To be competitive as a brand, it’s essential to constantly offer value to your customers. 

Customer value is what makes the wheels of commerce go around. It’s what makes your customers buy from you, engage with you, follow your accounts, give you positive reviews, and recommend you to their friends.

If you’re familiar with our Customer Value Journey framework, you’ll already know a lot about how to create and curate customer value. In this article, we’ll zoom in on what customer value is and some ways you can deploy it in your Customer Value Journey.

What Do We Mean By “Create Customer Value?”

“Customer value” is anything that makes your product and/or brand more appealing to customers. By adding value to your brand, product, and customer experience, you bring more decision-swaying benefits to your customer’s journey.

“Value” is anything your customer wants, needs, or enjoys. The most obvious “value” is monetary—getting a quality item for a low price is something every bargain hunter enjoys—but it’s far from the only “value” available. 

Value for your customers can include:

• Great product quality
• Fantastic customer service
• A positive brand presence 
• Ongoing customer support
• Relevant and personalized marketing
• A rewarding loyalty program
• A positive customer experience
• A trustworthy brand reputation
• A caring brand community

Let’s say, for example, that you are a Canadian telecoms brand. You produce the best business phone system in Calgary, but people still buy from your competitors. How can you bring them to you?

Adding value is the best way to turn the tide of customers toward you. You can do things like improve your customer service, add 24/7 support options, tailor your marketing in ways your customers prefer, produce engaging and educational content, add loyalty rewards, and more.

Why Is It Important To Create Value For Your Customers?

Creating value for your customers is crucial because the more value you can offer, the more likely customers are to buy your product, subscribe to your brand, and ultimately become loyal members of your customer community.

Think of every purchase decision in terms of a pair of scales. For a potential customer to purchase your product, its value has to outweigh its drawbacks.

The most obvious element of the purchase decision is the monetary cost. But there’s a lot more to it than that. Things like time, negative experience, and risk also add to the perceived “cost” of your product or service. 

For example, if your website does not look safe and professional, your customer may avoid buying your product because they fear credit card scams—even if they would find your product useful and can afford it.

Similarly, if your buying process is too complicated and lengthy, or your customer service could be better, the purchase-decision scales could tip in favor of taking custom elsewhere.

By creating extra value for your customers, you weigh the scale towards the decision to buy. And the more value you add, the better the benefits get. 

As well as buying your product, customers who get value from you will return again and again. They will also engage with your content, recommend you to their friends, and boost your brand reputation in general.

All in all, creating customer value is well worth doing. So, how do you go about it?

How To Create Customer Value

Use our Customer Value Journey

Our Customer Value journey is a framework that helps you to understand where and how you can add value to help your customers along their journey to conversion and beyond.

It consists of eight steps: Awareness, Engagement, Subscribe, Convert, Excite, Ascend, Advocate, Promote.

You can find plenty about our CVJ framework, but here’s a (very!) brief rundown:

• Aware: Get your target audience’s attention with content that is relevant and valuable for them. 
• Engage: Communicate with your customers/prospects. Let them know that you care about them.
• Subscribe: Try and persuade your burgeoning customers to subscribe to your emails and follow you on social media.
• Convert: This is the point at which your prospect becomes a customer. You can use various value-adding tactics to nudge them through this stage.
• Excite: Build on the excitement of a purchase by throwing in added extras.
• Ascend: Keep up communication and keep adding value to make your one-time buyer a repeat customer.
• Advocate: Ask your happy customer to write you positive reviews, share your content, or recommend you to their friends.
• Promote: Keep encouraging your customer community to promote your brand, and reward them for doing so.

Provide Stellar Customer Service

The quality of your customer service can make or break your customer experience. Great customer service adds a huge amount of value to your CVJ.

What does good customer service look like? Well, it ranges from things as simple as sending emails saying “Thanks for your order,” to more complex efforts, such as having a fully equipped and responsive customer support center staffed with patient, helpful, and friendly operatives.

Another way of offering great value and customer service is by having a product that will offer unique benefits. For example, offering online business cards with a QR code that automatically captures their information so that you can use analytics and metrics to measure your networking efforts.

Build Community

You can easily add value for your customer by making them feel valued. One way to do this is to focus on building relationships and community with your customers.

