6 things you want to do for your digital marketing strategy
Every business, large or small needs to keep looking at their long-term plan. Some businesses won’t need a digital presences, but most small B2C businesses will. Many of these points are the same as any traditional marketing strategy, merely translated to accomodate digital platforms.
Here they are, my 6 starting points most B2C businesses needs to possess and look after:
- Create Content: My biggest exasperation with digital marketing strategies these days is executives hear the words “facebook” and “twitter” being thrown around by their target audience, so they tell themselves they have to create a page. Done. But they don’t go further than that. Translated to traditional marketing it’s as if companies rented billboards, or space in a newspaper and only printed their company’s name. Companies need to invest in touch points with their audience. You should constantly be inputing content and creating discussions, otherwise your Facebook pages and/or Twitter accounts will die before they have the chance to prosper.
- Listen & Learn: Along the same lines, using these channels to listen to their customers and use that data to improve your business model and strategy.
- Advertise: Google Ads, Facebook ads, Twitter ads, all these platform offer great possibilities to target a very niche audience. Facebook, is extremely important as you can filter your message by age, gendre, location, hobby, education level, etc…
- Ain’t no such thing as a free meal: It’s what my dad tells me all the time (minus the “aint’t”), and the quote is very appropriate for any digital marketing strategy. Small business owners often think that social media and digital marketing as a whole means free advertising. False. While it may be financially more lucrative, you will need to invest a little bit of money to get you started, and more importantly, time so you can execute your strategy. Coming back to points one and two, if you don’t create content and listen to your audience you will put in more money than you bring in.
- Reward Loyalty: A happy customer is a loyal customer. I’ll go into more details in my next point about how to do so for businesses offering tangible products, but for those who offer intangible services (such as coffee shops, restaurants, hair salons, bowling alleys, and so on) here it goes: First thing you have to do is make sure all of your employees have the motivation to be as invested in the business as much as the owner is. Their good work needs to be rewarded, so that they can feel that their role in the business is vital and express that happy sentiment to the customer. Once the customer feels happy with the quality of the service they will feel happy to come back. But one must be given an incentive. To accomplish that make sure that your business is found on Foursquare, and that the mayor is rewarded for his or her loyalty. You can either offer them a free coffee, or a discount every time they come in. If your cynical and think they’ll take advantage of that discount, don’t be. You want them to take advantage of that offer. I hope they do. Because should it not have been for that discount they wouldn’t be here at all.
- Love thy Customer: It applies to social media too. Every time I have a bad experience with a company I contact them via Twitter (not only because I’m already a grumpy old man, but also because I want to see how they execute their social media strategy). Most of the time I get a response, but what keeps me loyal to a company is when they go the extra mile. Don’t just reply with “So sorry to hear about your experience, send us an e-mail and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible” (British Airways did that with my dad over 2 months ago. We have yet to hear back). Also, give your employees a bit of slack. Trust their judgment. Don’t tell them a reimbursment isn’t possible because you can’t. The customer will be frustrated. Allow your employees to make decisions they deem potentially lucrative in the long run for the company. You may challenge them about it later, but if their action is justified you’ll think so too. Let me just share with you an experience I had a couple weeks ago: I ordered a back protector for my iPhone 5. I’d had one with my 4S and boy did it save me more than once. Satisfied, I went with the same manufacturer. However, the case seemed too large for the phone and would peel off when I took my phone out of my pocket, essentially ruining the protector. I contacted them, and within hours got a response:
Hi Nabil,
I hope you are well and thanks for getting in touch.
I am sorry to hear that the middle section of your back protector has peeled off. The middle section of the device has a bevelled edge, and if the protector is slightly misaligned, it can catch at the edges, causing it to peel. I can assure you that it is possible to apply the back protectors perfectly, however it is quite a fiddly process. We are always reviewing our designs to be sure they’re the best possible cut, and we did decide last week that making the back protector cut slightly less precise would make it much easier for our customers to apply the protectors.
We’ve redesigned the cut and added it to our production schedule, and will be shipping the updated cut on the 27th. If you’re ok with waiting a few days, I can arrange for a pack of the updated cut to be sent out to you on the 27th. If you’d prefer not to wait, we can send you a replacement pack today.
Please let me know how you’d like to proceed, and I’ll get that sorted for you as soon as possible!
Best Regards,
Sarah
MediaDevil
Here’s what Sarah (and MedialDevil) did right:
- Called me by my first name and apologised (that’s text book customer care)
- Let me know that the problem was one they were aware of, and that last week they had decided to change the design to fix that problem. The fact that she knew that shows a great environment where all departments communicate openly, so as to avoid the typical: “contact X”. Alternatively, should could have just said, “Yeah we’ll send you a new one” but instead she reassured me I wasn’t the only one and that the problem had been fixed.
- She offered to send me a new one either today (free of charge) or if I would wait a week, she would send me the new ones.
- She then invited me to stay in touch with her.
I replied and told her I’d wait a week for the new designs. When the new designs came in she personally sent me an e-mail telling me that my protector had been shipped and asked to contact her when I received it.
The fact that she asked me to let her know when the protector had arrived showed she had not only remembered about me, but that she was invested in my individual experience. When the case arrived I e-mailed her and she then replied asking if everything had gone well with the new design.
That example gets 5*. Sarah did everything right. Sending me a new protector, shipping included probably cost them €2-3. In exchange they got a an extremely loyal advocate for their brand which in the long run would earn them much more than €2-3. Not bad!
There you have it, folks. That’s what I feel is the starting point for any digital marketing strategy. It may sound like a customer care strategy, but it isn’t. This is the future of business, either adapt to it or wait until your competitors do.
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1FORTYPLUS 
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