s p e t S 7 g n i v e i to Ach g n i g a g n E , l a Re h t i w s p i h s n o i Relat s r e m o t s u C r u yo

Introduction Experts say we are now entering The Relationship Era; This is all about how you can achieve increased average spend and visits from your existing customers, encouraging referrals and achieving the ultimate: Brand Loyalty. Truly engaging with your customers involves a combination of relationship marketing and building an emotional connection: Word of mouth, retaining regular customers and being seen as the ‘expert’ are all core to this. Research shows that getting one piece of work from a new customer will cost you three times as much as getting the same value of work from an existing client. This shows how valuable it is to engage with your customers and build long term relationships with them. This is where having a plan and structure for engaging your customers becomes a must, and we believe there are 7 core steps to go through to achieve this.

Here at Intergage, we have created the 7 Steps to Achieving Real, Engaging Relationships with your Customers to demonstrate how you can implement these strategies within your business.

7 Steps to Achieving Real, Engaging Relationships with your Customers www.intergage.co.uk | 01202 684 009

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Contents Step 1.

Profile and understand your customers

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Step 2. Brand match with your audience

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Step 3. Speak to them individually

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Step 4. Become a part of their community

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Step 5. Put yourself in front of them

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Step 6. Communicate with them regularly and create a reason to buy more Step 7.

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Build relationships where your customers become your sales people

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Step 1. Profile and understand your customers Getting a deep understanding of your audience is vital – you can’t build a relationship with someone you don’t know. The key to success is research: The more reliable intelligence you have, the easier it is to segment and profile your audience. We recommend a blend of primary and secondary research methods to give you a clear picture.

Primary research methods include: Surveys and Questionnaires

Focus Groups

Social Media Discussions

Mystery Shopping

Webcasts

Sales Feedback

Staff Feedback

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Secondary research methods include:

Journals and Articles

Statistics

Competitor Analysis

Expert Analysis

Once you have this information it is worth profiling the customers through: Pen portraits: Drawing up a personality and description of your customers Demographics and geographics: Breaking them down by their location, status, social standing, job title, etc. Decision makers: When targeting businesses, which job role or title do you really need to speak to? Are there multiple contacts within one company? Company size and genre Type of purchase and decision making: This is essentially about Behavioural Targeting, the marketer’s perfect storm: Contacting the right person, at the right time, through the right marketing channel. The biggest question to ask yourself of your business at this point is: How are you capturing and analysing your customer’s information?

Now that you have these vital first elements in place, you can move on to the next step.

7 Steps to Achieving Real, Engaging Relationships with your Customers www.intergage.co.uk | 01202 684 009

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Step 2. Brand match with your audience Following on from Step 1, this step explores how you can match your brand and message to your audience: Immediately creating an emotional connection and becoming akin to them and their needs. If you think about your closest friends; they are someone you trust and feel familiar with: This is how your brand should feel to your customers. It is important to speak their language, to use positive and motivating tones and to show your passion and expertise through every member of your team that they come into contact with. It is also valuable to think about the meaning of colours, images and fonts you are using and how your customer base will identify with these. Many companies fail to achieve engagement with their audience due to showing little or no empathy for their customers: Your loyal customers need to see that you care about something more than your products: Demonstrate this through community and charity involvement, sharing your expertise and being on hand as a resource.

There is a simple formula for success here: Engagement

Trust

Targeted Contacts

Brand Impact

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There are a few questions you can ask yourself, in order to make a start on this journey to engagement: Do you have a clear company vision – is this being communicated both inside and outside the company? Do you have clear and consistent branding and messages? Do you communicate your brand values and ethics to your customers? Do your customers agree with and understand your brand values and ethics? One last thought to leave you with: How can your customers emotionally connect with your brand if you don’t show them your personality also? The secret ingredient to success here is to have a clear brand personality and to communicate this through all of your marketing communications, consistently.

Now that you are equipped with a clear brand message, you can begin the process of speaking to your audience as individuals.

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Step 3. Speak to them individually This step revolves around personalised, two way communications. Every person likes to feel they are being spoken to individually and this personalisation builds trust. The best way to establish this is to create two way communications and engage customers in conversations. Perhaps start by gathering feedback and then acting on it, by asking customer’s opinions, by running events where you can speak to them face to face.

In order to speak to your audience individually, you would need to segment them, which we would usually do so by categories such as:

Demographics Age, Sex, Family

Buying Patterns

Socio-demographics Earnings, Wealth

B2B Role

Geo-demographics

Decision Makers, Roles, Budget Handling

Household, Social Class

Lifestyle

Company Demographics

Hobbies, Interests, Values

Size, Turnover, Profitability, Genre, Marketplace

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Once you have segmented your audience and planned out the personalised, two way communications to them, it is also essential to differentiate yourselves from the competition in all of your marketing communications.

Some of the core ways to differentiate are through: Expertise

Brand Preference

Credibility

Product Durability

Responsiveness

Your Customer Relationships

Ease of Purchasing

Product Features or Performance

Innovative Marketing

Guerrilla Marketing and Attention Grabbing Campaigns

Your Personality and Brand Values

Leaving you with one last thought to add to your marketing communications: Always surprise and delight your customers with your communications and give the impression that your customer is in control.