You can strengthen your customer relationships through things like sending emails on their birthdays, personalizing your marketing content so that it’s relevant for each customer, and generally showing that you are listening to them and you care for them.

You can expand on this by providing space for your customers to communicate with you and one another. Loyalty clubs, social media pages, events for loyal customers, and so on can all help to build a rewarding community that will add value for your customers.

Focus On Quality Over Price

It’s a common misconception that making an item cheaper adds value for the customer. While price is certainly an important consideration in purchase decisions, quality often trumps it.

However low your prices are, your customers won’t be impressed if your product is low quality. Most customers are happy to pay a bit more for a product that works well, looks good, and will last.

Most customers understand that true quality costs more. So, if you drop your prices too low, customers will automatically assume that your product is low quality.

The old “quality vs. quantity” debate is, to an extent, false—but it is still important that your customers have a good experience with your product. And that means creating something of acceptable quality.

So, we recommend focusing on the quality of your product first and foremost, and deciding the price once you are aware of your profit margins. A quality product that costs a little more will gain you more repeat customers than a poor-quality product at a low price.

Play To Your Strengths

Your strengths are where your true value lies. Maybe you have an excellent customer service team, the best quality product on the market, or a fantastic social media following. Whatever it is that you do best, play to it.

Your strengths form your USP (or, at least, part of it). Your strengths are where your value exceeds that of your competitors. So, make the most of them!

Educate, Entertain, & Engage

Producing great content is a quick and easy way to add a lot of value and boost your brand’s presence and reputation.

Blog posts, videos, newsletters, social media posts, competitions, games, and webinars—all of these are great for entertaining, educating, and engaging your customers.

Anything you can put out there that your customers will enjoy or find interesting adds value to your product, no matter what your product is.

Let’s say, for example, that you provide online fax services in Canada. On the face of it, this may not seem like a promising topic, but the right content can bring a huge amount of interest to your brand.

You could produce how-to videos, talk about the history of faxing, run case studies, and more. All of it will add value for your audience and bring in new customers.

Reward Loyalty

A loyalty scheme adds value for your customer and directly encourages repeat purchases. 

You can use your loyalty scheme to add value in a variety of ways. Many retail businesses use point schemes, in which customers get a certain number of points per purchase which they can then use to offset the cost of later purchases.

Other examples of loyalty rewards can include:

• Exclusive content
• Free gifts
• First looks at new product lines
• Discounts
• Privileged access to events, products, and services
• Enhanced customer service

Boost Your Business & Add Customer Value with A Customer Value Journey

By designing a Customer Value Journey, you will give yourself a head start when adding value.

A Customer Value Journey will show you exactly where in your customer journey to add value and the form it should take.

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For example, a speedy and safe website adds value at the point of sale. It encourages people to convert quickly and with confidence.

After a sale, a loyalty scheme and follow-up emails reinforce your customer’s positive experience and help strengthen your brand/customer relationships.

At all points, a positive brand presence, rewarding content, and a quality product are brilliant for adding value for your customers.

So, to give your customers the value that they deserve, sit down and plot your Customer Value Journey.

The post How to Effortlessly Create Customer Value appeared first on DigitalMarketer.

Today, consumers have an increasing number of options for how to interact with your brand. These include virtual channels like social media and influencer marketing.

While it’s great that technology has provided us with plenty of new methods and marketing tactics, it also means you need to up your game. As a result, customers are placing a higher value on the overall shopping experience than ever before. 

The way your brand presents itself at various touch points is a major factor in conversions. Customer journey optimization works to raise overall customer satisfaction (CSAT) and promotes growth in your business. 

What is customer journey optimization?

Optimizing the customer journey involves mapping out and analyzing every touchpoint in the buying process. You can then improve the buyer’s journey by eliminating friction at each of these.

This encompasses all available touchpoints, including digital advertising, content and social media marketing. Customer journey optimization improves processes behind the camera, so to speak, so your brand, team, and products can be the stars of the show. 

Benefits of customer journey optimization

When you optimize the customer journey, you stand to gain several benefits.

Save money

Mapping out the customer journey paints a clear picture of your current marketing and sales strategies. You can easily identify redundancies and remove these by analyzing them from an outside viewpoint. Long story short is that you’ll save money on operational costs and labor. 

