Few bands ever find success overnight. It takes hard work, dedication, creativity, and an overall drive to succeed. In the first part of our marketing rockstar series, we looked at the importance of internal value and looking after your own employees. The next step is providing value for your clients and customers. 38% of marketers say their biggest challenge is improving customer acquisition and retention, and that’s understandable. It’s an increasingly competitive market online and marketers need to do everything within their resources to improve client value.
The global internet population grew 18.5% from 2013-2015 and now represents a whopping 3.2 billion people. The opportunity online to acquire and retain clients has never been higher, yet the same can be said for the competition. Below, we will highlight the second stage of becoming a marketing rockstar, this time through the appreciation of your current clients.
Don’t forget to educate
Companies are significantly more likely to be focused on customer acquisition than retention, and although it’s undoubtedly important to bring in new clients, it’s just as essential that you don’t forget about your current ones. Though potential clients could bring business your way in the future, it’s your current customers that are keeping you afloat. But now that you have clients, how do you make sure you retain them? Providing a service superior to your competitors is the obvious answer, but let’s look a little bit deeper. More to the point, let’s look at how you can inform and educate your clients.
Creating material for additional sales is a part of most companies' marketing strategy, but it shouldn’t be the main focus of your content. Educating your clients with expert views and opinions, through timely and technical pieces, should be an essential part of any company’s content strategy. Inform your clients of updates within the company and to their service, reminding them of what they’re currently gaining by using your business, without the need to sell them something else. From a client’s perspective, receiving content from a company that isn’t trying to sell you anything, but instead is simply hoping to educate and inspire, will be refreshing and can only help build customer loyalty.
Informing vs. spamming
Any company with a marketing strategy knows the power of content and email marketing. Sending your clients emails is a vital part of a marketing programme, yet there’s a fine line between informing your clients and spamming them. The average online consumer subscribes and receives emails from 8.9 different brands, and receives 13 promotional emails from subscribed brands daily. Clients certainly aren’t suffering from a shortage of company emails, so it’s imperative to make yours stand out from the crowd, with clients eager to read your content above anyone else’s.
As opposed to sending emails to your clients that are simply trying to sell more of your services, provide content that a client will actually find informative and helpful through an easy to access content management system. Help them solve problems they didn’t even know they had. In an ideal world, you want them to see your email pop up in their inbox and immediately have the desire to read it. You should know your clients better than anyone. Accordingly, you should know what they’ll want to read and how often they want to read it. You should also extend your content reach by allowing the audience to pull relevant content from your company newsletters. If there are certain topics that a reader finds favourable, they should have the option to receive more of that specific content, over other topics.
Value for money
The potential revenue up for grabs due to changes in consumer spending and switching among brands and providers is $1.6 trillion, a 29% increase from 2010. The opportunity to gain new clients from your competitors is an ever present possibility, however the opportunity for your competitors to pinch your clients is just as possible. Keeping hold of your current clients is a must, and one of the biggest ways to achieve this is having your clients receive more than what they’re paying for, providing them with value for money.
You have to make your clients look like rockstars themselves. If they don’t believe they’re receiving the highest of services, what’s to stop them from leaving you and joining a competitor? Your service should go beyond what they’re paying for, which can include all matter of things, such as providing and maintaining a solid service, continually looking at ways to improve the business, and finding new methods to aid the clients and customers.
Concluding part two
A recent study on customer retention revealed that 95% of highly satisfied customers are likely to remain as a customer. Though we can’t guarantee that every client will stay with you, the higher quality service you provide your clients with, the more likely they are to stick around.
This leaves just the third and final piece of our marketing rockstar series to come, where we will examine how well you really know your clients, how you can always improve upon this, and how you can finally reach marketing rockstar status.
