Whenever I do a talk on marketing, I always start by asking the audience what they think marketing is. More often than not the answer given is “promotion”. Marketing is about promoting your products or services.
I then have to share that this is incorrect. Marketing is actually all about customers. You can promote all the products you want, but if you don’t have any customers, or even potential customers, you’re not going to be very successful.
That means if you want to be successful in your marketing, you must think about your customers first.
One of the ways to do that is to hone the customer experience. This is essential for getting in new clients as well as securing repeat business. Think about it: if you got excellent service, you’d be happy to continue shopping there. You might even pay a bit more money for it.
While the customer experience could include many things, here are two key elements that could help to set apart your business.
1. Customer Journey
Every customer will go through a journey with your company no matter what you sell. From the first time they hear about you, to successfully paying for your products or services, a multitude of steps can be involved, and that is the customer journey.
The more you understand that journey, the more you can connect with your customers and increase the chance of them buying.
When we used to talk about optimising the customer journey, this was very much about strengthening messages, pushing value and encouraging sales. In more recent times, however, this whole task has shifted sideways. Optimising the customer journey is now about optimising the customer experience.
Whether it’s Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), how people land on your website, or how they find out about you in the first place, it needs to be a more transparent experience, and you need to make it swift and painless. A delay of just 2.5 seconds now on loading a web page could be the difference between whether someone stays and looks around or whether they pop off somewhere else.
That loading time may not seem like long, but it’s when you understand your customers that you appreciate their perspective.
When I moved to London, many years ago, I was waiting for a tube. I had to wait three minutes and everyone around me was irritated. In the village where I grew up there were two buses or one train per hour, and you’d be lucky if any of them turned up at all. I had frequently waited twenty minutes to half an hour in the rain for public transport to arrive. There was nothing I could do about it, so I grumbled and got on with it. The prospect of only having to wait three minutes, and for that time to be accurate, was like a dream come true.
Fast forward twelve months, I stood at the platform waiting for a tube and I had a three minute wait. I found myself cursing about how long a wait it was, and my friend from back home questioned why I was being so impatient. Three minutes, and knowing that it was an accurate time, was marvellous. But I had now been ruined by the super speed of London. When suddenly everything in your life is instant, three minutes can seem like a lifetime.
It’s the same online. When you can get access to instant information at your fingertips twenty-four hours a day, suddenly 2.5 seconds seems like a very long time. It’s not that we are innately impatient, but in comparison to our norm it feels as if something is wrong.
It’s all about perspective. And that’s why marketing is about customers. Because it’s their perspective, and only theirs, that matters.
Think about your customers and what perspective they have. How hard is it to find out relevant information on your website? Are you trying to talk to too many people in one go, so you end up losing people who can’t access the details they need quickly enough? Is it time to strip back so you’re saying less, but what you are saying is exactly what your audience needs to hear?
Think about that customer journey and how you can make it smooth and pleasant, and so much better than any of your competitors.
2. Trust
The other element to focus on is trust. If someone doesn’t trust you, then they’re unlikely to want to interact with you. You need them onside now more than ever to have a good chance of selling to them. So how can you be more transparent in what you offer, increase your customer service levels, better open the lines of communication and make your customers feel good in the presence of your brand?
It’s not easy. If it was, we’d all have mastered it by now. But those who get this right soar above everyone else, so it’s worth spending some time thinking about it.
In addition to this, as the saying goes, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Trust is a two-way street. You probably want to get information from your customers to help the marketing process and to hone that customer journey, but this is becoming harder to obtain as we enter into a cookie-less era. But why on earth is anyone going to volunteer to give up their data for free?
What you need to think about here is a value exchange. What are your customers getting in return for giving you their data? If they feel there is value in it, they will be more eager to share.
Our Modern World
Our world is no longer about who is selling the best product at the best price. We also want it now, we don’t want to pay delivery, it needs to be as effortless as possible, and we want to be able to easily communicate with someone should we have queries or issues.
This all falls under the marketing banner. So how can you improve your marketing to ensure that you grab new customers and keep them for the long term?
If this sounds good, but you’re not sure where to start, then why not request a free consultation with Lindsay Woodward Marketing. If nothing else, we’d be happy to share a few top tips.