For example, simple customer actions like order tracking might be better and more efficiently managed by a virtual receptionist, freeing your team up to work on tasks that are more obviously profitable, such as sales.  

Increase productivity

Customer journey optimization helps you cut out the fat. A well-trimmed buying process is much more efficient when it comes to how your team members’ time is used. By focusing their efforts on the most valuable touchpoints and prospect interactions, they’ll be able to generate more leads and conversions in less time. 

Part of this optimization might mean investing in software that gives the customer more control over their journey. For example, if you offer co-working spaces, you may wish to invest in coworking space management software that empowers users to book and pay for rooms without having to speak to a team member in person or over the phone. 

Better teamwork and collaboration

The results of the 2021 Statista survey shown above found that inter-departmental siloing is the biggest challenge when optimizing the customer journey. This is where customer journey mapping rises to the challenge.

With a big-picture view, those working at the top of the funnel will better understand where their prospects are heading, meaning they’re more able to prepare them for their next interaction. Likewise, salespeople working in the middle of the funnel can give feedback on the quality of leads and help prospecting teams adjust their strategies accordingly. 

How does optimization increase customer satisfaction?

Many business benefits arise from customer journey optimization. 

Reduces Friction

Customers may encounter friction at every step of their journey. We’re not talking about Newtonian physics that explain how your car grips a road; we’re talking about obstacles to conversion that are built into your buying processes.

Customer friction is something you must overcome for the consumer to take the next step. Common causes include:

• Lack of empowerment. Do customers have their preferred channels available to them e.g. live chat and self-service options?
• Unreasonable/uncertain duration. Are wait times reasonable, and are they communicated to the customer?
• Lack of identity. Is the customer known and recognized at each touchpoint, or do they have to repeat themselves along the way?
• Lack of transparency. Do customers know what step they’re at in the process?
• Lack of consistency. Does each interaction fit with your brand and provide a positive overall experience?

Let’s take friction caused by duration as an example. You could utilize a service that enables call forwarding or queue callbacks to help lower customer wait times. This would optimize the buyer journey and make it less arduous for the customer. 

An often overlooked tactic is to focus on the obstacle causing the friction rather than the nudge itself. For example, you can make conversions easier so your prospects can sprint their way down the sales funnel.

In the early part of the journey, this might include optimization by way of marketing and communication channels. If your target audience is Gen Z and Millenials, for example, forgo traditional channels and build brand awareness on the social media platforms they use instead. 

There are many eCommerce marketing strategies that can help you optimize interactions and reduce friction.

Focuses on pain points

An optimized customer journey gives consumers a more streamlined experience. Rather than being distracted by unnecessary steps, it ensures just the right amount of interactions and information. 

This type of focused effort from your sales and marketing team means you can spend more time singing the benefits of your products or services. More importantly, it ensures each experience focuses on the specific pain points of your buyer personas. 

Personalizes the customer experience

Part of the optimization process is building customary journey maps that achieve a high level of success. Each one should focus on a different buyer persona. These custom journeys are just one way that optimization personalizes the customer experience (CX).

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Building interactions for each segment’s preferred channels increases customer satisfaction. You can also use CRM solutions, customer journey management platforms, and marketing automation to hyper-personalize every interaction. This might range from having live agents and chatbots with access to customer account information to suggesting products your buyers will be interested in. 

How to optimize the customer journey map

1. Define your business goals

Optimizing the customer journey can help you achieve various objectives, but it’s best to set your sights on a few specific goals for your business. This will help to guide you.

The following are some examples of business goals:

• To stamp out weaknesses or redundancies in the customer journey
• To gain more insight through increased customer feedback
• To increase conversions at bottlenecks in the sales funnel

2. Define your buyer personas

Buyer personas help you segment your audience according to their attitudes, values, behaviors, and demographic information. The first step is to identify your best buyers and your least valuable customer types.

When building your customer avatars, you should find common factors or indicators to help with optimizing customer journeys and areas like lead qualification. 

3. Pick your target personas

To get started, pick the buyer persona that most closely fits your business goals. If this is your first time refreshing the customer journey, you’ll likely want to focus on the personas that represent the best lifetime value. 

4. Start drafting a customer journey map

Now you have a better understanding of who your customers are, it’s time to start visualizing the purchasing journey. You need to map out every customer touchpoint or interaction from beginning to end. 

