How to Connect with Customers in the Age of Assistance

We’re living in the age of assistance. What does that mean for marketers?

Marketing tips in the age of assistance
Customers have more options than ever before today, thanks to technology. Therefore, each buyer’s journey is unique and customers are looking for valuable content to educate themselves before making a purchase.

“Focus on the user and all else will follow.”

Your marketing strategy needs to be focused on your customer or prospect. Where do they look for information? How do they like to shop? How do they like to interact with brands?

If people need help, they usually start with Google. (While the search giant reaches 93% of US consumers, note that your customer base or target audience may use Bing or another search engine. It’s important to know where your customers go.) We’re busy, distracted and always on the go, so people are searching on mobile, including reviews, for information to make decisions in the moment.

Consider this example… Jon is working at home when he hears water running. The problem is that he’s not running any water. After heading upstairs, he realizes that his toilet is overflowing. He lives in an older home, so there’s no shut-off for the toilet; he needs to turn off his water at the main shut-off. Quickly, he Googles shut off water main and finds a YouTube video showing him how to locate his main water valve and shut it off. Jon follows the directions and shuts off his water before suffering any damage. Who does he call to fix the toilet? The local plumbing company who provided the video, of course.

Note that this local company gave Jon the information he needed first. He didn’t have to dig through their website or sit through a sales pitch beforehand. Educating consumers before you ask for a purchase or deliver a call-to-action (CTA) drives business.


Meet People in the Moment

People are living in the moment today, so they rarely plan in advance. Jon probably should have known where his main water shut-off valve was, but he had recently moved in and hadn’t gotten around to finding it yet. He’s not alone.

Mobile searches for today, tomorrow or now are up 900%. Our phones are never out of reach, so it’s always convenient to find the information we need—in a traffic jam, at the doctor’s office or at your kid’s ballet recital.

How can you meet your customers or prospects in the moment?

Start where they start: Google yourself.

Google yourself, your category and your business. Do you like what you see?


Google yourself, your category and your business (in incognito mode, if you prefer). Do you like what you see? Are you providing valuable content to help your customers and prospects educate themselves and move along the buyer’s journey? Or are you only asking for the buy? Be a part of the conversation along the entire journey, so consumers can get to know your company and form an emotional connection with you. If you just show up at the end when consumers are ready to buy, they’re likely to go with another company who has been there all along the way.

While we’re on this subject, does your business have a Google My Business listing? If not, set one up. This free resource helps you connect with customers across Google Search and Maps, boosting your SEO efforts. Remember to include a phone number too. It allows people to quickly call you, which could be the difference between you getting an opportunity or your competitor.

While Google My Business is an important starting point, don’t stop there. Tracking how your customers first found you is important, but so is measuring every moment that matters to your business. Each buyer’s journey is unique today, so you need to track every interaction with your customer and map out their individual customer journey.

Your customer may have found your company through Google, but then she visited your website, read a few blog articles to learn more about a subject that interested her and connected with you on your Facebook Page. After those steps, she contacted you to discuss a project. If she hadn’t made all of those steps, she may not have ever contacted you to do business. That’s why it’s so important to measure every interaction or touch point with your customers, so you understand how they want to be communicated with and helped along their unique buyer’s journey.


Make an Emotional Connection

People are looking for more from brands and businesses today. They don’t want to just buy stuff; they want to support companies who have similar values to theirs and are good corporate citizens.

Tell your brand’s story: how you got started, why you’re in business and the faces behind the brand name. Talk about your charitable efforts and community involvement, so customers can see your values in action. They want to know where their hard-earned dollars are going and what kind of company they’re supporting. Tell your founder’s story and shine the spotlight on your employees with behind-the-scenes content, including how your product is made, a day in the life or following employees outside the office.

Creating an emotional connection with your audience is crucial to your marketing and sales efforts.


While customers want to get to know your business or brand, they also want to be entertained. Most people make decisions emotionally and then look for rational reasons to support their decisions—especially when we’re making so many decisions today in the moment.

