Two Marketing ruts to avoid
Posted by admin - 25/01/10 at 09:01:17 pmGenerally, when people think about marketing, they think in terms of tangible extensions of their brand such as their website, a catalog or advertisement. However, one of the most important elements that define your brand are the intangible interactions and experiences people have with your brand. Often that can come in the form of an experience they have using your website or using your product, but for the sake of this post I’m going to assume you already have a great product and a great website. But marketing doesn’t stop there.
It should be fair to say that existing customers have more interactions with your brand than potential customers. Yet, why is it that when we think of marketing (which really is just about managing brand interactions and perception), we so often only think of ways to get new customers?
There are two ruts I’d like to point out that hopefully you can avoid in your marketing strategy:
1. Marketing only to new clients and not marketing to your existing customers
2. Treating potential clients better than existing clients
Now nobody sets out to treat their existing customers poorly or worse than their potential customers, but it’s an easy trap to fall into. I like to think of these two problems as fishing with a hole in your net. You may get a lot of fish to swim in, but they’ll just swim right out before you can eat them. Now hopefully you aren’t planning on eating your customers, but sometimes when companies only focus on new customers, their existing customers can definitely feel like they’ve been swallowed up.
3 Ways to avoid these ruts:
1. The most obvious solution is to literally market to your existing customers. They already believe in your business so chances are they would do more business with you. Often times clients may not even realize you offer an additional service that compliments the one they already purchased from you. Email marketing is great way to stay in front of your existing customers and remind them of other services you offer.
2. Don’t make marketing all about discounts and free stuff. Not only can this often degrade your brand and lower your margins but it can also offend your existing customers. I have personally experienced this with phone and insurance companies who have “new customer rates” that are far better than existing customer renewal rates. To me this seems backwards. We address this issue with of one of our clients that we do a print catalog design for and email marketing for. When a catalog hits the mail and customers start to place orders, we don’t want to follow up with an email offering a discount on something they may of just recently purchased. With this client, we offer a handful of “web only” products and are careful to only offer email discounts when a catalog is getting close to the end of its season.
3. Another big way businesses can fall into the trap of treating new customers better than existing customers and letting those fish swim right out of the net is through their support and service. I can’t tell you how many times I have a seen a company offer both phone & chat support for sales but only offer chat for support. What that tells a customer is that you are willing to do everything you can to get their business but then once you have it you’ll only use part of your resources to keep them happy.
So keep marketing to your customers, keep them happy by offering them the same great support and attention you do your prospects and don’t make it all about new customer discounts just to drive in some new business. Focus a little more on the customer you do have and you may find that you don’t need as much new business as you thought!
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Great post, so true!
Comment by kevin — January 26, 2010 #