How Social Media is driving customer-brand interaction

 In my previous blog, I briefly touched upon how the internet, since it going mainstream in mid-1990s became ever more central to the way we do business, there sprang up quite a different and radically new way of how businesses manage reputation. In the offline world, it was relatively straightforward. The image was projected via centralized controlled media and the average customer or citizen’s opinion and experiences were relatively between the organization and them. However, with the advent of the internet, this started to democratize a bit more and really exploded into the true voice of the masses with the advent of social media. These days, it is important for a business or organization to pay attention to what and how is the online reputation shaping up since it affects almost every aspect of an organization from customer relations, new sales, even their ability to attract talent, and of course their future growth prospects.

This week, we will explore where and how ORM helps in driving customer-brand interactions.

Building and maintaining brand loyalty are one of the central themes of research for marketers for a very long time. Marketers have utilized various means to maintain the brand loyalty of their customers. Brand loyalty is defined as the partiality of a consumer towards one business or product over another, and it can truly make or break a company. It drives in-store traffic, visits to your website, word-of-mouth recommendations, and the conversion of leads to customers. This means the difference between profits and losses. Whether you like it or not, your customers are talking about your brand on social media. Customers have always dictated brand perception through word-of-mouth. Companies can put out good products, market those products, and attempt to steer branding in a certain direction, but it’s always been up to the customers. Now, word-of-mouth has moved online and happens on a much larger scale. And through various social media platforms it’s available for all to see and more often than not, in today’s interconnected world, brand loyalty depends on your ability to leverage the power of social media to build connections with your prospects and customers.

Tapping into your social media market and communicating with followers is no longer an option – it is a requirement. Hence, in this digital age, reputation management has become a critical component of every business. It is all about reputation when it comes to how a brand identifies itself and how the public perceives it.

The primary goal of online reputation management is to market and protect your brand so that it can be found, followed, and promoted in a digital world. Online Reputation Management aka ORM works by responding to negative, unfavourable customer comments and articles published on the internet that reflect poorly on your company's brand image.

Though both Online Reputation Management and Public Relations have the same goal, they approach it in quite different ways. ORM is more of a reactive effort that includes searching for and responding to potentially damaging information from other individuals or businesses. PR is more of a proactive effort to strengthen a brand, whereas ORM is more of a reactive effort that includes searching for and responding to potentially detrimental information from other individuals or businesses.

If you want customers to keep coming back to your brand, you have to connect with them in meaningful ways. Social media is the perfect place to build these relationships. First and foremost, doing a thorough online reputation audit could be considered the most basic of ORM activity. An online reputation management audit involves establishing how people view you online and the hurdles you face in challenging that perception, which can be done through brand monitoring. Simple questions like what kinds of websites do I see for my brand name. Do most people reach my business through search engines or external sites can be answered with this, and is the sentiment for my company's overall positive?

With the audit results in hand, you can outline your ORM goals, set limitations and constraints, and prioritise your duties to construct an Online Reputation Management Strategy for your firm.

Proactively monitoring online discussions gives you a real-time picture of your online presence and helps you to reply swiftly. People expect responses to social media remarks within a day or less. Prompt responses keep disgruntled consumers from providing negative comments and show that you value their assistance. The goal is to reply immediately and compassionately. A private message could become a public comment if you do not respond to customer inquiries swiftly.

To summarize, any company that wants to build client loyalty must remain on top of online reviews and develop an online reputation management strategy that shows its strengths and positions it well on the first page of search engines. Actively managing reputations can certainly benefit organization with bigger trust, better talent, less risks, and higher profit.

What is Online Reputation Management and Why Do You Need It?

As the internet became ever more central to the way we do business, there sprang up quite a different and radically new way of how businesses manage reputation. In the offline world, it was relatively straightforward. The image was projected via centralized controlled media and the average customer or citizen’s opinion and experiences were relatively between the organization and them. However, with the advent of the internet, this started to democratize a bit more and really exploded into the true voice of the masses with the advent of social media. These days, it is important for a business or organization to pay attention to what and how is the online reputation shaping up since it affects almost every aspect of an organization from customer relations, new sales, even their ability to attract talent, and of course their future growth prospects.

