If we look from a relationship perspective and new and more effective term can be of use for return on relationship or our it can provide deeper insights on the effectiveness of business personality and its ability to connect with people ROI is the value accrued by a person or brand dude nurturing a relationship whereas ROI is simple dollars and cents. Roi is the value perceived and real that will accrue over time through loyalty recommendations and sharing. And it is aro R that puts an emphasis on building positive relationships. To dig deeper into your company’s ROI. Consider the areas of your business that interact closely with your customers. Are you using social media to drive engagement? Do you send emails that address your customers needs? Does your content encourage readers to share with their network? Do you listen to your customers and respond quickly with a solution? Are you actively generating referral partnerships all of these things will make a difference. Remember to plan to spend time putting the lessons learned and aha moments into practice and let me know how you go with it all. Remember to act, nothing changes if you don’t set aside time to make it happen. So once you’ve worked out what you need to do, start putting timelines and deliverables on your action plan. Get clear on what you want your customers to feel, what actions you’re going to take to build a customer centric organization, and what pain points you need to solve that you may or may not have created from your leadership at the table. So now I’m going to take a short two minute break and when we return, we’re going to bring it all together and look at why any of the things we’ve covered so far matter and what the direct impact can be to your bottom line.
Okay, so we have covered as usual and epic amount of content and need to tie it all together. So let’s take a look at your key actions for this week. Remember the questions we need to be able to answer why do you need to work to surprise and delight your customers? Consumers are a confident bunch and if businesses don’t know a person’s likes or dislikes, they are more than willing to jump ship to another vendor to gain a sense of personalized connection. This tendency extends to every node of the customer journey. Nearly half of consumers don’t like advertisement because unrelatable 44% of consumers say they will buy again. After a personalized shopping experience. 40% have bought something they hadn’t planned to purchase as a result of personalization. In other words, loyal customers come out of personalized interactions, or they will lose to competitors who are all too eager to poach customers who will abandon us at the drop of a hat. So we need to be able to surprise and delight them and personalize that experience in a way that leads them to embrace us as part of their tribe. How are we personalizing each customer interaction and ingraining a customer centric culture within all parts of our business, communication with your customers should be more than just mass email blasts. Instead of bombarding previous customers with nonstop offers, use customer analytics to understand how you can customize and personalize your messaging. With a bit of analysis. For example, you can use past data to figure out what products or services a customer might be interested in purchasing in the future, then you can alert them to relevant special offers unrelated products or opportunities to level up on services. Not all of your communications should be about your company trying to sell something. This is often a mistake people make at specific days of observance. For example, Remembrance Day, which is here is today. So as we come up to Remembrance Day and a minute of silence at 11am, it’s not the time for everyone to be posting that they have some kind of a special deal or trying to jump in on Remembrance Day, because their marketing suggests that they should do so it’s a time for connecting. It’s a time for understanding that there are people other than ourselves who gave up a lot to get to maintain the rights that we have. So that’s a great example. Anzac Day is often another one where businesses fall down from a marketing perspective, particularly here in Australia. But again, start sharing some of who you are, and sharing things that are of interest to customers across your social channels in your marketing channels, it’ll all be a lot more effective. If we look at what assets we have available to us that will allow us to build stronger relationships with our customers. This is where we look at the 10 principles of customer strategy, we need to master the art of the possible, we need to know your customers at a granular level. So what is it that they like? What is it that they are interested in? How do they like to be communicated with and What channels do they like to communicate on, and then you don’t need to link your company’s customer strategy to its overall identity. So that consistency, tone of voice, customer experience, all of those things are important. From there, you can start targeting customers with the marketing messaging with whom you have the right to win. So in other words, you have a product or service that’s going to meet their needs, it’s competitively priced, that doesn’t mean that you need to be the cheapest in the marketplace by any stretch of the imagination, okay, but you’re ticking the boxes for them in a way that that you should be a good choice for them. And then you need to treat your customers as assets that will grow in value. Because as your relationships with your customers deepen over time, we know that they increase in value, they start referring other other people to us, they will leave us testimonials on social media or wherever else it might be. So if you can get steps one through five, right, when it comes to the principles of a good customer strategy, when you get to number six is pretty easy. You have to leverage the ecosystem. So you’ve gone out of your way to build this amazing ecosystem of referral partners of happy customers, all of them are delighted to do business with you. Now you can start calling in some favors from the favor bank, okay, because you’ve made plenty of deposits. So through leveraging your ecosystem, you start to get more inbound inquiries, which is an important aspect of business. And then we move on to step number seven, we need to make sure that we’re ensuring a seamless omni channel experience. So go back to your businesses and have a look at where this falls down. Okay, so for example, if I’m getting people to message my Facebook page, to tell me that they want to book a table for dinner, I’ve been running an ad or something for that and it’s