So, your content needs to educate, entertain and connect with your customer on an emotional level. In fact, advertising campaigns are twice as likely to perform well if they contain emotional content instead of rational content. Buyers consuming your content want to feel a connection with your brand—not think about how your brand will help them.

In 2019, we average a 3-second attention span online, so you need to grab a viewer’s attention quickly. Create joy or surprise right away to keep viewers engaged with your content. Consumers get distracted every 10 minutes, on average, and take three minutes to refocus, so you’ll need to keep them engaged the entire time they’re consuming your content. If you lose them, they may jump to something else and never come back.

3 Key Principles in the Age of Assistance

  1. Be There—Connect with the right people during key moments of intent.
  2. Be Valuable—Give consumers the information they need where they are.
  3. Be Quick—Automatically act on intent. Consumers expect quick responses today!

As marketing professionals, how can you deliver on these three key principles?

  1. Know Your Audience—Go beyond demographics to target consumers effectively. Detailed buyer personas are important!
  2. Know Your Brand’s Story—Tell your story, so your audience can understand your values and connect with your business on an emotional level.
  3. Conceptualize the Space—Understand the marketing domains your customers are operating in so well that you know the best ways to connect and communicate with them in those areas.
  4. Self-Educate—Marketing knowledge is constantly updating today, so you need to always be learning.

Understanding your customers (beyond simple demographics) is so important today, because you need to meet them where they are when they need you. What data do you have on your customers (that you’re protecting)? How can you leverage that data to better serve them (not to sell to them)?

Knowing how your customers first heard of you is no longer enough. Go beyond the first click to measure every interaction or touch point with your buyer. It will change your understanding of how each customer wants to be communicated with and helped along the way.

Follow your customers across social media platforms (however they use them) to email and messaging services to brick and mortar locations. We’re living in the age of assistance where micro-moments and individual interactions matter for your business. How are you making the most of every single one?

Questions? Comments? Leave your feedback We’d love to hear your thoughts!

Are you struggling to connect with your customers in the age of assistance? Let’s discuss how we can help you with your marketing efforts!

Let’s connect,










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Why Influencer Engagement is Important in Digital Marketing

Editor’s Note: We’re excited to welcome Tanya Sen as a contributor to the CCC blog! Enjoy her article below on the importance of influencer engagement in your digital marketing strategy, and learn more about her at the end of the article. If you’d like help with your digital marketing strategy, contact us so we can discuss your needs. Thanks for your support all year long, and have a happy, healthy and prosperous 2018!

social media on a smartphone

To be successful, companies and businesses have to constantly innovate and come up with marketing strategies that will deliver. These days no marketing plan is complete without a digital marketing strategy. The impact of digital marketing in generating brand awareness is tremendous, especially if you can get the right people talking about your brand.

These people are called influencers, and their recommendations and reviews carry a lot of weight with their audience. Influencers are any individual or group who can sway the sentiments of their audience in a certain direction regarding a person, brand, idea, or business.

Here are few ways in which an influencer will be able to boost your digital marketing efforts.

  1. Influencers enable you to reach out to a wide and loyal audience

The biggest advantage of communicating through an influencer is that you reach out to a wide audience. More importantly, this audience follows the content that the influencer puts out. So, if an influencer mentions your brand name, talks about it or retweets or shares your posts, they are amplifying your brand communication.

  1. Influencers help you to build a good network

Influencers help you to build a good network in multiple ways. First, whenever an influencer sends out any content, it generates a lot of conversation and discussion among their followers, which can lead to more brand-building. Not just that, they share or retweet these posts which means that your audience multiplies, increasing your visibility.

Second, through these conversations you can also identify other influential people. They can in turn influence their own audience’s opinion of your brand, resulting in a snowball effect and reaching a wider audience.

  1. Influencers deliver engaging content

In a survey conducted by Vocus and Brian Solis, 62% of the respondents said that they follow an influencer because of the content they create. Quality content is crucial to any marketing campaign. When you collaborate with influencers, they can create unique content to spread the message about your brand or product. And the best part is the audience is much more likely to engage with this content!