Why ONLINE REPUTATION MANAGEMENT is important for your business

·       Every organization tries to build a positive image about itself; in fact, the core of the business is all about building an image and improving it every day. In today’s immensely crowded, geography agnostic flat world, It is important to make sure your brand is interesting and fascinating to attract new customers.

·       The way customers interact with the business has undergone a tremendous change. These days, before buying anything online, they look for reviews online and on social media to know the product, brand, and its general views from others. More often than not, the preference of your customers largely depends on the search results.

·       Internet and social media have truly given voice to everyone and now anyone can give reviews online, even your competitors can write negative reviews to spoil your reputation online.

·       With the help of ORM tools, strategies, and practices, one can eliminate the negative content that is untrue; this helps in painting the right picture in front of the customer.

·       Online reputation management helps you improve the reviews and feedback about your brand and create a positive brand image. Customers usually pay more attention to a brand that has positive feedback and reviews online. This helps to generate sales as well.

·       Online reputation management boosts the search engine optimization of your company.

Online reputation management helps you to overcome all this. A survey indicates that a vast majority of customers read online reviews before purchasing anything, therefore ORM becomes paramount today

Hence, reputation management has become a critical part of every organization in the digital age. The way a brand defines itself and how the public sees it is all about reputation. Online Reputation Management is primarily concerned with marketing and defending your brand so that it may be discovered, followed, promoted in a digital marketplace. ORM works by responding to negative thus unfavorable customer comments and articles that are posted online media that cast a poor light on your organization's brand image.

Your consumer base might be jeopardized if you do not manage your online reputation properly. Because according to one survey more than 80% of customers conduct some internet research prior to making a purchase, how you seem online is a make-or-break aspect in their final choice. In addition, with the majority of consumers reading reviews to decide if your organization is trustworthy, your online reputation is a business quality check. Treating online reviews as personal recommendations becomes critical in such situations. Because the Internet keeps practically everything, anything people say about your business online is likely to stay online.

Though both Online Reputation Management and Public Relations have the same aim, there is a significant variation in how they do it. PR is more of a proactive effort to strengthen a brand, whereas ORM is more of a reactive effort that includes searching for and responding to potentially detrimental information from other individuals or businesses.

Monitoring is an important component of maintaining your online reputation since it may provide you with valuable information about consumer satisfaction and feedback on your products or services. Customers who made a complaint and received a satisfactory answer from the company will return to do business with them. You can reduce negative customer comments and maintain a positive online presence by actively managing your reputation.

First and foremost, completing an extensive online reputation Audit may be regarded as an ORM activity. An online reputation management audit entails determining how people perceive you online and the challenges you have in contesting that perception, which may be accomplished through brand monitoring. This can assist with simple queries like What kind of websites do I see for my brand name?, Do most people find my business from search engines or external sites?, and Is the overall attitude for my business positive?

With the audit results in hand, you can create an Online Reputation Management Strategy for your company by outlining your ORM goals, establishing limits and constraints, and prioritizing your tasks.

Monitoring online chats, social media posts, discussion forums, reviews, etc in a proactive manner offers you a real-time snapshot of your online presence and allows you to respond quickly. People expect social media comments to be responded to within a day or less. Prompt answers prevent dissatisfied customers from leaving bad feedback and demonstrate that you appreciate their assistance. The goal here is to respond quickly and with empathy. If you don't reply to consumer inquiries promptly, a private communication might suddenly become a public comment.

To summarize, online reputation management is not a one-day or one-time activity rather it requires regular monitoring; online reputation management will help your business in the long term if you keep an eye on your activities and the activities done by your competitors.