You now have the audience profiling, research and brand message ready… so it is time to move on to the communication steps.

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Step 4. Become a part of their community Becoming a part of your customer’s community is all about being seen as ethical and akin to them, being someone they would trust and build loyalty with. You can achieve this by allowing each customer to speak to different members of your team and build relationships with them on multiple levels, and also by allowing customers to interact with other customers.

Becoming part of their inner circle involves two core elements:

1. Seeing them face to face See them face-to-face through your hospitality events and seminars, sponsorship of events, attending trade exhibitions, public speaking and networking.

2. Showing them you care Show them you care by getting involved with charities and community groups, engaging with local schools and universities and by having something you stand for. There are so many big brands who do this well: Showing you that they have a cause they care about and consequently running campaigns around this cause, attending events, speaking on the subject etc.

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You can only develop customers with true brand loyalty to you by establishing a relationship which is sustainable and emotional. How many of you customers are advocates for your brand and tell others about you? How many of your customers have had a brand experience with you so feel emotionally connected? How many of your customers speak to you on a regular basis and attend your events?

Research has shown than there are several steps to becoming a part of your customer’s community: Speaking to them through the most appropriate communication channels Showing you care about the same things as them Showing how credible you are as a company Becoming a part of their culture Involving yourself with their community and groups Creating regular marketing content which is relevant to them The first step to take away is to define and understand the values you want to demonstrate and how they match with your audience.

Moving ahead, you are now ready to proactively put yourself in front of your target audience in a more direct manner.

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Step 5. Put yourself in front of them Essentially, the secret to success in this step is multi-channel campaigns. By adopting a number of platforms to present your messages, this will allow you to stay at the forefront of their minds. Today, as we continue to see the growing significance of digital communications, we must still be mindful that our customers are individuals and all have their preferred method of communication.

For example, you could be a restaurant with a new menu to announce – this is your campaign visual and message. You want to get this message out to your existing customers but also the local community, so you need a multi-channel approach such as: Email newsletter

A launch event for existing customers

Facebook campaign

Posters dotted around the restaurant

A new blog on the website

Press release announcement with a great photo

Adverts in the local magazines

In order to ensure you are getting in front of every customer you need to consider 7 points of contact. Every customer is different and every customer is going to have a preferred method of communication. This might be face-to-face, email, telephone, and post. By delivering your messages via multiple points of contact you can ensure that you are potentially reaching every possible customer and communicating with them through their preferred medium. Once you have identified your 7 points of contact, this will not only put you in front of your customers regardless of their platform preference, but it will also allow you to communicate and reinforce messages regularly.

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C J Hayden (i) commented that, once you have put yourself in front of your customers, the process of building a relationship with customers follows 5 P’s: Passion Push – push at the beginning to get going Persistence Patience Profit It is essential that you remain in the forefront of their minds so that when they are ready to make a buying decision, you are the company they think of and the brand they engage with. It is, however, a balance between presenting your multi-channel messages and ‘hassling’ your customers. Adopting multiple channels spreads your message by ensuring that your message will be received regardless of a customer’s preferred communication channel but do be mindful of the ‘enthusiasm’ and ‘passion’ of your messages. Concentrate on using positive words but avoid exaggeration. Use bullet points to break up text and simplify messages. Now that you have put yourself in front of your customers it is essential to really consider the content and regularity of those messages.

At this point, you have established your initial communications with your audience, so now we move on to looking at the long term continuity and consistency of this.

7 Steps to Achieving Real, Engaging Relationships with your Customers www.intergage.co.uk | 01202 684 009

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Step 6. Communicate with them regularly and create a reason to buy more Step 6 is essentially about examining how you encourage your customers to buy more, and buy more often, now that you are in front of them. One of the most effective ways to encourage your customers to buy more is to focus on the advantages of cross-selling.

In many sectors it is possible for multiple departments to communicate to the same client, especially as you may have products and services that compliment each other or follow on from each other. This is an example of how this would work for a firm of solicitors, ticking which products / services each client buys, and highlighting the gaps; hence defining the areas with possibilities for cross-selling:

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It is therefore essential to think macro rather than micro with your customer engagement. Look at how all departments can communicate with customers and how all services and products can be presented effectively at the same time. Alternatively, look at allocating certain communication platforms to particular products and services in order to add variety to your messages.

Essentially you want them to: Come back more often Buy more each time Refer you to others As we have now established that it is essential to not only put yourself in front of customers but also to ensure that you are communicating with them regularly, with the intention to encourage them to buy more, the question then becomes, HOW. There are a wide variety of ways in which you can communicate regularly with your customers. This includes: E-Newsletters

Customer Service/Account Management

Direct Mail

POS (Point of Sale)

Newsletters

Seasonal Campaigns/Promotions

Loyalty Schemes

‘Saw this and thought of you’

Blogs

Positioning your company as ‘The Experts’

Social Media (Facebook,Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+)

Internal Displays

As a company, you need to identify which platforms/approaches are the most appropriate for you. Which will best communicate your products and services? Which will best suit your target audience? Which would be the most feasible in terms of time and resources? Which approaches would create the best combination of platforms to ensure a multi-channel approach that will keep you in the forefront of your customers’ minds? The one main question that you must ask yourself is:

Are your communications RELEVANT, UNIQUE and ENGAGING?

