Muhammad Umair Khan

Engagement Marketing Your best salespeople aren't on your payroll. They aren't down the hall. In fact, they may not even be in the same building as you. It sounds crazy, but the reality is that the people best equipped to sell your product might be... the people who have already purchased your product. And your ability to turn them into effective advocates for your brand comes down to the customer engagement strategies you adopt. Thanks to the increased presence of peer research and online reviews, your existing customers' power to influence prospects' buying decisions has skyrocketed. However, the possibilities don't end there. Discovering, nurturing, and mobilizing your customers as brand advocates creates unbridled potential for generating revenue. So why are most organizations focusing the bulk of their time and resources on winning new business? Maybe they don't know how to start engaging customers properly and turning them into advocates. Maybe their teams aren't properly aligned to focus on customer engagement. Or maybe, they haven't figured out who their true customers are yet. To explore why so many businesses miss the mark on engaging past customers - and why these customers are the key to unlocking your company's true revenue potential - I sat down with the co-author of this article, Jill Rowley, to figure out what companies can do to fix it. Customer engagement is about encouraging your customers to interact and share in the experiences you create for them as a business and a brand. When executed well, a strong customer engagement strategy will foster brand growth and loyalty. Businesses that focus on customer engagement are focused on value creation, not revenue extraction. They give people something meaningful beyond a sales pitch: a brilliant end-to-end customer experience, great content, or interactive, real-time customer support. As Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon will tell you, obsessing over your customers is key. It starts with your company culture and ensuring your customer support team, the frontline of your business, is empowered by and shares your focus on providing an amazing customer experience. For example, Zappos, the leading online shoe retailer renowned for their customer service, doesn’t enforce call time tracking because they believe their reps should spend that little extra time with customers rather than be focused on getting through each call. The customer experience you provide is important because it gives marketers and business owners a way to increase satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy. A study by White House Office of Consumer Affairs found that 80% of U.S. consumers would pay more for a product or service to ensure a superior customer experience. Think about your business model and how you can best serve your customers. When do your customers need you? What hours do you need to be available to them? Seamless, the online food ordering service and one of my favorite companies (not least because I love to eat at all hours!), services customers in different time zones across the US. Not only are they fantastic at providing customer service around the clock but they’re stellar at timely, relevant offers like snow day discounts and engaging you with fun food facts across their Twitter and email channels. At the heart of everything, it’s important to understand that every customer wants to feel you understand their needs and that they can relate to your brand. This is easier for fun consumer brands like Red Bull or Nike than for more conservative brands like banks or B2B companies. But even these businesses can be humanized without trying to squeeze themselves into a contrived persona that won’t resonate with their audience. For example, find a personality within in your organization who is passionate about your brand and a natural communicator. Grow that person into a thought leader and give them a voice to humanize your brand and engage your audience. Create opportunities for them to build their presence and promote your brand – they can regularly blog on your own site and guest blog on others, be used in video content, engage in speaking opportunities, present webinars and publish white papers and ebooks – all ways to establish your brand’s voice with a trusted face. Social media is a great place to let your brand off the leash a little. Voicey personas are common on Twitter, and it’s a great way to get interest, interaction, and even viral traction for your b rand. For example, Wendy’s has gained a lot of attention for their hilarious tweet roasts of other burger chains 70% of US retailers are making customer personalization a priority in 2017. Personalization can take many forms, from the auto-generated happy birthday email to a sophisticated algorithm that recommends products based on browsing history. Amazon and Netflix are out in front when it comes to recommendation engines, but there are simpler solutions. In an interview with Emarketer, CEO Michelle Lam explained, “We demonstrate that it’s a conversation between us and our customers. For everything they tell us, we give them a response, whether it’s a recommendation from their personal shop, a fitting tip or a tailored marketing message. The flip side of using social media as a way to differentiate your brand is using it to listen to customer complaints and really respond. That can be customer service-oriented, like this snapshot of a random day of JetBlue’s twitter responses. Every few minutes they are responding to customer needs, giving stressed-out flyers quick responses to their concerns and complaints. Whether or not social listening informs your long-term goals, it helps people to feel heard by your brand, and it’s a great way to get negative feedback. While it can be hard to hear sometimes, honest negative customer feedback can be one of the most important drivers for a change in an organization. Ultimately whatever customer experience strategies you employ, be consistent – think about the brand messaging you employ, your customers’ end-toend experience from their very first interaction and the various departments these customers will move through. Give them a consistent (and exceptional) experience and you’ll be rewarded with their trust and loyalty.