This includes every channel that’s used to create brand awareness, from Instagram and Facebook marketing to email newsletters and word-of-mouth referrals. It also includes third-party channels like affiliate marketing and other partner programs.

From here, you can start optimizing and connecting actions to build a customer journey that’s robust and efficient. 

5. Start optimizing

With a rough draft of the customer journey in place, you can begin to make alterations and improvements. Eliminate redundant or friction-building interactions, and map out pathways that allow for a seamless transition from one touchpoint to another. Ensure these make sense for the buyer persona involved. 

For instance, when nudging Gen Zers from the brand awareness to the subscription stage, you could focus on social media only. This means eliminating CTAs that involve newsletter subscriptions or inbound calling campaigns for this particular journey. 

6. Use the right tools

By now, you should have a close to ideal journey for each buyer persona. These are optimized when friction is reduced and your team is set up for success. The only problem is that nothing is ideal.

No matter how much you prepare, there will always be room for improvement, so you’ll need to arm yourself with the best tools for the job. Customer relationship management software is crucial. Other marketing tools can also help you automate and track each customer’s journey.

While you’re at it, don’t forget about the wealth of digital marketing resources available online. 

7. Optimize, rinse, and repeat

Completing your optimized customer journey map is only the beginning. You’ll need to take this process and repeat it for each business goal and buyer persona. Of course, you can use existing maps as templates for building new customer journeys.

Using marketing tools, you should be able to track the success of your freshly optimized touchpoints and overall conversion rates. Use analytics tools and trusty A/B testing to hone in on what’s working and what isn’t. 

Continue the process ad infinitum and reap the rewards of providing a seamless, frictionless customer experience. 

Optimize the customer journey today!

Businesses like yours desire their operations to run as smoothly as possible. Your customers will hold you to these same standards during the buying cycle. Now, at least, you should have the tools and team to identify what your customers want. 

This is the time to map out and optimize your customer journeys. That is, unless you’d rather wait around while they flock to competitors that offer a painless purchase process. Why not start improving your customer satisfaction levels today?

The post Creating a Journey to Customer Satisfaction appeared first on DigitalMarketer.

Podcasting has become an increasingly popular way for businesses to reach their target audience and build a loyal following. But how can businesses use podcasting as a part of their overall marketing strategy?

I know firsthand as a business owner the importance of creating a targeted and effective marketing strategy that maximizes the value of each customer and builds long-term loyalty and advocacy for my brand.

That’s why I decided to leverage the power of podcasting by launching the Creative Visionaries Podcast as a part of my overall marketing strategy at Creative Marketing.

To create a targeted and effective podcast marketing strategy that maximizes the value of each customer and builds long-term loyalty and advocacy for their brand, businesses can turn to DigitalMarketer’s Customer Value Journey (CVJ) framework.

While it is most commonly used in the development of a marketing plan there is a huge opportunity to align each stage of the CVJ with the podcast marketing process.

Businesses can create episodes that attract listeners, build trust, and ultimately convert them into loyal brand advocates. This approach ensures that every podcast episode provides value to the listener, while also advancing them further along the customer value journey toward becoming a loyal customer.

To better understand how the CVJ framework can be applied to podcast marketing, let’s take a closer look at each of the eight stages:

• Awareness: At this stage, the customer becomes aware of the business and its products or services.
• Engagement: The customer engages with the business in some way, such as by visiting the website or signing up for an email list.
• Subscribe: The customer opts in to receive more information from the business, such as a newsletter or free content.
• Convert: The customer makes their first purchase from the business.
• Excite: The customer experiences the product or service and becomes excited about it.
• Ascend: The customer makes additional purchases or upgrades to higher-priced products or services.
• Advocate: The customer becomes a loyal fan of the business and recommends it to others.
• Promote: The customer actively promotes the business and its products or services to others.

Applying this framework to podcasting, businesses can create and market a successful podcast that guides customers through each stage of the journey.

At the Awareness stage, a business might promote its podcast on social media or through paid advertising to reach new listeners. By offering valuable and engaging content in the podcast, businesses can then move listeners into the Engagement and Subscribe stages of the journey.

