Lets Get Back To Basics

With the volatility of the market and the challenges that we are currently facing, sometimes we really need to take a look at some basics to prevent sales from dipping further. Below are some steps that we might be able to use in increasing marketing effectiveness during these challenging times.

1. Check Your Product and Service Mix
Talk to your customers. Find out how you can provide more value to your customers. How can you meet smaller clients demand or customers with a lower budget? Your customers are more willing to tell you what the market needs.

2. Audit Your Brand
How your customers see your products or services reflects your company. A consistent experience, a single ‘voice’ and the ways you communicate your brand is critical. Improve it and protect it.

3. Enhance The Customer Experience
It is always more expensive to acquire a new customer than get more business from the existing customer. Each customer you lose, you are drying up your own pocket over time. Enhance your customer experience and improve your customer touchpoints to increase awareness, acquisition, loyalty and retention.

4. Look Into Your Database
Your database is like a gold mine. Capitalize and use it. Reactivate your dormant customers with new promotions, products and services. Call up your current customers for referrals. They will be happy to pass you referrals if they are comfortable with you.

5. Gain More By Using Customer Insights
The more you know about your customers, the more predictive you can be. You can accurately target your brand and marketing to meet the specific needs of your customers. Your customers’ voice, your reputation online will all lead you to a better understanding and act accordingly with ease and speed.

6. Control Your Cost
Not to reduce cost but use it wisely. Ensure that your budget is used wisely with greater value for every dollar spent in your marketing activities. Always relate it to marketing ROI and cost control to ensure that the marketing investments bring the greatest revenue.

7. Marketing Measurements
What you can measure, can be improved. Many marketers are unable to ascertain whether their marketing efforts work. Smart marketers will combine science and art to ensure marketing effectiveness. Always measure the outcome to ensure your marketing investments give you the greatest return.

Customer Database: A Priceless Asset

Innovation has played a vital role in many years for the success of an organization. However in the present state, reports have shown that more than 80% of new products brought into the market are destined to fail. This shows that innovation is fleeting and capturing competitive advantage is getting tougher. No matter what innovative products your organization sells today will most likely be a commodity tomorrow.

Organizations today need to go beyond the traditional innovation process. Other than product or service innovation, customer innovation also plays a very important role. How does an organization achieve customer innovation? It derived from DATA and customer insights. Lots of organizations either don’t keep customer data or keeping loads of it.

Most organizations with plenty of data don’t know how to take the advantage of the insights and analysis it can offer. Innovative ways of using customer insights will enable organization to maximize the value of each customer interactions by delivering a great customer experience.

Below is an excerpt from the Sales Ninja blog regarding customer database which I fully agreed upon which I would like to share:

Retail is a highly competitive business. Traffic to the store is one of the primary sources of business. Most leads are generated through walk-ins – either from passer-bys, advertisements or from referrals.

Typically, food businesses thrive thanks to referrals.Whenever a colleague or associate plans a lunch treat for us, often enough, they already have a r.e.s.t.a.u.r.a.n.t in mind. As a restaurateur, the one million question is how can we stay in people’s mind so they will remember our eatery as THE right place to dine.

A prominently-placed advertisement shows up in the newspapers one day. Obviously, not everyone would be attracted to the ad, prompting the question, “how can retailers get to the top of the mind of shoppers” so they would not leave empty-handed whenever they v.i.s.i.t an outlet or even if they do, they are likely to return in the near future to make a p.u.r.c.h.a.s.e.

Many retailers make the mistake of failing to apply this one very powerful strategy – they fail to collect personal details of their visitors or customer for their database.

Grave mistake. Everyone who walks to our store is a potential buyer. Something must have attracted them to walk in. A lady shopper may like our coffee mug but it may be too pricey to her budget at that particular moment. So she puts her buying decision on hold.

Retailers have to remember that people b.u.y on emotions and back their decision with logic. In the context of the lady shopper, she may have the desire to come back but may not remember this anymore upon leaving the store due to her many commitments.

As such, if we keep details of this shopper in our database and put her in our mailing list where we can periodically but consistently mail her our new arrivals via e-mail, postcards, SMS or newsletters, then we would have “entered her world”.

You can view the whole blog by visiting the Sales Ninja. From the above, we could see that by having a proper customer database, organizations can strategize by using customer insights such as descriptive, behavioral, interaction, etc. and thus innovate at touchpoints across the customer lifecycle to enhance the customer experience.

The Approach On The New World Customers

In today’s vulnerable and competitive market conditions, capturing customers has been very challenging and has been one of the major focuses for all businesses. This is because customers have raised their expectations due to the easy access of information and customer loyalty is falling rapidly. These customers have grown with technology and they demand more offerings and experiences that a business has to offer.

With all these challenges, organizations really face a formidable task to cope with the ever changing consumer landscape. In a hyper-competitive market, competitive advantages don't last for very long and innovation is fleeting. The ease of entry by competitors, substitutes and matching products that will disintegrate your competitive edge, or customers move on to your competitors, or even the environment changes in such a way that the advantage becomes irrelevant. How can these businesses face these complexities and volatility of the market? How can they acquire and retain the best customers in this new world?

That is the reason why the brand and the customer experience should be closely knitted and a deeper understanding of what customer wants, needs, perception and options is crucial to drive more right customers closer to your organization. Organizations that perform will be those maintaining a strong customer-centric focus while dealing with these complexities of customers and the market. It is an approach to doing business in which a company focuses a positive customer experience. Organizations need to identify what makes for a delightful customer experience, and coordinate their interactions, touchpoints, procedures, and systems to support that.

Below are some steps that can be looked into to allow organizations to be customer-centric:-

1. Knowing your customers
Performance driven businesses always try to have a deeper understanding of their customers. They used fact based information and analytics as well as customer data covering all aspects of their customers such as what they value, how they behave, etc.

2. Reaching the customers
In-depth knowledge of your customers from customer-centric programmes will enable the organizations to put up an effective marketing strategy to reach their customers with the right message at the right time.

3. Exploring the alternative media
Be innovative with new channels such as Web 2.0 and the social media to interact with your customers. This has become increasingly important with the emergence of the Web 2.0 customers. However, organizations need to be ascertained that the core competencies of the organization is uphold.

4. Effective interactions using analytics
Use a scientific approach in driving interactions with your customers through various channels. Analytics can be very useful in identifying your customers’ needs, behaviour and how to engage them. What can be measured and monitored can be improved!

5. The customer experience management
Pricing is no longer the main reason for customer churn. The way how your organization engages the customers, is to deliver a unique customer experience which is relevant to satisfying your customer’s needs and your brand promise. These also will eventually lead to customer loyalty.

With a customer-centric approach, successful organizations will always interact with their customers and seek to understand their needs and behavior. From here, value will be offered to the customers without forsaking the differentiated customer experience.