Know your customers

As a first step, you must identify and understand your customers: Who is buying your products? Why are they buying them? What problems are they trying to address? How do they perceive your company and brand?

Having an informed customer profile will help you determine the best outreach strategy. Understanding key data points such as your customers’ preferred digital platforms, magazines and trade shows will positively inform the ways you reach, engage and build relationships in today’s omni-channel environment.

Once you’re successfully reaching your customer base, your business can capitalize on these connections in order to both influence your customers’ perceptions as well as learn from their responses. To influence existing and potential customers, you’ll focus on communicating what your brand stands for and creating a connection between what your customers want and what you offer. You’ll also use these channels to get important feedback regarding what your customers want, what they need and how they perceive your company and brand.

When customers recognize your brand and identify with it, they will choose your company when they are ready to buy. Once a customer has purchased from you, keep engaging them to build a lasting relationship. Across sectors, retaining the customers you already have costs less and generates more profit than acquiring new ones. In fact, it is generally recognized that It’s anywhere from 5 to 25x cheaper to retain an existing customer than it is to acquire a new one and that the probability of selling to an existing customer is 60-70%, while the probability of selling to a new prospect is only 5% to 20%.

Convey what you stand for

Your potential customers, partners and employees want to understand the heart of your company so the mission and values of your company are what shape its essence. Promoting your core values creates an emotional connection with your customers and partners. This mission transparency can also help you to attract new customers and engage with your audience.

In today’s world, more and more customers, employees and business partners want to deal with organizations that they trust and respect. A recent survey from Accenture reaffirmed a longstanding belief that consumers will abandon brands that don’t support their values in favor of those that do.

Of course, once you’ve communicated those core values, you’ll need to operate according to them if you want to build trust with and retain your audience.

Create an online experience

Your website represents the first touch point for most potential customers, especially considering the growth of e-commerce. A well-done website that reflects your brand will help your customers to appreciate what your company can offer and make a purchase decision.

First and foremost, your website must maintain relevant, updated and clear and correct information. It needs to be intuitive and easy for customers to navigate no matter what device they use, whether they want to look for specific products, find inspiration or place an online order.

You also want to demonstrate that your business is modern, on-trend and offers the customer a unique experience. In the furniture industry, for example, you can help your customer to see how a product will look in their space by posting high quality images and investing in 3D, augmented reality and virtual reality tools. If your website doesn’t provide a good experience, the best-case scenario is that your customer service department gets tied up providing customers with information that they should’ve been able to find online. The worst case is that you lose potential and current customers.

In conclusion

Your business must adapt in order to effectively meet new challenges and remain competitive. Landing new customers and partners – whether they’re domestic or international – is challenging.

A strong marketing strategy plays a vital role in your company’s success and needs to be continually reviewed and adjusted according to your audience. Analytical tools can help you evaluate the effectiveness of your marketing to determine where your strategy is a hit and where it’s a miss.

Expandigo is here to support your business in these efforts. Expandigo’s innovative and robust interface can bolster your marketing strategy by helping you identify and manage relationships with customers and partners.