It’s not very common these days for a person to just walk
into a store, right out of the blue, and make a major purchase. We see a much
different customer today: one who doesn’t look at a business as a faceless
corporate entity that just happens to make a product that the customer wants or
needs. Instead, these customers look at businesses as people, like the Moms and
Pops from small towns. They interact with them on social media, and they talk
to their friends and people they’ve never even met in order to decide if that
business is someone they actually want to buy from. Review sites and online
business-customer interactions have become a major factor in whether or not the
customer will actually buy from a business today. So what kind of role does
your marketing play with this new customer?
Customer Service
A lot of marketers think of their role as assisting the
sales team in bringing in new leads. The marketers provide the attraction; the
salespeople close the deal. Marketing isn’t just the front end of sales,
though. The buyer experience is every bit as important as closing the sale. If
a buyer has a negative experience, you can almost be sure it’ll show up on a
review site, and it will have a negative effect on the rest of your marketing.
Make customer service part of your marketing. That’s
obviously not just saying, “Excellent customer service!” on your promotional
materials, but rather shifting the idea of marketing from a front-end piece of
sales to a full-service operation. The more active your marketing is throughout
the entire sales and retention
process, the more likely you’ll be to see favorable reviews popping up across the
Internet. The endorsement of a stranger can be one of your most valuable
marketing tools.
Website Design
More often than not, the first interaction someone has with
your business will be through your website. They might check it for your hours,
for a location, for a phone number or any other thing, but you can be sure
they’ll look at your website before they even pick up a phone to call you. That
means your website is really a prerequisite for business. If you have a website
that’s not approachable or difficult to navigate, you’re likely to push a
potential customer toward a competitor whose site is more user-friendly.
Design isn’t just the way your website is laid out. In this
case, design is the way that your potential customer connects with you through
your website. Your website should be designed in such a way as to invoke some
kind of feeling in your viewer, whether that’s a feeling of satisfaction by
easily finding your location, or even as deep as reminding him or her of some
childhood memory.