Encouraging listeners to subscribe to the podcast and leave reviews can help move them into the Conversion stage, where they become paying customers.

During the Excite stage, businesses can leverage their podcast to deepen engagement and foster brand loyalty. By offering valuable content that speaks directly to their customers’ needs and interests, businesses can generate excitement and enthusiasm around their brand, further strengthening their connection with their audience.

This leads them directly into the Ascend stage, where customers are offered opportunities to move up the value ladder by making additional purchases or upgrades to higher-priced products or services, building a deeper relationship with the brand.

For example, a digital marketing agency could establish authority in their industry by offering marketing consulting services and using a podcast to provide valuable insights and tips to potential clients, ultimately building trust and establishing themselves as an expert in their field.

At the Advocate stage, businesses can use their podcast to create a community of loyal fans who actively promote their brand. This can be done by encouraging listeners to share the podcast with others, leave positive reviews, and engage with the business on social media.

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Businesses can create long-term loyalty and advocacy by promoting their podcast to their existing audience and leveraging the Promote stage of the customer value journey, which involves creating a sense of belonging and community around their brand.

So, we’ve talked about how podcasting can really benefit businesses. It’s a great way to get your brand out there, engage with your customers, and connect with your target audience. Plus, it’s a powerful tool for establishing your expertise and building a strong, recognizable brand.

By incorporating the CVJ framework to guide their podcast marketing efforts, businesses can create a more targeted and effective strategy that maximizes the value of each customer and builds long-term loyalty and advocacy for their brand.

To Create a Successful Podcast, Businesses Should Follow Some Key Tips:

First, they should identify a specific niche or topic that appeals to their target audience. By focusing on a specific topic, businesses can differentiate themselves from other podcasts and create a loyal following.

Second, businesses should produce high-quality content that provides value to their listeners. This can include interviews with experts in the industry, tips and advice, and engaging storytelling.

Third, businesses should promote their podcast through various channels, including social media, email marketing, and paid advertising.

With dedication and creativity, podcasting can be a valuable asset for any business looking to stand out in today’s digital landscape. By creating high-quality content that resonates with their audience, businesses can increase brand awareness, engagement, and loyalty.

Incorporating the Customer Value Journey framework can help guide their podcast marketing efforts and create a more effective and targeted strategy. So, if you’re looking to take your business to the next level, consider starting a podcast today and join the millions of businesses already leveraging this powerful tool.

The post Revolutionize Your Marketing Strategy with Podcasting appeared first on DigitalMarketer.

In modern business, standing out from the crowd isn’t easy. A strong brand-customer relationship is vital, as it drives customer loyalty and engagement. This can be the deciding factor in your business’s long-term success. 

This article will explore the importance of your brand-customer relationship. We’ll explain how the four principles of brand management can help you build and maintain that relationship.

What is a Brand-Customer Relationship?

Your brand-customer relationship is the connection between your business and its customers. It’s influenced by various factors, but is essentially formed through the perception and reputation of your brand. You build this relationship on trust, loyalty, and engagement. 

As well as the quality of the products or services you offer, your company’s reputation is also important. So is the customer’s overall experience with your brand. To put it simply, there are both tangible and intangible aspects to your brand-consumer relationship.  

The tangible aspects include the quality of your products and services, as well as your sales, customer service, and support. We measure and affect the intangible parts of the brand-customer relationship with brand management. 

Why is Brand-Customer Relationship Important?

It’s well-known that customer experience is one of the most critical factors in customer loyalty – and your brand-customer relationship is central to this. A good relationship encourages customer loyalty through engagement. 

Customers who have a positive experience with your brand, and thus a strong brand-customer relationship, are more likely to recommend your company to others and make repeat purchases. This drives higher customer lifetime values and can grow your revenue through word-of-mouth and social sharing. 

In addition, a solid brand-customer relationship helps to differentiate your business from its competitors. Positive associations with your brand make it easier for customers to identify and choose it over others.

The 4 Principles of Brand Management

So, now you know what we mean by a brand-customer relationship. But it probably still seems like a vague concept. Yet, whether you’re aware of it or not, you’re affecting it with everyday business decisions, advertising, and communications. 

That’s why many established businesses have dedicated brand management teams to build consistency across your brand. These four overlapping principles guide brand management strategy. Measuring them will show you the state of your brand-customer relationship.  

