Marketing in a digital world - where customers own our brand AND our business

Marketing in a digital world is a little like managing your boss: you only have one boss; and your boss is the customer. If the boss is unhappy with you, every task would seem uphill!

While this key concept of marketing seems fairly easy to comprehend, it isn’t. You see, we have (had) different experiences and varying degrees of relationship with our bosses (past and present). A few have been fairly easy to develop and nurture; while others a little less so. Nonetheless, one common thread across these relationships with our superiors (the good, the bad, and the in-between) is this: TRUST. Anything less is short-term.

If we fail to gain the trust of our customer in a digital world, the customer will throw us out of business faster than we could ever imagine.

These are 3 crucial considerations for successful marketing in a digital world:

No. 1: Our customers don’t trust us. Our customers trust other customers.

The Internet has given our customers and those who are not, the ability to connect with each other and along the way, to become a part of our brand’s customer experience. With limitless amount of information out there on the Internet for anyone to access at anytime, winning the trust of customers is not an option – it is a requirement.

In this instance, the most important task of marketing is not to find new ways to engage with customers. It is to find better ways to engage with a customer on the terms of the customer. Anything less is labelled as “distrustful”.

In today’s digital world, a brand is the integrity of a company. The slightest lapse of trust in a brand’s integrity and that of its people will result in a fast and expensive damage to the business

No. 2: Our customers are not metrics. Our customers are the sum total of their interactions with us

I have little choice but to be impolite – the number of fans/followers we have on our Facebook, Twitter and Instagram pages are vanity metrics which mean nothing if we are not converting these into actionable metrics.

I ask you this - how soon do we respond to “friends" and “friends-of-friends” who connect with us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram? How soon do we reply to recruiters who reach out for our resumes through LinkedIn? Now, let’s go to our company’s social pages. How often have we not responded to feedback and inquires posted on these sites? How often have we falsely assumed that connecting with our customers on the Internet is less impactful than responding to them in person? And how often have we made customers angry with just barely “cover our bases” responses?

Bottom line, if marketing continues to fail towards improving customer interactions across all touch points of a brand , the business will end up planning its exit strategy

No. 3: Customer experience is the only marketing strategy that has proven to support business security

The customer is king? Yes and it’s kicking us like hell out of business in the digital world. But what does this actually mean?

It means the customer has a stake in our company. It means the customer must be made to feel and to be a part of the company. It means personalised, honest, timely, and real-time engagement with the customers, 24/7.

Simply put, customer experience means customer partnership with a business, on steroids! 

Bringing it all together

In a digital world, customers own our brand and our business. How? Through our brand promise to them. It's that simple, really.

If our marketing strategy have implicitly asked them to “trust” us, we’re actually promising them more than our slogan - we're promising to provide them with quality products, services and solutions in a timely manner; we're proming to safeguard their interests with integrity and transparency; we're promising to demonstrate respect and authenticity to them across all of our touch points; and most of all, we're promising to remain reliable to them throughout their experiences with us.

Backing even an inch away from our brand promise in a digital world can literally mean burying the business six feet under

Getting to know me

My name is Sashi; and I'm a branding and marketing person at heart. I also believe that everyone of us are all just fighting to survive in a digital world where “likes” doesn’t mean “I’m happy” and “share” doesn’t mean “I trust”.

As always, I welcome feedback anytime, anywhere. But for now, if you speed mail me at [email protected], I can assure you of at least a "hi!" By the way, don't forget to click like and share ! :)