The traditional customer journey was once described as a funnel. You would try to gather as many leads as you could to fill the top of your marketing funnel, then slowly narrow down those leads until you got customers at the bottom of the funnel. Then the process would start again with a new batch of leads.
However, today’s customer journey is much less of a funnel and is instead a flywheel. That means that one person could have seven interactions with your business before becoming a customer and another person could only have two interactions. It also means that a customer can help to generate new business for your small business by becoming an advocate of your services or products. Think about it: if someone tells you how much they enjoyed a product or posts on social media about how great a service is, you are much more likely to give it a try yourself.
In order to harness this momentum and get your customers to help market your small business for you, you need to build credibility and trust with your customer base through personalization. When a customer can relate to your strong online presence, they are more likely to spread the word about what you do and help generate new leads for the beginning of your flywheel.
Building Trust with Customers
Today’s customers hold more power than ever before. Rather than relying on salespeople to give them information, buyers are able to do their own research and discover more about products and businesses before ever making a phone call or contacting a sales representative.
One area where your customers have a lot of power is online. They determine how they interact with your small business, and if your small business can’t be found, it’s much harder to build the trust that will allow them to return as a loyal customer and create momentum for your flywheel.
Having a strong online presence is key to the success of personalizing the customer journey. Without an online presence that is recognized by both customers and search engines, you can be lost in the noise and your competitors will take over the valuable online real estate. With a strong foundation for your online presence, you can increase the amount of credibility your small business has with customers, which further encourages them to promote your products and services to others online.
A customer needs to feel heard and recognized by a small business. Personalizing your online presence allows you to create that important connection to your customer base and give power to your flywheel. But how do you go about personalizing a marketing journey when there are so many potential paths someone could take? Let’s learn some tactics.
4 Marketing Personalization Tips
Laying the foundation for your online presence and personalizing your marketing for today’s dynamic customer journey is an important step for remaining relevant, increasing your reach, and getting more customers. When your messages are tailored for individuals and reach a customer on a personal level, you are able to leverage your data for growth.
1. Get More Reviews
One of the best ways you can boost your online presence is by getting more reviews for your small business on Google and other review platforms like Yelp. Far too often small businesses get caught up in getting 5-star reviews and forget to focus on bringing in the numbers.
Reviews are not all about the star rating. A 4-star review that has detailed descriptions about what your products and services are and how the customer enjoyed them can be much more valuable than a blank 5-star review that doesn’t have any details. Blank reviews can sometimes be thought of as spam, so encouraging your customers to leave detailed reviews no matter the star rating is a great tactic.
It’s also important to respond to each and every review you receive. Replying to a positive review allows you to show your appreciation to the customer. One mistake that small businesses often make is ignoring poor reviews. However, that can appear as though you are ignoring the problem. Replying to a negative review with an apology or a resolution allows new people considering your business to see how much you care.
Reviews are examined closely by potential customers, and are a major factor in deciding which business to go to. If you can garner more reviews than your competitors, you can increase your chances of getting new customers to add to your flywheel.
2. Be Active on Social Media
Your social media profiles are another area where you can significantly build up your online presence. Social media gives you the opportunity to interact with customers one on one and create deeply personal interactions that improve the quality of the customer journey and encourage new customers to try out your business.
Engaging in activities like Q & A and polls with your customer base allows you to start engagements and begin to gather important data with your audiences. Not only do you understand more about your customers, but you are also pushing your own brand and allowing your audiences to see that you are an active participant on social media.
Another way to use social media to personalize the customer journey is to start conversations with your followers. By reaching out to them rather than waiting for a message, you can jump-start important conversations and begin to really personalize the interactions you have with customers. That goes a long way in building trust and credibility with your audiences.
You can also use your social media accounts as a platform for sharing content that is relevant and helpful to your customers. If you can begin to build a reputation as a thought leader in your industry, you can build authority in your brand and help guide your potential customers through the flywheel.
3. Get Your Information Squared Away
The information you have online about your business needs to be accurate and correct at all times. Think about it, have you ever looked up a business’s hours to see that online they said they were open but in person, the office had already closed? It can be an incredibly frustrating experience that drives away potential business.
Your NAP data needs to be consistently displayed everywhere. After all, it’s hard to build trust with your customers if they can’t reach you or contact you due to outdated information on your online profiles. Your online presence depends on having the right information available as needed to customers. It also needs to easily be found online, so having your business information listed in multiple places is key.
A Google Business Profile is the number one way that customers find out information about your business services, hours, and contact information. You’ll also want that same information displayed on other business directories online and on your website. Keeping these details updated to be completely accurate is an important part of personalizing the customer journey.
4. Be Innovative with How You Communicate
Communication with your customers is key to success in today’s business world. A small business needs to be in constant contact with your customers in order to nurture the relationship and encourage its customers to leave reviews, return for more sales, and tell others about how great you are.
Email to this day remains one of the most effective ways out there to reach your customers. Emails have great open rates and are able to get into the inboxes of many customers at once so that you can send out mass messages or create workflows that automatically send emails after certain actions are taken, like an order is placed or a review is left.
While email is still effective, it’s not the preferred way of communication for most customers. Customers prefer to deal with businesses through text or chat methods of communication. Investing in SMS text messaging software is a great way to encourage more business and connect quickly with customers.
Your chatbots are another essential part of your communication with customers. A chatbot should be able to reply with personal, relevant messages that guide your customers through the flywheel and help them take the next step in their journey. Creating detailed workflows and chat message trees allows you to help make the customer journey a breeze and create a better experience for your customers.
Attend a Surefire Local Marketing Platform Demo
Surefire Local is an all-in-one marketing platform that allows you to connect with customers, personalize the customer journey, and build up your online presence all in a single database. You can accomplish your marketing goals without ever needing to log into different platforms or accounts. Instead, our platform gives you a full picture of your marketing from any device.
To learn more about what Surefire Local can do for your small business, request a demo and discover how we can help your business grow.
