Do you ever find yourself asking, “What is customer marketing and why the heck should I be using it?” If you are not asking your self that question you may be missing out. Customer marketing is a tailored form of marketing that is brilliant in creating brand evangelists out of your current customers.
Although converting a lead into a prospect and then into a new customer is brilliant, if you are not utilising your current customers to get new sales and retain current revenue you are seriously missing out.
What is customer marketing?
It is any marketing activity directed at existing customers of your business.
Yes, you market to pre-existing customers. Although, it is excellent to turn a prospect into a new customer, there are amazing opportunities that you may not realise are presented by your current customer base.
Customer marketing is conducted by using tailored campaigns that are designed to market additional products, drive customer retention, enhance customer loyalty and ultimately turn your customers into evangelists.
Market additional products:
Customer marketing is perfect to market additional products to existing customers. If you have a product or service that is of a high quality, marketing additional, relevant products is a piece of cake.
Drive customer retention:
Once you get a paying customer, you want to do everything in your power to ensure that they are not stolen by a competitor. Customer marketing allows you to drive customer retention and make certain that you retain that customer when they are next in need of your products or services.
Enhance customer loyalty:
Through successful customer marketing you can make sure that each one of your customers is either loyal to you or loyal to your brand. You can do this by continually adding value to your customer, even when they do not realise, they need it.
Turn your customers into evangelists:
In marketing, an evangelist is a customer, who through word-of-mouth and other forms of communication, promotes your product to another prospect. They are excellent as they help create a positive representation of your brand that really reaches your target audience.
What is customer marketing best practices?
Customer marketing can be a powerful tool to help improve your businesses revenue and make current customers brand evangelists. Check out some of the best practices below:
Use your buyer personas to understand and segment your customers
A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customers based on data and research. It is used in many forms of marketing and customer marketing is no exception.
When performing customer marketing it is incredibly important to consider your buyer personas and what type of content will be most relevant for them. This includes email marketing, blog content, infographics, or industry updates.
Once you understand your buyer personas you can segment your customers accordingly. This means that the marketing material you are sending them is always extremely specific and tailored to their desires.
Offer amazing customer service
Customer marketing is much more effective when you are marketing to happy customers. Unfortunately, it is inevitable that some issues will arise during a consumer process. This means that it is essential to have amazing customer service where you are easily reachable and quick to act on solving any problems that occur. This helps you create as many happy customers as possible.
Effective method of customer services includes chatbots, phone lines and social media. The key idea is making your business as accessible as possible to make it as easy as possible for any type of customer to resolve a problem with your organisation.
Listen and engage with your customers
Listening and engaging with your customers is a best practice when it comes to customer marketing. Similarly, with understanding your buyer personas, by understanding your current customers you can create tailored content and promotions.
Some great ways to interact with your customers includes questionnaires, face-to face meetings, zoom conferences and social media. In 2020 social media is a particularly great tool as it offers the option for real time interactions. Social media ha also grown massively in popularity and is offers a free means of reaching a massive audience with your target market.
Incentivise loyalty
Often, companies offer new customers discounts of special rewards if they sign up for a product or service. This additional benefit is a great incentive to get a prospect over the line.
Customer marketing best practices include offering similar incentives to your current customers. Offering incentives you are creating a feeling that your current customers are just as important. This improves the representation of your brand in your current customers minds. With the nice added bonus of increasing your current customers loyalty. Some incentives may include discounts or free products or services.
By creating loyalty within your current customer base, you ensure that there is little chance of your customers moving to a competitor within your niche.
Why should you be using customer marketing?
Customer marketing is an awesome marketing method to give you an extra source of revenue. This is away from new leads and prospects. Check out the reasons you should be using it:
Increase retention:
Customer marketing helps retain your current customers. If you are at the forefront of their mind through great products and services, they are less likely to feel the need to leave you for a competitor.
Increase revenue:
Through customer marketing you have an excellent opportunity to increase the revenue of your business. This is because current customers are more reliable buyers than new customers.
Customer marketing allows you to successfully up-sell and cross-sell your products and services.
Increase new customer acquisition:
Although customer marketing is targeting customers already known to your business, it does in the long run increase customer acquisition through brand evangelists and word-of-mouth.
Happy, current customers ultimately become brand advocates recommending your service to other prospects looking for similar services and products. This happens through word-of-mouth and online recommendations.
For further insights and guidance, we invite you to explore our blog at 07hm.co.uk/blog. Here, you’ll find a wealth of information tailored to the needs and challenges of SMEs navigating the digital landscape. Additionally, if you have specific questions or need personalised advice, don’t hesitate to reach out to us via email at info@07hm.co.uk or telephone on 01702 410663.
