Developing a marketing campaign is crucial and plays a decisive role in a company’s growth. It’s the fundamental way for a company to communicate with their market to build their position and acquire customers. A marketing campaign is a step-by-step approach to identify the target market and accordingly to plan unified activities.
In the past, companies followed a traditional strategy and advertising campaigns. As trends are changing, marketers are looking towards more innovative ways that involve customers and build active communities for their product. The best way to achieve this is by creating marketing techniques for outreach and connections with your customers. This strategy has to be flexible accounting for customer preferences and interests.
One of the primary purposes of a marketing campaign is to promote your business and exhibit your brand. Many people search on how to promote a business which is helpful in understanding this concept in detail. In addition to a marketing plan, you need an approach in terms of customer involvement. It is all about inspiring your customers to connect and share their experiences. Here are 7 tips to involve your customers in your marketing strategy.
1. Leverage Your Customer Stories
Stories are a tremendous tool to connect with your customers because they can extract various types of emotions. Success stories from customers directly reflect their viewpoint while contributing social proof of the adequacy of your brand. “Your customers are your best assets to help bring a story to life, humanize your product and build an engaged community,” says Elizabeth Walton, member of the Forbes Communication Council.
There are multiple ways to use this approach better in order to humanize your product. One way is to have a dedicated platform and for that, social media provides you access to millions of potential customers. It is also highly effective if these stories are shared on your company’s website.
The customers who experience satisfaction and are happy with your service can be a tremendous asset to your company. When a customer has a positive story and shares it with others, it increases your brand value. Stories shared with gratitude, great reviews, and courteous words from customers have more worth than other conventional marketing plans.
2. Ask them to Share Your Content
A recommendation is one of the most useful components that lead to higher customer acquisition. Encourage your customers to share your content with their friends and peers. From these recommendations companies often get referrals and additional business. This is of far greater influence than other advertising and marketing ideas.
The value of loyal customers can even be more worthwhile than your top salesperson if you approach and inspire them correctly. The customers who are more than loyal can br outspoken about this and endorse your product; such customers are called “brand evangelists”. They are not only more committed than others but are also willing to share content on your behalf that will attract more people to your product.
To get maximum advantage of this aspect, you should write and share convincing and influential content on your webpage. Writing services provide such kind of assistance in createing valuable content. In addition, you need to make it easy for the customer to share your content by educating them about the right tools and platforms to share your content. Guide them as to how to post on social media, how to sign up, and participate on your website, how to post comments and add reviews to your review pages in order to support your digital marketing.
3. Build them as Your Brand Advocates
One of the most compelling ways to involve customers is inspiring them to be your brand advocates. You have to develop a very friendly and engaging relationship with them and then encourage them into social media marketing. This will help to build your business reputation and product awareness. Often customer’s reviews are just as credible as experts and are imperative to building trust with other potential customers. “Do good work and your clients will advocate on your behalf”, says Charlie Terenzio, member of the Forbes Communication Council.
There is no specific formula for building brand advocates as it’s primarily about developing a great relationship with the customer and providing satisfactory services. They advertise your business because they like the product and believe in your brand. By creating brand advocates proactively, you can reach a broad audience with your message to increase sales through word-of-mouth strategy.
4. Introduce Some Physical Activities
Introducing physical activities and interpersonal marketing campaigns is an exciting way to approach customers. Contests are appealing for customer involvement. You may start a contest asking customers to do something intriguing and entertaining like a task where they take a picture at your store or write a story related to your product and post it on your webpage. Such activities are a means of direct interaction with the customer making them feel more connected to your brand.
5. Thought Leadership Opportunities
Thought leadership is the informed opinion of leaders in their field of expertise. It’s a motivational source that encourages and inspires customers to get involved with the company’s marketing plan. This leadership provides opportunities for customer engagement as it gives marketers and business owners a way for customer acquisition.
As thought leadership can dominate the market, it also influences customers input in marketing strategies of the company. They have a dominant opinion about the industry and have an enormous influence on viewers and customers. When they speak, people listen and admire them. This powerful impact can be of great use to customer’s involvement. They can help your customers share their ideas, raise their queries or get feedback on issues that are then sorted out.
6. Manage Customer Reference Program
In recent years, the role of the customer reference program (CRP) in sales and marketing has evolved impressively. In the past, it was merely about adding an endorsement to the enthusiastic approach. The greater benefits of CRP can be earned by consolidating customer reference systems and working within your overall customer assistance services.
Other than profits, this approach also has a remarkable brand building effect, varying from competitor’s claims and endorsements to your contribution to the customer’s community. As you develop a following of customers, you may gain an advantage by using a formal customer reference program. If you have a practical set of channels and technology, CRP can give you a tremendous end-to-end system that gets results from your marketing campaign.
7. Involve them in Marketing Exchange
A marketing exchange refers to the trade of goods or services between two individuals or organizations. To involve customers, marketing managers attempt to generate a response from a marketing stimulus. Marketing involving customers is a course of action that is built to reach, convert and engage the target audience.
Marketing exchange strategy requires a partnership that benefits both sides. When customers are involved, it facilitates the exchange of a given commodity for goods, services, and delivering maximum value to the product. Customer involvement is listening to your customers; and in exchange, they will become your brand ambassadors.
The Bottom Line
A successful marketing campaign follows a theme and includes customer’s interaction to it; this is regardless of whether they have a B2b or a B2C module. Often companies shift their B2B module and approach a B2C module. Learn to switch from B2B to B2C is an informative article discussing essential steps to make this transaction smooth. If you are determined to support your clients or customers, they will become your best marketing resource.
Start evaluating your current marketing approaches. Are they successful? If not, consider creative ways to include your customers in the marketing campaigns. Once you start practicing this approach, it will offer new ways to look at marketing and customer engagement. A strong customer involvement strategy will encourage your brand growth and loyalty.
