Post-Pandemic Marketing to Gain and Retain Customers

It's time to raise your hand and tell your markets you’re here and ready as ever to serve them with your extraordinary products and services! And the best way to raise your hand is through effective, aggressive marketing.

Going to Market in 2021

For many challenged by the pandemic, this may be going back to market, but whichever it is for you the good news is that you have a dazzling array of choices in how you go to market.

Content Marketing

Content continues to be “king” and for good reason. It’s the best way to demonstrate the knowledge, expertise, experience, and insight you bring to your services and the value they deliver to customers. It’s important to remember, however, that customers come to learn, not to be pitched. It’s fine to include an invitation to make contact in your call-to-action, but make every effort to convey real value in your content. As with any publication, make building a reader base your goal and watch those readers convert into customers over time. Running low on time to create content? Reach out to your vendors and distributors—they’ve got content to spare.

Social Media Marketing

The value of social media marketing cannot be overstated. Everyone is flocking to LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and others to establish a dialogue with their audience. Make no mistake, social networks are interactive media and provide an unparalleled opportunity to build personal relationships with customers, and a service business like yours thrives on personal relationships. The key is to consistently engage with your social audience and people you’d like to build a network with. This can take some time, but it’s a worthy investment. Consider using a marketing intern or other socially-savvy low wage employee if marketing budget dollars are tight.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Figuring out how others are going to phrase their searches when looking for you has become a complex combination of intuition, calculation, research, and constant experimentation. SEO is a moving target, with new algorithms and rules being introduced all the time. You don’t have time to track all this, so find someone you can engage to do that for you. Vendors and distributors might have some resources for you in their MDF programs here, or engage one of the many SEO agencies out there.

Bot Marketing

Bots are the greatest invention since automated phone answering in helping qualify customers, directing them to where they’ll get the best help, and reducing total time spent on suspects. Given the growing importance of customer retention and selling more to existing customers, anything you can do to accelerate qualification is worthwhile. Bots can easily perform preliminary interviews with prospective and current customers so your human operators get on the phone with plenty of questions already answered. When a customer whose network is in trouble can simply get out their mobile and text a service request in, that’s retention magic. When they can do so quickly because the bot is collecting all the necessary details without delay, that gets even better.

Personalized Marketing - Use Your Data

“The personal touch” is still highly desirable among most customers. To personalize all your marketing activities, start by collecting as much data as you can about each suspect. When you start using social automation you may be astounded by how much information can be harvested from their social sites and other sources. Your contact center agents can get on the phone armed with useful information about the customer, their network, and perhaps even some solid recommendations to help build a comfortable and enjoyable dialogue. Blend this data with anecdotal information obtained during personal interactions.

Omnichannel Marketing

Every marketing advisor who ever lived will tell you how many times you need to “touch” a new customer before they’ll respond, and it’s likely that no two will agree. Rest assured it’s usually more than one, and the variety of ways in which you make contact can add velocity to their response. Coordinate your social, email, even direct mail, phone-calling, web, and other channels to keep bringing home a consistent message, and watch those contacts convert!

Omnichannel is also important in both directions—not only how you reach customers, but also how they reach you. Customers want choice. Some prefer to text, others to call. Some won’t talk to anyone, but are glad to exchange emails.

This strategy is not new. Even before digital marketing, many marketers sent direct mail, followed by phone calls or faxes (remember those?), and some even use express mail to get more attention to their messages. In the digital era this is vastly simplified. Content created for one medium can readily be re-purposed for others.

The Customer Experience

All of this, and all the other ways in which innovative marketers are approaching their craft this year, are focused on creating the ultimate customer experience. You don’t only want to inform the customer, you want to entertain them, engage them, make them feel welcome, and build their confidence that yours is a business they want to do business with.

Creating outstanding customer experiences is a non-stop process. Given that it is far easier to sell more to existing customers than it is to create new ones, you need to focus significant effort on retaining those customers and keeping them loyal. Affinity programs are still a popular way to do this, but many marketers are finding that simply maintaining ongoing engagement through interactive forums, message boards, and loyalty groups makes customers feel like part of the family.