Keeping customers actively buying products and services is a key component of every marketing and service strategy. The longer people remain in the buying funnel, the greater their lifetime value and contribution to corporate profitability. People can easily shift loyalties with a click of a button in our global marketplace. This makes it much harder to keep them actively engaged and committed to your business.

Companies with storefront are better equipped to keep customers because they have the opportunity to build face-to-face relationships. Ask anyone who is extremely loyal to a brand why they love it so and invariably you’ll receive a response similar to these: “The products/service is amazing.” or “Ben always takes good care of me.”

When people have good relationships with individuals within an organization, they are more loyal.

Amazing products and services contribute to loyalty but there is always another option available. If not today, rest assured that someone is working on one to replace your best sellers. The only way to guarantee a loyal customer base is to create unbreakable bonds. This is done one person at a time.

Pure play direct marketing and ecommerce companies are at a disadvantage when competing with bricks and mortar organizations. Creating bonds with individuals is much harder when transactions are handled electronically. Social media changes the playing field because it provides a venue for the one-to-one connections that create unbreakable bonds.

Capitalizing on this opportunity requires a strategic plan that includes connecting with customers across channels. The plan must include building a community of customers. Companies are investing too much money in the hopes of launching viral campaigns. Connecting with customers delivers a better return on investment. To get started, replace passive links to social media networks with aggressive campaigns that invite customers to join your communities and reward them for doing so.

Connecting with customers takes more effort and time to build your communities than typical social media acquisition strategies.

The rewards are greater too. When customers are the foundation of your community, they help you answer questions, introduce new people to your business, and respond better to your promotions. People who are actively participating in brand communities have longer customer lifespans and higher lifetime values. And, one more thing…they look forward to your marketing messages instead of complaining about them.

Creating a successful integrated marketing strategy is a necessity in our multichannel marketplace. Silo management of marketing channels wastes resources and reduces results. The days are gone where dominating one or two channels was enough to grab market share. Capturing people’s attention requires multi-faceted campaigns that reach them wherever they happen to land.

Understanding your company’s customer and prospect expectations is a necessity when choosing channels and platforms. What works for your competitors may fail your business. You have to know what your target market expects from your organization.

If you haven’t seen much success from your social media participation, it could be that your expectations and activity are misguided. The rules of engagement defined by early adopters rarely deliver measureable results beyond fan and follower acquisition. There are four areas where social media works. In addition to providing opportunities, they provide the reasons companies need to participate.

1. Customer RetentionThe benefits of keeping customers are well known. Social media helps make it happen by offering the opportunity to create one-to-one relationships. Showing people that you value them helps keep them loyal.
2. Customer AcquisitionA community filled with happy customers attracts prospects. As noted in Social Casual vs. Direct Qualified Prospects, social media doesn’t work very well as a stand-alone prospecting tool. But when you use it for customer retention and service, acquisition is a secondary benefit.
3. Customer ServiceProviding quality service requires companies to answer questions before they are asked. When this is done well, service calls are reduced and marketing is easier. Use social media to share “how to”, “what happens when”, and troubleshooting information.
4. SEOUsing good keywords and links in social media posts improves search results. Social search often receives higher page rankings than traditional sources. When posting updates use keywords and links so that people find your business even when they don’t participate in social media.

Direct sales is missing from this list because revenue generated from social media is a secondary benefit for most companies. There are rare occasions where corporate income is directly attributable to social activity but this is an exception. If it happens, celebrate. Don’t expect it to be sustainable. Use social media as a relationship building tool so you can reduce service costs and improve loyalty. Sales and profitability will follow.

A few months ago someone abandoned a pregnant cat close to our farm. She found her way to our barn. No one noticed her until the litter of six kittens had matured enough to wander around searching for food. In my perfect world, cats would never be around me. Their dander stimulates every allergic reaction possible. My eyes water and itch. My nose clogs. Breathing becomes a challenge.

We don’t live in a perfect world. My children love cats. When the kittens were discovered, I tried to keep the children away from the barn. In theory, we would find homes for the barn invaders without having to deal with the drama of “Please Mom, we promise to take care of them and they will never be around you.” This theory was flawed because the kittens refused to cooperate and stay in the barn. The lobbying began as soon as the aliens were discovered.

