The key to marketing success for retailers is to create organic, sustainable growth. What this requires is a change in focus from unmeasurable promotions and activities to new approaches that connect with customers. Your marketing plan should entail the creation of an online customer community that can market and sell for you.
Encouraging Advocates
Every retailer has a core group of customers who love their products and services. Their passion and enthusiasm makes them the perfect advocates for your store. As an advocate, they can do so much more for you than give glowing reviews. They act as a two-way resource, promoting your products and services and giving you valuable feedback. It’s a higher level of engagement and meaningful insight. And, because of their personal experience, they can be a trusted source for prospective customers. The hard part is finding a way to get them involved.
4 Steps to Start Your Community
Building a community embraces the relationships you have with your customers, while encouraging others to see the difference you make in their lives. For today’s consumers, making a difference is what matters. And your advocates become the foundation of your customer community. This takes time, but it’s worth it. Here are 5 simple steps you can make to create a community of customers that will become your biggest fans.
1. Develop a Community Platform
Your platform comes from your mission and should support your business objectives and streamline the sales process. For example, a mattress store has a mission to give their customers the best option for a restful night. One of many platforms could be providing as much information on how their customers can get a full night of rest. The intent is to provide your customers with some credible, trustworthy, and pertinent research they are looking for.
2. Build It
An online customer community is more than a page on your website. It’s a place where your advocates discuss their experiences—a forum with information and interactivity. Fortunately, social media has provided the architecture-for-connection, so all you’ll need to do is claim your pages and find your hashtags. Then, you can begin populating those pages with pictures and content supporting your platform.
3. Content
You may know some experts or where to find more research-based information about your platform, so utilize these resources. The community will respond better if they have a mixture of information that can make a difference in their lives. You’ll also need to have a content strategy filled with topics and a calendar that organizes all of the activities.
4. Sustain It
The best way to sustain a forum is to treat it like an ongoing conversation. And, to have a great conversation, you need to respond to drive the conversation and provide positive, helpful responses. This is also an area where rewards work very well. Rewards nurture activity and gather more information about your customers. You do need to be active in this, but not all the time.
At first, it may seem like a lot of work, and there are a lot of action items, but you need to redirect some of your marketing activities away from the more traditional avenues. The easiest way to do this is look at each activity’s return-on-investment and you’ll see where to make adjustments. That time and money will be better spent on building a community of customers and organic, sustainable growth.