Long gone are the days where a business has the upper hand over the customer. Never has it been so easy to research and compare the product or service you the customer require. Think to the times you recently have required a product or service, where did you first look? I know that I start typing a query into Google. I understand and research the product or service, look up the companies accessibly practical to me, know their offerings, pricing, service and usually have limited my choice down to one or two, maybe three companies before even opening a dialogue. If they dont have a website, social media presence or other accessible online media – I’ve moved on. In most cases… they’ve missed out on my business.
Now, more than ever, companies have to gain and retain their customers. Companies need to understand their market, know their trade, not to mention genuinely understand their target audience. The company that does not, well, the competitor who does will sweep in and take what’s for the taking. Gone are the days of customer loyalty – and while I don’t believe that this brave new world yet affects all industries – it’s just a matter of time – no harm starting at the front of the race, right?
Technology has been the changing factor of customer empowerment – and technology is the same answer we look to in understanding the customer. Never before have we been able to understand our customers as we can today – we can track everything they view, anticipate their next move – and this isn’t just limited to within the online space, the digital world has met and coupled with the physical brick and mortar store.
In the early day’s systems such as Google analytics came into existence – initially just recording page views and number of visitors these systems have matured to document trends, goals and provide great insight into anonymous visitors visiting our websites. As the internet grows up our customer habits do too, we are now in a world of individual customer tracking and targeting. We can track the products a customer has viewed, the pages that they are interacting with and the journey the customer navigating, all of which are data. Data that we can analyse, crunch – probabilities identified at an individual level. If you are still sending the same bulk marketing material to your entire customer base, then you are probably doing it wrong. Data enables us to customise content based on the customers collected data, individualise the material and to select the best time for that customer to receive the campaign. Now we are sending relevant campaigns with a higher probability of success. We can calculate which prospects to reach out to, the best time to reach out to them and what probability we have in closing the deal and apply artificial intelligence to the sales process.
Connecting with our customers is changing as well, no longer is the phone the primary method of communication. We are now communicating in multiple channels – email, websites, social media, instant chat, artificial intelligence – the list goes on and continues to evolve. Communication with our customer can be recorded, feeding our data reservoir and continuing to understand their individual needs.
The internet is an amazing medium. It provides so many ways for us to interact with our customer on a global scale – it enables us to analyse the right time to communicate, follow up, We can see that they have received our emails, how long they spent in our email, give a call when they are reading our email.
But as much as this technology can work for us, it can also work against us. When something goes wrong, it can really go wrong. We are talking about damaging viral content. While potentially damaging content goes viral, an opportunity can arise to make a right, but many businesses don’t take the seriousness or expertise and stick to our traditional policies making a negative situation even worse. Customers can be lost faster than ever before.
This is now the area of specialties I am stepping into – it’s now time for me to learn and understand this brave new world of digital marketing.