How to succeed With a Customer-centric Marketing Strategy

Advances in technology and communication, combined with explosive growth in data and information, have given rise to a more empowered global consumer. During the past decade, consumer needs have changed significantly, with technology growing at an exponential rate, influencing consumer behavior and marketing strategies. Nearly three-quarters of the world will use just their smartphones to access the internet by 2025. By 2025, 85% of the global population will have access to mobile telephony and more than 75% of the customers will have low-cost tablets or smartphones. It is anticipated that almost 75 Billion devices would be connected globally with mobile-based internet being the primary method of connectivity. Social media and unprecedented access to information such as peer-to-peer product and service reviews are giving greater power to consumers, creating more demanding and informed consumers. These experiences are shaping consumer expectations across all sectors. Amongst all of this, personal interaction is still highly considered and will remain an important component of the overall strategy.

Every day, hundreds of marketing strategies are published, each with its own set of thoughts and studies, but nothing else counts if your customers do not connect with your brand. Any strategy is good if it keeps the customer’s interest. To build value and increase sales over time, understanding your customers is crucial for a predictable result from marketing activities.

Customer centricity is a corporate strategy that prioritizes customers and places them at the center of operations in order to provide a positive experience and build long-term relationships. Understanding how to create leads based on your ideal customer and developing an overall marketing strategy that focuses on the greatest results for your customers are both parts of customer-centric marketing planning.

When a customer becomes engaged with a brand, they are 70 percent more inclined to spend than a first-time customer is. All of this is the outcome of long-term customer trust in the brand. A loyal customer base cuts down on the time, money, and effort it takes to generate additional revenue.

The most common way of creating an effective strategy, especially for marketing is to start by conducting a customer behavior study, which may assist split customers into distinct categories and personas’ as well as covering the most basic phase of constructing a customer profile, is a good place to start when developing a plan. This aids businesses in defining and focusing on their target market.

One can create original content that is relevant to one’s audience by focusing on a specific market, as a vast majority of consumers prefer relevant and personalized content. It is critical to align content not only to different stages of the buying process but also to specific buyer personas, as the type of content that will engage and incentivize them will differ depending on their characteristics and preferences.

With the proper content in hand, one can begin implementing it using an Omnichannel strategy, with special emphasis on social media. Social media and internet-based customer conversations – both good and bad – are federated, dynamic, contagious, and opinion making about products and services. As social media is about real-time and people-centric interactions, external social initiatives will have limited success if not backed by a similar focus on agent engagement. The way forward is to build internal collaboration capabilities that help deliver a superior external customer experience. The key here is to concentrate one’s efforts in the areas where one’s target audience exists, engages, learns and spends time. Share the content in these places and collaborate with the audience to create memorable experiences. This will help in increasing the likelihood of customer advocacy, which can foster a sense of community within loyalty the loyal customer base.

Along with content, other factors that can contribute to customer-centric strategies include training the talent that is aligned with customer-centric thinking and understands the value of customer experience delivered by the organization. Here the role of Contact center representatives who are the first and most front-facing workforce is extremely important. They will shape many of the first customer interactions. This must be coupled with relevant and timely information. Successful organizations break down silos of information and use an enterprise-wide approach to customer information and insight. A single, accurate, accessible enterprise customer view is essential to the success of any organization that wants to differentiate on customer-centricity.

Measuring the performance of one’s strategies is equally important, so having customer success metrics to measure customer-centricity becomes critical. Calculating churn rates can assist you in keeping track of customer satisfaction. Similarly, Net Promoter Score and customer lifetime value are two metrics that can assist you in determining the success of your customer-centric marketing strategy.

95% of senior business leaders believe that the next competitive differentiator is customer experience. The irony is that 80% of companies believe they deliver a superior customer experience. But only 8% of their customers agree!

A customer-centric marketing approach is the most effective way to stay competitive, onboard ideal consumers, and increase the lifetime value of your customers. The modern consumer is acutely aware of their requirements and the myriad options and choices available to them. The transition to becoming a truly customer-centric organization is difficult and time-consuming, but even minor policy and procedure improvements can have a big impact on both employees and customers. Every part of your business should be focused on providing the best possible customer experience, resulting in your customers becoming your reason for success.