Living on a farm involves a lot of birthing and dying. It’s an expected part of the circle of life. Invaluable lessons are learned from the experience. Sometimes there are surprises (like kittens magically appearing), but most things are predictable. There is a cycle where life starts, produces, and then moves on. Birth and death are not cause and effect. The new life that comes is an addition, not a replacement.

When reading commentary announcing the death of a marketing tactic, I often wonder why people think that the addition of anything new means the loss of something else. Marketing is evolving. New tactics, channels, and platforms are appearing at record speeds. It is an exciting time to be a marketer because we have so many tools for connecting with our customers at our fingertips. Great marketing minds evaluate the options and test to find the best results. They don’t abandon proven tactics for the shiny new toy.

Sometimes the addition of new marketing opportunities improves the results from traditional tactics. The shift to electronic media can lead to increased responses from printed mailings. When people receive less mail, your message is more visible. And, more visibility from your target market generates more sales.

Every marketer has one objective – to find the best way to deliver the message to customers and prospects. There are more opportunities today to connect with people than ever before. The best marketers use every tool, tactic, platform, and channel available to create lifelong relationships. They see new additions as opportunities, not replacements. Isn’t it time we stopped prematurely announcing the death of marketing tactics and started focusing on optimizing results?

PS: For anyone curious about the outcome of kittygate, homes were found for the mom and all of the kittens except two. I gave in to the argument that they would be barn cats and take care of the mice. Fat chance they’ll ever catch a mouse because they are fed twice daily. I’ll take solace in the fact that they are living in the barn instead of my house.

The purpose of business is to create and serve customers for a profit. This is easy to forget in a world brimming with new methods for delivering marketing and service messages. When the focus of management shifts from acquiring, serving, and retaining customers to conversations, things start declining. Acquiring views, fans, followers, and mentions becomes top priority, replacing proven growth and profitability strategies.

Creating a successful marketing strategy requires the blending of the best of every channel. The finished product has to meet customer expectations and match the corporate culture. Wildly successful campaigns for one brand will fail another because each company has a unique personality.

Traditional and social marketing have been in two distinct camps as if they are adversaries. This is the equivalent of a civil war within the organization. It doesn’t matter who fired the first shot or the last. The channels are different. They complement each other. When marketing campaigns are designed to include the best of both camps, they deliver a one-two punch that converts shoppers into buyers.

Content created for the social platforms is designed to stimulate conversation that converts instead of chasing meaningless metrics. The online chatter changes from:

“Did you see that video company XYZ did? Wasn’t it hilarious? I laughed until I cried!”

Or:

“Can you believe what that company posted? Talk about controversy!”

To:

“Did you see that video where they showed how to use product ABC? How cool is that? I think I need one of those!”

And:

“I read that you could use product ABC to solve the problem we have. Who knew it would do that?”

The content that delivers conversions is always focused on using the company’s products and services to solve people’s problems. It can be done with humor or drama. Orabrush uses humor with the dirty tongue videos that have generated tons of views, inspired fan videos, and generated sales for the company. Blendtec’s “Will it Blend” series uses drama to showcase the power of the company’s blenders. When the product is the star, conversations lead to conversions. How can you make your products and/or services the star of your social platforms and generate conversions? Here are some questions to get the creative juices flowing:

• What problems can we solve? Featuring new solutions to existing problems attracts prospects and retains customers.
• How many different ways can our products be used? (Or not?) Showcasing the ways your products work (or don’t) can provide an interesting twist on commodity items.
• What is a unique way that we could feature our products? Providing a different perspective makes content interesting and worth sharing.
• Why do people buy from us? Knowing the reasons people buy and what moves them from shopper to customer helps define the way information is presented.

When creating content designed to generate conversations that convert, always remember to add a call to action. Telling people what to do next moves them along the purchase path.

There is a certain safety in following the rules. When a marketing path has been tested, there are few surprises or unexpected challenges. Mediocre entrepreneurs can create successful companies by following the steps of the innovators who have gone ahead. Odds are that the copycat businesses won’t last more than a few decades without a significant management change, but they will provide income for the founders until the industry declines or something new comes along.