1. Awareness

This is how aware your target audience is of your brand versus others in your market. Think of synonymous brands such as Coke for soft drinks or Hoover for vacuums. These are the brands with the highest level of awareness in their respective areas.  

Most businesses won’t become household names, but there are other ways to measure brand awareness. Analyzing organic searches for your brand name, as well as social media mentions, content shares, and so on, can give you a good idea of your audience’s awareness level.

That said, raising brand awareness isn’t just about getting your brand name in front of people. Increasing and maintaining awareness means you must also stand out in the customer’s memory. For brand managers, this means creating a unique brand personality for your business. 

2. Reputation

Your reputation is what customers think about when they see your brand. This might be certain words or emotions they associate with your brand or product or a generally positive or negative sentiment.  

This has a significant overlap with your brand awareness. If you’re not working on maintaining your brand reputation while growing awareness, you can spread negative sentiments and do more harm than good for your brand. 

Building a positive reputation takes time. You can affect it through your communication, service, recruitment, and community projects. Your company culture, mission statement, and guiding principles can also tell external stakeholders about your reputation and values. 

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3. Loyalty

Research shows that loyal customers are five times more likely to make repeat purchases and four times more likely to recommend your business. That’s why customer loyalty is the goal of your efforts to improve your brand awareness and reputation.

Easier said than done? Perhaps. Customer loyalty can be challenging to build, partly because many customers look for different things to get their best experience out of a business. Some customers value convenience and price, while others want on-demand support. 

For example, customers who come to your brand for value might appreciate your customer service measures such as a toll-free number or online text chat for inquiries. On the other hand, those looking for convenience might appreciate a premium-rate line that guarantees instant access to support. 

That means that to increase customer loyalty, brand managers must analyze customer behavior and feedback. Personalization is a major driver of customer loyalty. When you listen to a customer’s needs and make changes based on feedback, you show that you value their contribution to your business.

4. Equity

Brand equity represents your brand’s perceived value. Think of it as the premium customers are willing to pay to access your brand over cheaper competitors. This leads to higher ROI on both new and developed products, as you can incorporate this into your pricing. 

In his book, “Strategic Brand Management: Building, Measuring, and Managing Brand Equity”, author Kevin Lane Keller describes four key steps to building your brand equity:

• Establish your brand identity by identifying your target audience. Then, create your brand assets and stories around it. 
• Define what your brand means. You do this by clearly stating your company values and through the projects you choose to support. 
• Analyze how customers respond to your brand. What feelings and emotions does your brand evoke? Direct feedback and sentiment analysis are two good ways to judge this. 
• Build your brand resonance by developing your existing customer relationships. Use your brand management to form deeper emotional connections with your customer base. 

High customer satisfaction and customer loyalty are key indicators that your brand equity is rising.  

How to Use Brand Management to Improve Customer Relations

Now you understand the principles of brand management, let’s look at how to use this in an everyday business setting to improve your customer relations.  

Start With Brand Basics

If you’re new to brand management, the first step to improving customer relations is establishing a clear and consistent brand identity. This means developing a brand strategy, mission statement, and brand identity that aligns with your business’s values and goals.

You’ll also need to make key decisions about core brand assets like your logo design. Simple assets or slogans can be crucial in reinforcing the emotions and values you want customers to associate with your brand. Give these decisions the time and thought they deserve. 

Share Your Stories

Whether we’re talking about your brand’s origin story, mission, or even employee journeys and customer testimonials, sharing these stories will help you make deeper emotional connections with your customers. 

For example, many companies make support content like video tutorials for their products. But one way to make your customers feel more connected to this process is to share user-generated content with success tips and product guides.  

Optimize Your Online Visibility

In today’s digital age, your business needs to have a strong online presence. Optimizing your online visibility can increase brand awareness and reach more customers. 

This includes developing a website and creating social media profiles, as well as covering other basics like listing your brand in online directories and review sites.

Create an Internal Branding Guide

A strong brand identity is not just built by communicating with customers. You also need to ensure that employees understand and align with the company’s branding efforts. You can achieve this by creating an internal branding guide. 

Use this as a reference for all employees to ensure consistency in tone of voice and other branding markers for all departments.

