Align Your Marketing with your Customers

Attempting to reach out and engage with consumers is becoming more and more difficult. There is so much ‘noise’ that it can be hard to cut through it all to get your message to the right people. To add to the situation, consumers arereported to now highly favour the opinions and word-of-mouth reviews from family and friends first, with public reviews coming in at third place. On top of this, while grabbing the attention of consumers becomes tricky to capture, attention spans are also shortening.

Alas, we cannot throw our hands up in the air and simply walk away. We need to do something about it but trying to advertise your way around or through the situation won’t help. It’s time to stop looking at your consumers and take a look at your business because the answer lies in aligning your marketing with the customer journey. This will ultimately mean you’re end goal is the perfect execution of the customer experience. What do customer’s like to talk about? It’s not a business’s advertising, it’s not the product or service; it’s the customer experience they like to share!

The complex issue is of course formulating a marketing plan which reforms with this. How can your marketing improve the customer experience? They key is focusing on the role that marketing should play. This means it must inform a consumer of:

1) What they can and should expect if they were to purchase a product or service or, if they were to approach and deal with your business.

2) The product and/or service which actually matches these prior expectations set out by your marketing

3) The subsequent follow-up and aftercare service after your business has closed the deal

All of the above encourages your converted consumers to share their positive insights into your business. It provides them with the reason to pass their experience on to others. A recent article in Marketing Magazine states that, “Deeply integrating advertising into the way a customer experiences a brand is becoming an essential aspect of the overall marketing mix” (Cameron, 2015).  All SMEs want their customers to speak well of the interactions they have had with their business, but it won’t happen unless they’re actually given a service which the consumer believes is worth telling others about.

The positive sentiment of your happiest customers has always been something businesses have wanted to net, and with the undeniable presence of online media in our everyday lives, this leverage can be amplified. Learn how you can formulate the perfect online business model for your business and gives us a call here at SponsoredLinX on 1300 859 600 or visit our website here.

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