Talking with customers

Social media, websites, e-news – all of the things I’ve talked about in this series are part of a bigger picture: how you engage with your customers. None of these technologies and techniques have any intrinsic value, except as they engage you with customers.

Websites can do much more than promotions and sales:

•    Manage warranty and service
•    Give your customers better service than your opposition offers
•    Build customer loyalty:
o       Involve customers in product improvement
o       Reduce warranty claims
o       Increase word of mouth referrals
o       Reduce customer complaints
o       Build product communities
•    Attract good employees
•    Get more from your suppliers
•    Improve team morale
•    Improve operational efficiency
•    Measure customer satisfaction
•    Measure team spirit

Interaction and channel multipliers  

When marketing people say “interactive”, “social” and “Web2”, often it turns out they are grouping blogs, e-newsletters, video, apps and perhaps publications along with Facebook and Twitter. Of the extras only blogs and apps can be truly interactive, but they do all serve the same purpose of getting your customers engaged with you and your story.

Trend cycles?   

Social media is one of the hottest, most hyped subjects (should I say fashions?) in marketing right now.

In fact, it feels a lot like websites circa 2000 when trendy companies just had to have a website. There were some grand visions, but in reality websites back then had no viable role in most business models. Consequently, they drained cash and produced little. That was why, at that time, I was advising clients not to build one.

Later, towards the middle of the decade, when the reality check of the dot com crash had settled, websites started to mature into a useful business tool. I began telling clients, you probably won’t make money out of the internet yet, but you need to engage and start learning.

Now of course I say, no website, probably no business future.

Social media is on the same kind of trend cycle, and it’s about in the middle: time to engage and start learning, so you don’t miss out and get left behind. Maybe you won’t make a decent return out of social media right now, but that time is coming.

For social media, the establishment cycle will probably take five years, not 10.

So it is time to get started with social media – cautiously.

Is online advertising more than a fad?   

In the US and the UK about one in every four or five advertising dollars is now spent on line. Forbes predicts on-line spending will pass TV spending by 2016. So the global business consensus is clearly  pro-online.

Is it just for big business?  

No. Compared say with TV, on-line actually advantages smaller advertisers.

Is it just for business?

No. Not for profits and other information providers and opinion influencers need to go where the public discussion is, and increasingly that’s online – especially if the talk-back radio demographic is not for you.

What is SEO?      

SEO is the best known website promotional tool. SEO is only one part of the picture – but it is the first part. Almost everything else you can do to promote a website will be enhanced or crippled by good or bad SEO.

SEO tries to get people from a search engine (Google, Yahoo, Bing and hundreds more) to your website. As 50% to 80% of a typical website’s traffic comes from search engines, it’s a pretty good place to start.