Peter Symonds
By Peter Symonds
Successful marketing is a process and not a ‘one off’.
Just because someone has been exposed to your brand doesn’t guarantee they’re going to become (or remain) a loyal customer. Great marketing is about building and nurturing a relationship with your target audience – through repeated exposure and interaction.
With different demographics receiving messages through different channels, it’s essential that your brand takes a multi-channel approach to building and nurturing customer relationships.
If the success of the world’s biggest brands has taught us anything, it’s that the more channels you market through, the more successful your brand exposure campaign will be – allowing you to reach a wider audience and drive your brand message from all angles into the deepest corners of your potential customer pool.
Offline
While digital marketing has dominated discussion over the last decade, it’s essential to remember the advantages of offline marketing. Events, for example, offer unparalleled customer engagement levels – not to mention a high ROI when done correctly. Events allow you to cut out the middle-man and interact directly with your customers, getting to know them on a personal level — making event marketing an invaluable approach.
In event marketing, professionally designed and cohesively branded exhibition standsand display materials can help set the scene and make your brand stand out. This is especially important if you’re attending trade shows or exhibitions where competition for attention is fierce.
Photo credit: Daniel Iverson
Even global household names like Nescafe invest in pop-up events, offering promotions and free samples in order to maintain their presence and introduce new products to the market. Even though most everyone in the UK is already familiar with brands such as Nescafe through mass advertising, the brand still finds it worthwhile invest in event marketing and other channels.
Online
Digital marketing includes a number of channels to build and enhance brand exposure. The options for online marketing are virtually limitless with email, multiple social media networks, content marketing, and targeted web-advertising. The majority of big brands have a broad presence across the web – penetrating every social network, website and inbox they can in order to expose their offering on the World Wide Web.
It’s a common misconception that this kind of broad online exposure is only achievable through an enormous marketing budget. In fact, even fledgling brands can make a splash with a well-conceived online campaign.
On the vast majority of social networks, business pages and accounts are free to set up and use – only requiring time and an informed approach to grow and nurture. There are also numerous email marketing platforms, such as MailChimp, which provide free accounts for basic use. Owned media such as company web pages, newsrooms, and blogs that are optimized for search engines can produce significant results.
The true beauty of online marketing is its measurability – providing detailed and accurate reports on the success of your campaign. Whether it’s open rates on an email shot or retweets and new follows on a Twitter campaign, success can be measured at the click of a button – allowing you to tweak your efforts along the way and ensure you maximise your ROI.
Tools like CyberAlert also allow you to effectively and efficiently monitor the web, in real time, checking mentions of your brand online and allowing you to jump on opportunities as they arise.
While word of mouth recommendations are easily the most powerful asset to any brand, they are difficult to create artificially. They come about based on the brand delivering excellent quality, service and value to customers – essentially letting the product speak for itself.
Social media, however, is often seen as the next best thing to word of mouth – and this is something you can actively manage to nurture your customer relationships. Social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook allow you to create a brand voice or personality through which you interact with customers and other organisations.
Positive ‘social signals’ such as shares, comments and likes can also work in your favour – acting as a virtual ‘endorsement’ to the legitimacy of your brand and benefits of your products or services. Social media also provides the perfect platform to keep the conversation going – which is one of the main goals of a successful customer relationship.
Whether it’s following up an event by chatting with attendees through a dedicated hashtag or building a mailing list and keeping in touch via email, remaining current in the customer’s mind is essential for success.
That requires multiple customer touches thorough multiple marketing channels.
Bottom Line: Developing a successful brand with an engaged customer base is an ongoing process – as evidenced by the world’s biggest brands, who continue to invest in marketing despite being household names. A multi-channel approach is essential in ensuring the widest reach to the full cross-section of your customers, translating to greater brand exposure. It’s paramount that your business dedicates sufficient ongoing resource into developing and nurturing customer relationships – which, in turn, will lead to continued and increased sales.
