In today’s fast-paced digital world, discovering and implementing the latest SEO tactic or social media trend sometimes seems all-consuming. If there’s time left over, there are still blogs to write and ad campaigns to run.
For marketers and marketing teams, the list of things to do is truly endless.
In my experience with current marketing strategies, there’s a tendency to worry too much about day-to-day minutia. Marketing is about making your products and services attractive and helpful to customers, and if your products and services do have built-in value, this is easy!
I believe today’s strategies are undervaluing a marketing tenet that can calm the collective storm in the minds of marketers: a great customer experience!
It’s not that marketers don’t want to deliver a great customer experience, but rather they sometimes don’t understand their roles within the customer experience itself.
The truth is, delivering a truly exceptional customer experience begins in the marketing department. Still not sure why? Read on to find out the 3 ways to align your customer experience with your marketing message!
As Employees, Live Your Brand
The roots of a great customer experience actually start with your company and its leaders. Marketers often look internally for inspiration for their customer-facing messages, which means the way they are trained and treated as employees will be reflected by the marketing material they produce.
As a leader in our agency, this is exactly what I want, and it’s my job to ensure we treat our team members the way we want them to treat our customers!
Too often, however, companies fail to teach their employees how to properly “live their brand.”
When employees – like marketers – are trained and treated in ways that directly reflect the message you want to project to potential customers, you have laid the groundwork for your team to deliver great customer experience. Just beware that if you do not do this, the opposite is true: this is where poor customer experiences truly originate.
Make Promises The Team Can Keep
Everybody, at least once, has bought something they didn’t need because of a good marketing campaign!
There is, however, a significant difference between good marketing and making false claims just to get sales. Unfortunately, fierce competition sometimes calls for desperate measures, and this often includes saying anything and everything to get the sale.
Marketers and salespeople: do not make promises the products and service can’t keep.
If a company makes a car with a max speed of 195mph, they should not say it can reach speeds over 200mph. A golf club company should not say its driver can lower a golfer’s score by 10 shots…because nothing can lower Charles Barkley’s score by 10 shots. Marketing companies shouldn’t promise to get brands a #1 ranking on Google because there is simply no way to guarantee it.
Any sales made under false pretenses just amounts to fool’s gold. Be honest about your products and services and highlight their value, nothing more, nothing less.
Make promises you can keep. Don’t do this:
Deliver On Your Marketing Messages
“You are what you do, not what you say you’ll do.” – Carl Jung
This quote is an apt maxim for both company leadership and marketers. If a company claims it will treat employees a certain way, and then follows through, those employees are much more likely to deliver the same experience to customers.
Most readers will be familiar with the Japanese brand Asics – They are best known for their running shoes. I have two kids who are mad into sports and seem to go through shoes with lightning speed! I started buying the kids runners online a couple of years ago direct from Asics and I’m now a committed fan. The reason – They offer fantastic customer service and continually deliver on their promise.
For non-members you can trial their shoes for 30 days and return them free of charge – The return process is super simple and they don’t make you jump through hoops. Perfect when you are unsure of the correct size – Just order both and return the ones you don’t want.
The key here is that they sold me on their returns policy and then backed that up by delivering on their promise.
If your company makes a promise with its marketing message, you need to do everything within your power to keep that promise, even if a million things go wrong. Over time, long hours, even taking a financial hit – it’s all worth it to keep that promise.
Because of the customer, you are what you do, not what you say you’ll do.
Image Credit: Fifth P
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