Focus on Your Customer Journey

It’s vital to understand how customers interact with your brand, from the awareness stage to post-purchase. By understanding the customer value journey, you can identify areas for improvement and tailor your branding efforts to meet the needs of your customers at each stage.

Engage Your Customers on Their Terms

Engaging with your customers on the channels they prefer is crucial to building a strong brand-customer relationship. Whether it’s social media, email, phone, or in-person interactions your audience prefers, make sure they can access your brand on those channels.

Personalize the Customer Experience

While we can fit customers into groups and demographics, each one is also unique. By analyzing a customer’s preferences as they interact with your business, you can give them a customer experience that meets their needs every time. 

This can be small, simple, gestures. For example, give your priority customers access to a separate business phone number to speed up their support experience.  

Analyze and Improve

Finally, to truly optimize your brand-customer relationship, you need to analyze your performance and make adjustments as you go. This includes tracking website traffic, monitoring social media engagement and sentiments, and analyzing customer feedback. 

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By using analytics, you can make data-driven decisions to improve customer relations and drive growth. 

Final Thoughts: It’s all in the Details

Your brand-customer relationship goes deeper than your surface interactions with your customers. When we’re talking about subjective factors like emotion and engagement, the little details can make the biggest difference. 

Even seemingly unrelated decisions like your choice of website hosting providers can have a knock-on effect. Does your domain name reflect your brand? Is it instantly recognizable to customers? When we think about it in these terms, it’s easy to see why a choice like this can have repercussions for your brand. 

Effective brand management means you don’t have to fret about the small details of every decision. Having a clear brand strategy and documents like an internal branding guide help ensure consistency, even up to the decision-making level.  

The post Key Steps for Building Strong Brand/Customer Relationships appeared first on DigitalMarketer.

If you’ve never utilized a top to bottom marketing strategy like the CVJ, the Awareness stage is what you probably think “marketing” is. Put simply, it’s making people aware of your product and brand.

Awareness is the critical first step in a customer’s journey. In order to buy from you, they need to know about you.

At this point, think about one core offering that you most want to sell, and what is the one customer avatar that you have in mind. That is absolutely critical wit any given business, there’s never just one journey. Customer journeys are largely based on the thing that you’re selling, and who you’re selling it to. 

Map your customer journey so you can answer the question: How do qualified prospects find out about our brand? 

What channels do we leverage to create initial awareness? Hopefully this is pretty simple. What are the channels that you are currently leveraging to drive awareness to this particular product or service offer? There’s a really good change that unless your business is based entirely on referrals or based primarily on organic search, you’ll need to leverage social media in your awareness stage.

Facebook, Instagram, Google, and YouTube are four big channels owned by just two companies. They represent over 80% of all digital ads. If you’re thinking how could we expand and accelerate down the road when it comes time for optimization, we encourage you to stick to the big four. If you aren’t currently leveraging one or more of these channels you probably should.

What are you doing to get people to know you exist? What is your primary channel?

Luckily for Hazel & Hems Boutique, the core product is visually appealing and the customer avatar is very active on social media.

What better way to promote her products than paid ads and organic posts through social media platforms. 

With Hazel’s brand focusing on fashion, one of the most effective social media tactics is through live videos, visually appealing in-use and lifestyle photos, and paid ads through Facebook, instagram, and Tiktok. 

Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook and TikTok would be great ways to showcase her unique products, and these platforms are more than likely to be used by her target audience looking for new fashion trends. 

For Cyrus & Clark Media, organic search, Facebook advertising, and network marketing online can be utilized for awareness. 

Their target market is relatively old school, meaning that organic search content answering expert questions relating to marketing and the construction industry could be helpful. 

If their target audience is on any social media platform, it will be Facebook, which 84% of people aged 30-49 have an account. 

Posts and ads showcasing the agency’s knowledge of the construction business and real results including testimonials, metrics, and case studies will interest their customer avatar the most.

The post Aware appeared first on DigitalMarketer.

Resilience, flexibility and creative thinking under pressure are all traits that digital marketers innately possess. And these also just happen to be the ingredients for success during times of uncertainty, which is why the demand for passionate people in this space has never been higher.

In this article, you will learn why this is the best time to start your digital marketing career (even as a complete beginner).

Why Digital Marketing and Why Now?