The scenario is similar in almost most of the B2C organizations like Manufacturing, Automotive, Retail, FMCG, Telcos, BFSI, etc. However, the investments in marketing technology or process and people development areas to service their customers do not commensurate to this ratio currently. Moreover, organizations are driving efficiency and extending the cost play within the ecosystem and are not as much focussed on effectiveness.

To summarize, for the modern marketing strategy to succeed, it is imperative that the experiences during the acquisition and post-acquisition phases be engineered and managed properly. A customer experience is an interaction between an organization and a customer is a complex function of the brand promise, which has set the expectations to the customer and the sum total of the life cycle of an engagement or interaction experiences – product performance, service delivery, people interaction, and process experience. It is perceived through a customer’s conscious and subconscious mind. It is a blend of an organization’s rational performance, the senses stimulated and the emotions evoked and intuitively measured against customer expectations across all moments of contact 

Customer Journey Mapping: The secret to Superior CX

Customers' behavior is surmised to be rather unpredictable, thus businesses strive to make lasting first impressions and provide unique purchase experiences. Those who wish to learn how your clients purchase in today's digital environment should focus on the most impactful channels and touchpoints in their buying journeys.

 Customer Experience Mapping is a method that helps you identify your consumers' motivating elements during the purchase process. It may be defined as a customer's journey through the phases of their relationship with a company, which includes all interactions between the consumer and the firm across several channels. It's basically a flowchart that displays the steps of a client's interaction with a firm, from purchasing things online to contacting customer support.

 Although most firms are rather effective at acquiring data on their customers, data alone does not adequately express the customer's problems and experiences. At such instances, a customer journey map, which is a visual representation of a customer's interaction with a firm through time, may give insight into the customer's overall experience. It assists your team in better understanding and addressing the wants and pain points of your customers when they interact with your product or service. Thus, a customer journey map allows your company to observe how your brand contacts a potential client and then travels through the many touchpoints of the sales process.

Depending on the sort of business and the types of consumers served, each customer journey map will be unique. However, there are a few key elements that will be consistent throughout every map you build. Some of them are:

 

1.      Personas: Personas, which are composite representations of a market segment of consumers with similar requirements, objectives, and motivations, are the greatest way to understand customers' behaviors and sentiments. It may provide you a comprehensive picture of who your consumers are, what they want, and how they engage with your company across all channels.

 

2.       Identifying the stages of the customer journey that your customer is attempting to complete. Rather than focusing on internal process processes, one should focus on creating a customer journey map with phases that depict your client's goal-oriented trip.

 

3.      Customer touchpoints: One of the most significant parts of the customer journey map is the touchpoints between the customer and the business. Each touchpoint specifies a specific action the consumer did with the business. Identifying your touchpoints is a crucial step in establishing a customer journey map and ensuring that your consumers are happy at every stage.

 

4.      Emotion: It's crucial to think about how your consumers could react to each engagement. Identifying the places of friction in the customer experience may help companies see their client personas in a new light.

 After you've established all of the components, it's a wonderful exercise to bring them all together from the customer's perspective. Companies frequently need to construct many customer journey maps based on a jumbled picture of how consumers interact with them.

Customer journeys aren't always going to be straightforward. Customers may hop ahead and back multiple times within the same segment throughout the course of their lifetime. As a result, taking exceptions into account while mapping the Customer Journey may be a smart idea. Another smart approach is to involve other departments since each department has a stake in defining the customer's experience and may give a distinct perspective. Customer Journey Mapping will, in the end, never be a static entity; like everything else in the digital age, it will be forced to be Agile.

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to creating a customer experience, so your company will have to figure out what works best for you. However, the Trip Mapping frameworks you develop should help you gain a better knowledge of the journey your consumers take as they interact with your organization, brand, goods, partners, and employees. Knowing where your consumer is on their journey might help you anticipate what they could encounter next.

Happy New Year - 2022

Wave goodbye to the old and embrace the new with hope, dreams, and ambition. Bring in New Year off with more motivation, positivity, and some resolutions! 

Wishing you a Happy New Year full of happiness!