When I joined the direct marketing industry ages ago, there were a couple of dozen catalogs that were so similar it was impossible to identify the brand without reading the name. There were slight variations in the items, but the look, feel, and product lines were eerily alike. One of the owners explained the copycat philosophy to me. She said that the company that had originated the look did all of the heavy lifting with testing new markets and products. The copycats had higher profit margins because they didn’t invest in testing or new strategies.

The benefits gained by following the leader didn’t last. All of the copycat catalogs died an untimely death. The companies that survived the peaks and valleys of the economy were the ones who invested in quality analytics so they knew what worked with their customer base. They tested different strategies, tactics, and products. Marketing rules established by others were viewed as guidelines to be tested, not hard facts because every corporate culture is different.

Learning from others worked because the guidelines were based on sound business strategy. They had been tested by varying elements to see what works best. Marketing pioneers readily shared their discoveries with new marketers who, in turn, continued testing and improving results. The information tested and shared ultimately evolved into best practices.

Things change.

In the last few years, best practices based on controlled tests have morphed into rules formed by personal preferences. The catalyst for this change was the introduction of social media and the vision of a marketplace controlled by the people. The new age marketers’ imagined a world where people find businesses to fill their needs instead of one where companies seek customers.

The combination of tough economic conditions and the new marketing channel promising untold riches with minimal effort created a perfect environment for people willing to pillage the online community. Individuals facing record long-term unemployment searching for ways to provide for their family and executives desperately seeking to escape a sea of red ink were easy prey. Self-appointed experts commanded attention with declarations of data cooked up in imaginary labs. Testing of cause and effect required too much time and effort. It was much easier to imagine something and declare it as fact.

Rules of engagement were created and enforced by the new age marketers. In their alternative universe, traditional marketing was taboo. Anyone daring to promote their business or products via social media risked being ostracized on public forums. Requiring a return on investment indicated stodgy old school management destined to follow the dinosaurs into extinction. The new marketing rules included:

• Promote others twelve times to every one promotion for your business.
• Do not use automated direct messaging on Twitter.
• Leave comments on other people’s blogs to increase traffic to your site.
• Do not use social platforms to share promotional messages.
• Give to get.
• Be completely transparent in everything you do.
• Do as we say not as we do. (This one was unspoken. The rule makers didn’t follow any of the rules they created.)

Few dared to publicly challenge the new leaders. The new media was, well, NEW. And, different. And, people were already hurting and afraid of making another mistake. Following the leaders seemed safe and $397 for a guided tour of the new marketing channel seemed reasonable in an unreasonable world.

Did it really matter that the tour guides had little or no business experience? Or, that they aggressively promoted each other with affiliate links while pretending that they were simply sharing good sources? Or, that the how-to information they were sharing was based on personal opinion and theory instead of tested and proven tactics? Not much because it was desperate times filled with desperate people. When you are drowning even grasping a straw provides hope.

Time passes and with time comes experience.

When social media was new, no one really knew how it would evolve. The newness is gone, but there are still a lot of unknowns. It’s a shame that the people who stepped up in the leadership roles spent their time telling people to “be awesome” instead of testing different strategies to find best practices. It’s equally shameful that people followed them blindly down a dead-end path.

Fortunately, not everyone drank the social media Kool-Aid. People that didn’t get caught in the drama invested their time in testing different things to see what worked or didn’t. Real companies are making the social channel work as part of an integrated marketing strategy that includes other channels. There are a variety of successful strategies that move people from social activity into the buying cycle. Instead of trying to be awesome, successful marketing teams work to make real connections with customers and prospects. They may not have a zillion followers or fans, but what they have is much better. They have a proven strategy for using social media to generate revenue.

Testing different strategies to establish marketing rules is the best way to create sustainable growth for your company. Doing this requires a complete understanding of your customers, their behavior, preferences, and how everything works together to create a profitable strategy. Start with your data, add questions, and test everything to find proven cause and effect. It takes time and effort but the benefits are worth the investment. And, don’t listen to people who are selling new age marketing without questioning their experience, information sources, and testing strategy. The same people who promised that “it was all about the conversation” are now talking about search engine optimization, direct marketing, benchmarks, analytics, and return on investment. Being able to talk a good game doesn’t make you a player.