Kobi Ben Meir, Director of Marketing, Yalber
Of course, your marketing strategies are only as good as your understanding of current trends, news, and technology; these three elements have changed the way customers interact with brands. The selling process and customer approach are far from simple now. All people had to do was enter into a specific sales and marketing funnel, make certain choices along the way (which almost everyone in the chosen demographic did), and become repeat customers.
This is understandable. Ten years ago, people only had limited websites where they could find information on the items or services they were interested in. With the advent of vlogs, influencers, and social media marketing, their choices are endless now!
Now businesses have a harder time convincing customers to stick around long enough to make a difference to their profit margins. Sales representatives are often ignored in favor of vloggers who, let’s face it, actually use the products they review.
In other words, before you have a chance to market your business offerings, the customer already knows all about it AND whether they should spend money on it or not.
Traditional strategies such as cold calls, email campaigns, and trade shows just don’t cut it anymore. If you want your customers to see you, you have to be seen.
‘Experience’ is the New Brand
The fact is that today, customer-brand relationships are not only dynamic, but they are also ever-evolving, symbiotic, and more immersive than they have ever been.
Even casual shoppers own brands as much as the actual owners do, and the latter know their business is nothing without active and loyal buyers. If that means they have to communicate with them directly, that is what they should do if they want to see steady sales figures.
In other words, you have to see your customers not as a single organism, but as the sum of individuals who have their own interests and share commonalities that benefit your brand. It involves emotion, expected behavior, and perceptions, i.e., organic elements that can create a multitude of customer experiences, not just one.
Position and purpose are two key elements that determine your brand’s worth and will act as differentiators in competitive markets
In other words, you have to see your customers not as a single organism, but as the sum of individuals who have their own interests and share commonalities that benefit your brand. It involves emotion, expected behavior, and perceptions, i.e., organic elements that can create a multitude of customer experiences, not just one.
Of course, even if you do come up with an equation that works, the market may not fall in line as easily. Even if they love a product one day, a single negative review may make you lose thousands of loyal consumers in a single day. Similarly, if they think they are being ignored, they will switch to your competitors, who may give them the experience they are looking for.
So how do you drown out the noise and zero in on marketing strategies that can ensure a loyal clientele? The following basic principles can help you remain afloat in a consumer-centric environment whose loyalty is hard-won:
The Value Proposition - Determine the Position and Purpose of Your Brand
Position and purpose are two key elements that determine your brand’s worth and will act as differentiators in competitive markets. Today’s consumer engages with those that they can get behind and which touches them on a deeper level.
To determine what they are looking for, you need to care about the things that move them, their pain points, what motivates them, and what a successful product or service means to them. This is where a buyer’s persona can help you. Simply put, it is a research-backed profile that determines your ideal customer, what their days are like, what are the challenges they face daily, etc.
This is divided into more personas, which are essentially the people who influence the ideal customer into making a purchasing decision or the people they consult with before buying anything. So how can you ensure that they gravitate towards your business? By making a subtle but important shift in the way you present yourself.
Do this by first addressing their pain-points or needs to understand where their concerns are coming from. Use the information you get to train your sales and customer support team to personalize their interactions with buyers, so they can empathize with their dilemmas and provide solutions accordingly.
There are many key points when it comes to getting started in the marketing world. From a multi-faceted marketing campaign, Measure your digital marketing metrics all the time (!). For example: Number of Site Visits, Bounce rate, average order value or revenue per visit, exit rate, CTR, Cost per click, conversion rate - just to name a few. This article is a part from my new book “Marketing on Fleek - How to Make Your Marketing & Professional Efforts Count In A Customer-Centric World”.
If you want to read in detail on this topic and much more you can get a copy here (https://bit. ly/374wgbL) and soon on Amazon kindle and other platforms.