for a restaurant, then that doesn’t work very well, if they get an automated response that says if you look trying to book a table, ring, the restaurant, here’s the number, okay, and yet we do this often in hospitality, we tell customers that we don’t want to talk to them where the customers actually are. And we push them off to another platform or to another method of engagement. So that seamless omni channel experience is really important. If we’re getting all of these things right then we move on to excelling at delivery. So you know, it’s the time honored phrase under promise and overdue Never Be very careful about the promises that you make to your customers in this aspect, and make sure that you always deliver on what it was that you said you would do it simple, but most businesses fail at it. And often business people fail at it, because they will promise that they’re gonna call you at a specific time, they’ll email you by a certain time or they’ll solve a challenge. And for whatever reason, they don’t then deliver on what’s actually going on. So finally, if we get to number nine, and it’s an interesting one for some businesses reorganize around the customer. So it’s all well and good to set up a business on your terms, and I get it, we’ve all done it, we think it was a good idea. But you need to take a good hard look at yourself and make sure that you have then organize that business around your customer and what interest the customer has, and then match your culture with your customer strategy. If we take a look at what marketing channels do, we already have established and which ones do we need to develop, I have six that I’m pretty fond of that need to be in your marketing mix at all times. So pay per click marketing. As far as marketing channels go pay per click advertising is still an unbeatable juggernaut. Especially with the diverse options now available to brands, there’s a learning curve for each platform. So if you can afford to hire an agency to handle your campaigns, I would obviously recommend that and there are two dominating forces in the Pay Per Click world these days and a bit of a sleeping giant. So you’ve got Google ads, and Facebook and Instagram ads. The other one that you’ve got that’s really coming to the fore is LinkedIn advertising. So Google Search Ads will help you connect with users who are searching for products or services like yours. And so will your Facebook ads, okay, and LinkedIn. So the difference is implied need versus implicit needs. So Google is absolutely implicit need, whereas Facebook, LinkedIn, and the like we’re looking at implied needs. We’re building a buyer persona and an audience based on that. Which we’re then going to deliver messaging to make sure that you don’t forget the social media and your marketing mix. Social media is a big player in the marketing world, it’s not going to go away customers are actively seeking out brands that they like or are interested in, and increasing numbers of users are taking to social media to research making those buying decisions. We can’t forget email marketing, because it’s still the best method of direct response marketing there is users have opted in to hearing from you so they’re more willing to open these messages and learn about some of the latest product sales and how to benefit from them. Just remember that your lists are not one size fits all when you need to segment out your database so that you’re personalizing the messages beyond the hi too first name. Okay, and then we have your website. So some businesses don’t think of their website as a marketing channel, but in reality, it’s probably the most important one. This is where users will come when they’re interested in learning more about your business. And if they can’t find answers to their questions quickly, they’re not going to stick around long to find out anything else you saw, it should offer a good first impression, it should clearly represent your business brand products and services in the way that you want. And we can’t forget content marketing and SEO. So content marketing is kind of like a savings account. And as time goes on, you get compounding interest making it even more valuable. Your evergreen posts can offer search engine optimization benefits for a very long time to come as people continue to search them out and all of your content can provide valuable relationship building and lead generation capabilities. Last but not least, of course, is word of mouth marketing. So word of mouth marketing has always been one of the most effective marketing channels. And that will continue on an ongoing basis, you’ll brush it off if a salesperson tells you that you need that watch. But when your friend points out how much they love wearing it every day. Because of all the smart features, you’ll tend to take more notice. So bearing all of these things in mind in today’s digital age, the impact of developing stronger customer relationships spreads further than ever. Customers are eager to share their opinions whether positive or negative, and they have a great many channels to do so. So the work your company does and puts into maintaining and strengthening those relationships will make or break you. Just like any relationship strong customer relationships require work, but the payoff to your business’s bottom line is worth the efforts. So how do you measure up go away and test against the basics we’ve covered today. And lastly, a final word on where to from here. successful brands are not built in a day. A lot of perseverance is required to build a successful business and at the heart of a successful business are its customers. A recent Harvard study found CEOs spend 72% of their time in meetings and only 3% of the average 62.5 hour working week with customers. So it’s easy for us as business owners or CEOs to lose sight of the customer experience. Social media is an obvious way of connecting but why not make time for leaders to take on customer service positions to help keep in mind the value of the Relationships. Consider to the tangible aspects of an organization that people see. hear or feel logos, job titles, products, the physical arrangement of company spaces. Is everything optimized for the customer experience. Pay particular consideration to customer experience during development. So, next week is Show Hidden wins and missed opportunities. What
opportunities do you have to increase purchase frequency, upsell, cross sell or diversify to grow your wallet share with your customers.
Chris Irving 40:33
Thank you for listening to the confident networker. You can find more episodes and information at bnian.com.au/podcast
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