In our series of articles so far on our approach to sales and marketing, we have discussed the fundamentals of creating awareness of your brand, products, and services, and how to go beyond this to foster attraction in your prospective clients. We have established how important it is to align your beliefs, philosophy and values with those of whom you wish to engage, and how playing a core and trusted role within relevant communities can achieve this.
Having gained a loyal following of prospective clients who are bought into your offerings, it is now time to start engaging in earnest.
Embrace every engagement opportunity
Customer engagement is not necessarily about making a purchase. Any point at which a prospective client interacts with your business, or shares with you, is considered engagement. Any interaction, whether re-sharing a tweet, commenting on a blog, looking at your website, or referencing you in a Facebook is a positive step towards making a sale.
Aligning style, tone, and messaging
If social media is to play a large part in your customer engagement strategy, we will recommend how to do this most effectively. The quality and style of engagement is important to those prospective clients who you have so far attracted. It is, therefore, necessary to align your approaches in stage 1 (awareness) and stage 2 (attraction), with how you engage with people in stage 3. Sharp, savvy, prompt engagement at this point will provide confidence that the earlier image created matches with reality. To put this another way, think of online dating – you look at the photo and profile of someone you like; but when you meet in person, you realise the photo of the successful entrepreneur was from 20 years ago, and the truth provides a very rude awakening. You must be consistent and uphold the values and image that first attracted the individual or business to engage with you.
Keep up your customer engagement standards
Research by customer engagement software company, Thunderhead, reveals 39% of consumers would switch to another brand if they have two or more bad experiences when engaging with them. This shows that modern prospective clients have little patience for businesses who do not value them. This same research also states that “to truly build engagement and nurture your relationships, aim to do something unexpected and un-self-serving”.
Consumers expect you to understand them, where they are on their journey, and for you to respond quickly. And they know that if you cannot do this, there are others that can and will. In short – don’t waste your customer’s valuable time. Gone are the days when consumers will tolerate slow, sloppy, rude, uncaring service – for modern businesses to thrive, they must back up their words with positive actions, or risk being bowled out at strike one or two.
Technology as an engagement tool
You won’t fail to have seen the proliferation of chatbots and other AI-driven technology capable of keeping clients engaged. Law firms globally, are turning to chatbots to interact with prospective clients to provide quick answers to basic questions. In a world where people are constantly on their mobile phone, rather ironically, people are increasingly less likely to use it as a ‘telephone’ to engage with businesses; rather they will make contact through messaging services, and chatbots. This is in large part because, since 2010, the main way in which younger people communicate is via mediums such as Snapchat, Whatsapp, and Facebook Messenger.
Customer engagement software is now gaining in popularity, enabling communication and interaction with prospective and existing clients through a range of channels – whether it be your website, social media, web chat, customer self-service, email, or a chatbot. Such technology, including Salesforce Engage, Outreach, Salesloft, and Groove, ensure a uniform approach to how customer engagement is undertaken, and allows workflows to be designed, so that, depending on the nature of the enquiry, the client can be quickly and fluidly passed to the team with the necessary skills to assist. And because this software can be integrated with sales and fulfilment platforms, and indeed any other data source, the member of staff has at their disposal a vast amount of information relating to the client they are engaging with.
Designing the optimal marketing engagement strategy
There are limitless ways in which small, medium and large businesses can engage with prospective clients. However, given the breadth of the options available, it is essential that cost, return of investment, time to implement, and business priorities be considered.
Reach Revenue’s Directors, based on their combined four decades of senior sales and marketing leadership with some of the UK’s largest brands, work with small, medium, and large enterprises, to reliably promote robust sales growth and foster a loyal and committed client base.
By engaging our services, we will create a tailored strategy to achieve your business objectives in a manner that preserves your budget, prioritises the actions which will have the greatest benefit, and ensures a rapid implementation of your new sales and marketing processes. Call Nik or John today – your business has everything to gain.
Reach Revenue works with business owners, leaders and investors to develop high performing sales and marketing teams aligned to the strategic objectives of their business. To find out how we can help you, please call 0203 858 8030 or email info@reachrevenue.net