Using Customer Experience as Your Strongest Marketing Tool

Customer experience has grown to be of vital importance for business success. It’s no longer just about the quality or the quantity of products you develop. If your customers aren’t satisfied for any reason, they will simply abandon your business and move on.

Now, the main reason for this is the oversaturation of the online market. Consumer expectations grew as they found out they can get better service. If they can’t get it from you, then they can certainly get it from someone else. There’s no shortage of options these days, that’s for sure.

Therefore, instead of thinking about how to compete with other businesses, try focusing on improving customer satisfaction and use their experience as your most powerful marketing tool. With that in mind, here are a few ways to use customer experience in your marketing.

Research your target audience

The best way to start with improving customer satisfaction is to research your target audience and learn as much as you can about them. This doesn’t mean you’ll pinpoint exactly what they want, but it’s a good start. Once things are in motion, you can improve as you go.

Therefore, research your audience’s demographics, preferences, shopping behavior, expectations, needs, and demands. This will help you create consumer personas or buyer personas, if you will.

These personas give you insight into the means you can leverage to communicate with customers and tailor both your messages and your products to their needs.

In other words, you’re basically shifting all the business operations towards a more consumer-centric approach. Needless to say, consumers prefer businesses that are making an effort to meet their needs and expectations.

Ask for feedback

As mentioned before, research only won’t allow you to determine exactly what consumers want or expect from your business. For you to do that, you’ll have to ask customers directly. A lot of businesses hesitate to do this, which is a huge mistake. Customers will be glad that you asked and they’ll appreciate your business more for it.

Therefore, there are various ways you can collect customer feedback. For example, you can use online surveys, polls and questionnaires. Moreover, you can start an entire discussion on your social media platforms. Last but not least, you canopt for one of the hosted VoIP service providers and collect data by communicating with customers on a daily basis.

Asking for feedback is not a sign of weakness in the business world. As a matter of fact, it can be a major competitive advantage. By getting feedback from customers, you can make changes exactly the way they want or expect. This will drastically improve their experience and boost their satisfaction.

Improve customer experience

Now that you’ve gained valuable feedback, it’s time to make some improvements. You can start with something simple yet significant, such as personalizing customer experience, for instance. You can personalize messages, offers, marketing strategies and many more.

This will build customer satisfaction over time, and customers will certainly appreciate it. Aside from personalization, you can improve other aspects of your business to tailor to customer needs. Here are a few examples:

  • Improve website browsing experience
  • Provide customers with useful and relevant content
  • Solve a problem and address their pain-points
  • Provide seamless customer service and support
  • Communicate with customers through various channels
  • Reward customers
  • Include a self-service feature

The more you improve upon customer feedback, the happier your customers will be. After a while, you’ll have a satisfied consumer base, and you can use their experience as your strongest marketing tool.

Promote customer experience

Customer satisfaction and loyalty can greatly benefit your business in more ways than one. For starters, satisfied customers will do their own promoting, even if you don’t ask them to.

They will recommend your business to their friends and family, which is an excellent example of word-of-mouth-marketing. However, you can always encourage your customers to do so if you are in a hurry. Here are a few examples of how you can promote customer experience in your marketing:

  • Provide incentives for referrals
  • Ask customers to write reviews
  • Leverage positive reviews in your marketing efforts
  • Encourage word-of-mouth promotions

Customer testimonials will encourage more people to explore your offers, mainly because consumers trust other consumers more than they trust your marketing.

Some of your customers may even become brand ambassadors. For example, 91% of consumers online read reviews, and 84% of them trust those reviews as much as they’d trust recommendations from their friends or family members.

Customer experience is more relevant now than ever before. Consumers want from businesses to meet their needs and expectations, and if one won’t do it, some other business definitely will. That’s why you can no longer succeed on product quality alone. Today, customer experience is both a recipe for success and your most powerful marketing tool.

About: Dan Radak