  1.  Influencers have established credibility with their audience

Another important factor that contributes to the large following of influencers is credibility. The expertise these individuals hold in a particular field combined with the good relations they maintain with their audience makes them reliable to people. Their opinion of your brand will most likely become the general opinion among their audience. A positive word from an influencer can do wonders for your brand.

  1.   Influencers are up to date with the latest trends and insights in their fields

Influencers are usually aware of the latest trends of the evolving social media platforms. They tend to be among the first to try these new trends, to discover new platforms to reach and engage with their audience. Through them, you too can get acquainted with such new ideas and employ them to interest prospective customers.


Author bio

Tanya Sen, Freelance Blogger

Tanya Sen

Tanya Sen quit her well-paying job to follow her dreams and become a writer. She is now creating and managing digital content to build relationships for organizations and individuals. Tanya is an avid traveler, having visited more than 40 countries. She loves to cook and try different cuisines. She now lives in Goa, India.

How to Increase Sales Using Social Media

CCC is excited to welcome Lisa Austin and to the blog! Learn more about both at the conclusion of this guest post.

Learn how you can better market your ecommerce business through Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest. These 5 simple tips will teach you how to increase sales using social media.

The Power of Social Media

Cherilyn and I were next door neighbors ten years ago. Since that time, we have both moved–she moved to a different state and I moved to a different city. Despite the distance of two hundred and forty miles between us, I know that Cherilyn recently started her own online business selling beauty products.

How do I know? She announced it to me and all of her other friends on Facebook. In addition, I know when she’s having specials on certain products or running promotions. And it has all been done without a cent of her money being spent on marketing.

What’s the secret? The secret is social media. Viewers of social media know you and trust you because you have a relationship. According to DEI Worldwide, 70% of consumers use social media as often as they use firm websites to gather information about products. In addition, 60-70% of people believe that recommendations from other people online are “valuable, credible, and honest.”

Consumers Online

81% of the developed world now has internet access. Essentially that means that of the countries with expendable income, 81% can be reached from anywhere in the world. Global accessibility has never been greater than it is at this time. But with that accessibility also comes an overload of information and products.

Social media can help shoppers sort through it all. Social media, such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, allows business owners to build relationships with their prospects, as well as use existing relationships to turn friends into customers.

Think about how many adults use social media while at work–just to get a mental break from their jobs. They may be on a coffee break, scrolling through their Instagram feed, when they see your business’s post. With every social media post your business makes, you’re reaching prospects during a time or place that television, radio, and print ads often cannot.

A Boost to Businesses

When a viewer sees a post, it can be almost like magic. According to Forbes contributor Jayson DeMers, “studies have shown that social media has a 100% higher lead-to-close rate than outbound marketing.” And an IDC study released in 2014, found that buyers that use social media have 84% larger budgets than buyers that don’t. That’s a powerful formula!

Most of the developed world has internet + social media users have larger budgets + 100% higher closing rate = success!

Social media can bring you more leads and more sales without investing a fortune in marketing. However, social media marketing often falls flat. So I’ve gathered five tips to help you successfully connect with your customers.

5 Tips to Increase Sales Using Social Media:

  1. Post Often – By spending at least six hours per week, 66% of marketers saw a benefit from social media in lead generation.
  2. Use Images – Place an image alongside your text on Facebook. Posts with images have 2.3 times more engagement than stand-alone text.
  3. Learn to Pin – Pinners spend 50% more on purchases through the social media channel than users of other social media platforms, yet only 40% of marketers use it.
  4. Photograph People – When posting on Instagram, use photos of people. Studies show that photos with faces get 38% more likes than those without. So place your products with a person for a more positive response.
  5. Make a Video – Close to half of all internet users look for product related videos before visiting a store. Even though you may not have a brick and mortar storefront, put this statistic to work for you. Create simple videos about the products or services you sell and place them on your website as well as Youtube. Shoppers who view a video are almost twice as likely to make a purchase than shoppers who did not view a video.

(Thanks Hubspot for these great stats!)

So next time you are searching for a way to boost your sales, take a closer look at social media. It’s a great way to build your brand and boost your sales.

This post originally appeared on and has been shared on the CCC blog with permission.

Lisa Austin, My  Lisa Austin


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