Digital marketing has drastically evolved over the last decade and continues to change with each new iteration of our favorite platforms and analysis tools. But no matter what changes may come in the future, one thing is clear, digital marketing will continue to thrive. 

This is due to a lot of factors, but one main one is the large number of new businesses being created every single day. The U.S. Census Bureau states that on average there are about 2-4 million new business applications filed every single year. 

But as you’ll see from the image above, this average has increased dramatically since the start of the pandemic. In fact, in 2021 there were 5.4 million new business applications in the U.S. which was the highest of any year and a 53% increase from 2019. 

That’s millions of new businesses which now need help with creating and growing their digital presence.

And in knowing this, it’s no surprise that interest in this career path has also been on the rise.

Digital Marketing Is An In-Demand Skillset

So we now know there’s an increase in interest in learning these skills. But what about the demand from employers?

Well, over the past year we’ve seen a 12.2% marketing job growth according to data presented by Deloitte. Companies surveyed by Deloitte also estimated a further 10.5% marketing hire increase over the next year.

Not to mention that LinkedIn reported ‘Digital Marketing Specialist’ as the most in-demand job title based on volume of postings on the platform.

But these roles don’t look the way they used to.

According to a study done by Upwork, it’s predicted that 36.2 million workers in the U.S. will be fully remote by 2025. That’s an 87% increase from pre-pandemic rates.

This means that not only is there an increase in demand for people working in digital marketing, but employers are significantly more open to people working for them in whatever way suits them best. 

We’re no longer (necessarily) bound by the 9-5 workday, full-time working relationships, or even being in the same geographic location as our employers. We can work when we want, how we want, and from wherever we want. 

So we now know there’s demand and flexibility – next, let’s get into what it really means to be a beginner in the world of digital marketing.

Digital Marketing is Incredibly Beginner-Friendly

Some of the most brilliant digital marketers you’ll come across have no formal qualifications in the marketing field. But what they do have are skills, passion, and practical experience built through determination and a willingness to work from the ground up. 

And that’s because unlike in many other fields, people looking for talent in this space don’t place nearly as much importance on having decades of experience or years of formal training on your resume. 

Digital marketing itself hasn’t even been around for that long, and many universities and colleges still don’t offer practical training on the subject. The marketing world is evolving so quickly that by the time you finish a four-year degree on the subject, you would have to begin all over again to learn about all the changes. 

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Instead, employers are a lot more interested in well-rounded soft skills. So this might just be the career path for you if you are able to:

• Commit to lifelong learning
• Continuously innovate and explore new creative ideas
• Lead and inspire, but be willing to work effectively as a part of a team
• Be both creative and analytical in your approach to your work
• Have general knowledge of the field but be a specialist in a few key subjects
• Take risks and back yourself 
• Embrace setbacks as learning opportunities
• Approach every new task with flexible thinking and without bias

And with access to so many amazing self-paced digital marketing courses, it’s easier than ever before to upskill yourself in the more technical skills required.

Skills You Need to Succeed as a Digital Marketer

We’ve already discussed some of the softer skills and traits that can make someone an excellent digital marketer. But of course, technical skills are a large part of your success in digital marketing too. 

As you’ll notice from the image below, the top in-demand skills in the marketing world on LinkedIn are: social media marketing, paid search, social media, search engine marketing, and marketing in general.

In addition to the above, as a digital marketer, you might also have to be across the basics of:

• Search engine optimization
• Email marketing
• Influencer marketing
• Copywriting
• Data analysis
• Video marketing
• … and more

The key here is not to overwhelm yourself by trying to specialize in all areas, as no one will expect this of you. A positive attitude, passion for your work, and a willingness to upskill yourself in areas you’re not confident in as you go, are what will matter most in your digital marketing career.

And if you ask seasoned digital marketers what their career path has looked like up to this point, they’ll likely say it’s been like a Jackson Pollock painting. It might not make sense to people who don’t work in the field, but to them, it’s a beautiful masterpiece of diverse skills coming together and acquired over time.

So if you’re ready to get into a career that’s bold, versatile, exciting, and rapidly evolving – digital marketing might just be the right fit for you.

The post Why 2023 Is The Best Time to Begin Your Digital Marketing Career appeared first on DigitalMarketer.