Customers are more sophisticated, demanding, and vocal than at any point in history. It is clear that there is a social change taking place in the way customers listen to and engage with brands and businesses. As such, businesses need to ensure that their marketing strategies align with understanding their audiences and customers. Communicating and engaging with customers should be the strategic and tactical goal of all brands and organisations.
This new priority of customer engagement needs to come from the top of the organisation – i.e. the board. It also requires a commitment from management to implement this change across the various departments (not just marketing) in the organisation. Transforming marketing strategies in order to create a more customer focused campaign isn’t difficult and doesn’t need to be costly. The best advice Alterian can give to marketers, in order to make this transition successful is to forgo archaic initiatives in favour of a strategy that involves interacting with customers on a personal, one-to-one basis. Below, David Eldridge, CEO at Alterian highlights five key ways that you can align your marketing strategies to customer engagement.
Start as you mean to go on
Customer engagement needs to be a priority from the onset of planning a marketing strategy and throughout the campaign. It needs to be a key part of your marketing goals in as much as other objectives like product development, pricing and distribution. You should begin any campaign or financial year by orientating your marketing strategies around customers, ideally as individuals. It may sound simple, but many organisations prioritise product segments or channels over their customers. Customer engagement and loyalty is a stepping stone to building a strong brand.
Invest in the right technologies
IT procurement is a big part of planning a marketing strategy. The point of call for most organisations, no matter the size, is their website. When customers arrive on a website, they are looking to be engaged with interesting, dynamic content so this provides an opportunity to engage and build a strong relationship for your business. Ensure that you have an effective Web Content Management technology to ensure your website communicates, persuades, educates and most of all, engage the visitor. You should also ensure that you implement a web analytics solution, which facilitates the measuring, collating, analysing and reporting internet data for the purpose of understanding and optimising web usage. In addition, invest in a web behavioural analytics solution. Web analytics represents the evolution beyond page views into contextual analysis about the behaviour of individual visitors on an organisations website. In essence, it allows the analysis of what is on the page, what the user sees and how they interact with individual parts of the content. Subsequently, businesses can make informed, intelligent and insightful decisions around their entire marketing programmes and ensure their website is more effective and drives increased value for site visitors.
Educate and train your staff on engagement skills
It is likely that your marketers and general staff are up to speed on the traditional marketing techniques but how many of them are trained in customer engagement? Are they aware of and understand all of the different tools and techniques that can help them engage better with the customer? Employees need to receive training in disciplines such as multichannel marketing, analytics, online marketing and SEO, social media monitoring, social media marketing etc. Ingraining customer engagement into your marketing strategy, adopting the most appropriate engagement tools and techniques and training your staff up to use these will ensure that they integrate both strategy and analytics to benefit the customer.
Stay current and utilise social media marketing
IT is ever evolving and with that, social media networks have continued to expand over the past year. With such a large network of social media and customers talking online, it is integral that a social media marketing strategy is fully integrated with all aspects of marketing activities. Social media enhances existing channels such as email – it’s not a replacement. Marketing staff must be equipped and trained to handle these additional channels of communication and brands must be seen to be listening and engaging in these conversations online, to harness the power of the individual consumer and so build their brand authority through online as well as offline channels. Social media is just part of the entire solution however, you should ensure that you have the aforementioned tool that will allow you to nurture online conversations, predict future customer activity, and then use the information to shape your ongoing social media strategy and ensure it provides value not only for the company, but for the customer.
Engagement is an ongoing process – Don’t stop listening to the customer
Engagement is about taking the customer on a journey. This travels from an unknown to the brand, to familiar with the brand through to customer and finally on to customer engagement and loyalty. This takes multiple engagement cycles and therefore an organisation needs the process and technology in place to capture, analyse, create, optimise and deliver content in a continuous engagement cycle.
It is worth noting that the shift from the old mass marketing agency model to customer engagement doesn’t happen overnight. It’s a journey of defining a strategy, understanding a start point (better web engagement, better social media engagement, better email engagement etc), and planning and rolling out the necessary technology process, skills and campaigns to support the strategy.
