Bethany Stout http://contentmarketinginstitute.com 3m 698
The views of this article are the perspective of the author and may not be reflective of Confessions of the Professions.
According to 72% of businesses, customer success is their main priority. When you help customers achieve success with your products and services, they’re more likely to stick around. They’ll also rave about your business and refer other customers to you. But you need to come up with an effective strategy that engages with your customers at every step of the journey.
1. Target the Right Customers
In order to help your customers, you want to target the right ones. This is where creating an Ideal Customer Profile that you can share across your organization comes in handy. The biggest mistake you can make is communicating with a wide variety of customers. Everyone is different and should be treated as such.
By creating customer personas and journey mapping, you can establish better customer relationships. You need to identify which of your customers have the best chance of achieving success with your products and services. This is part of your success potential. There are six parts to creating a success potential:
- Competence Fit
- Cultural Fit
- Experience Fit
- Functional Fit
- Resource Fit
- Technical Fit
Along with your Ideal Customer Profile, your marketing department can create tailored marketing campaigns and messaging that targets your ideal customer. In addition, your sales department can determine if someone is the right prospect before offering your products and services.
2. Combine Your Success & Marketing Teams
Combining your marketing, sales, and success team can help improve focus and productivity. You should combine them into one single Revenue Team, which can lead to increased revenue rather than decreased customer churn. With this alignment, you’ll experience an increase in sales and revenue.
You’ll also notice that your customers are more involved with your marketing plans, such as speaking at conferences, events, references, and webinars. While you should combine your teams, you should also host regular meetings to maintain that alignment so it’s at the center of your goals.
3. Publish Free Educational Content
Content marketing combines the business and marketing processes for creating valuable content that educates, engages, and relates to your target audience. The main goal of content marketing is to increase profits. When it’s done right, free educational content is the perfect way to drive customers to your business. This educational content is useful when they’re searching for information about your business.
If you educate before you sell, then it’ll provide them with the knowledge they need to improve their chances of customer success. You should understand your customer’s goals so you can achieve your business goals. At the start of the relationship, your customers are educating themselves so they can make the right decision. Companies who are focused on selling are missing out on the benefits of content marketing.
4. Get Your Customers Involved
One way to get your customers involved is to implement field marketing with your marketing strategy. Field marketing allows you to create a brand that’s focused on one key area related to your customers. As you know, the most important part of a successful event or marketing campaign is your customers. Whether you’re reaching out to them through direct mail or a webinar, you want to make sure your customers are the center of your branding and messaging.
This can make a direct impact on your ROI. Your direct mail campaign can be large or small, depending on your budget. It also varies on several factors, including the budget, focus, and scope of your project. When it comes to conferences or dinners, having an advocate for your brand can become a valuable investment. This makes prospective customers to feel like they’re not being sold to.
5. Provide Examples of Successful Customers
This kind of proof is powerful. When a prospective customer sees that other people have purchased your products and services, they’re more likely to become a customer. You can use social proof by providing examples of some of your most successful customers.
Case studies is one way to achieve this goal. You can allow your target audience to see like-minded individuals who achieved success with your products and services. User-generated customer reviews and testimonials are two other powerful forms.
Want to improve customer success? Use some of these customer-focused strategies to see an increase in results.
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