Now is the time to take your customer relationships to another level.

7 Steps to Achieving Real, Engaging Relationships with your Customers www.intergage.co.uk | 01202 684 009

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Step 7. Build relationships where your customers become your sales people The ultimate goal for any business is to build relationships where your customers effectively become an extension of your sales team: These customers become your Brand Ambassadors. They are the people recommending you to others, they are giving testimonials and they are attending your events. These are the customers who you have a continual dialogue with; they feel special and appreciated and want to tell people about the fantastic service they receive from you.

Whilst word of mouth is an essential part of viral marketing there are other forms to consider: Networking

Incentives & Loyalty Schemes

Referrals

Recommendations

Affinities

Testimonials

Newsletters

Public Relations

Viral marketing spreads, so take every opportunity to encourage it. Always look out for the chance to build those relationships with both existing and potential customers. When examining the type of relationship your customers have with your business, you want it to be a positive and rewarding experience. It is therefore important to look to creating a brand experience, something that they will associate purely with your brand. When you examine popular brands that we come across every day, there are particular companies who are very successful at creating a strong brand experience as well as delivering positive customer experiences, which encourage referrals. These brands go so far as to have a very definite personality that is consistently and effectively presented and communicated through all of their marketing communications.

7 Steps to Achieving Real, Engaging Relationships with your Customers www.intergage.co.uk | 01202 684 009

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When looking to encourage your customers to recommend you, it is also essential to consider how you will achieve the referral and secure that new customer. Your existing customers will be telling your story, you must make sure that they are telling the story you want them to tell. It is important to reinforce the right messages to your existing customers to ensure that they are relaying them correctly. Once your existing customers have communicated your story, to put it simply, there are 4 main things to follow: Incentivise the referrals Ask for referrals Make it easy to refer Say thank you for the referrals It is all about engagement: Creating the dialogue, sustaining the dialogue and demonstrating that you understand the customers’ needs. It is also about delighting them! Give the customer an experience they will want to tell other people about! Go the extra mile, remember how to make their tea, reassure them that you have their best interests in mind. Add value wherever possible. Gail Goodman (ii) encapsulates engagement marketing in a 3-step process:

Provide a WOW experience

New prospect

ENTICE to stay in touch

ENGAGE people

If done correctly, engaging with your existing customers will naturally and organically lead to new customers. Concentrate on those valued existing customers, communicate with them, delight them, build that relationship and maintain it.

7 Steps to Achieving Real, Engaging Relationships with your Customers www.intergage.co.uk | 01202 684 009

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Your Journey is Never Complete We have now taken you through the entire 7 steps journey: But it doesn’t stop there. Your journey is never complete and it is important to go back to Step 1 from time to time to re-examine your audience, update your plans and review your successes and challenges. We hope that you found the content useful and informative and we wish you success with your future marketing communications.

7 Steps to Achieving Real, Engaging Relationships with your Customers www.intergage.co.uk | 0845 456 1022

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What we can do to help you achieve your marketing goals: Intergage, Your Complete Marketing Partner can be your entire marketing department; getting under the skin of your planning and strategy, and working with you to implement successful marketing communications. As your trusted partner, our team of dedicated experts will work with you to create a marketing solution that is tailored to your needs. We can train you, mentor you or manage your marketing needs for you. We deliver creative marketing solutions that meet your companies’ aims and objectives. We achieve this through working closely with you, as your marketing department on demand. We develop targeted marketing strategy and activities that work for you.

Website Services:

Digital Marketing:

Design & Build

Content Marketing

Responsive Websites

Social Media

Blog Sites

Paid/Organic Search

Video Production

Blog Writing

7 Steps to Achieving Real, Engaging Relationships with your Customers www.intergage.co.uk | 01202 684 009

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Communication Services:

Event Management:

Public Relations

Planning & Marketing

Advertising

Corporate

Direct Mail

Hospitality

Lumpymail

Seminars

Copy Writing

Workshops

Audience Engagement

Exhibitions

Design Services:

Marketing Support:

Graphic Design

Marketing Planning

Brand Development

Marketing Strategy

Print Management

Market Research

Photography

Training

Email Marketing

Consultancy

7 Steps to Achieving Real, Engaging Relationships with your Customers www.intergage.co.uk | 01202 684 009

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References

(i)

Hayden, C. J., 1999. Get Clients Now: A 28-Day Marketing Program for Professionals and Consultants. New York: Amacom

(ii)

Goodman, G., 2012. Engagement Marketing: How Small Business Wins In A Socially Connected World [online]. New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons.

7 Steps to Achieving Real, Engaging Relationships with your Customers www.intergage.co.uk | 01202 684 009

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