When you’re trying to plan a comprehensive marketing strategy, it’s easy to get caught up in content details (e.g., improving your calls to action, spacing your emails just right, etc.). But in order to win loyal, life-long clients, it’s essential to take a step back and ensure that your marketing makes sense from their perspective.
Here are some pointers for maintaining a client-first approach in all your marketing efforts so you can win and retain more of the people you’ve set out to help.
- Focus on their needs, wants, and problems. You may really want to make a sale, but that desire won’t convince anyone to buy from you. Enter every client relationship (and create every piece of your marketing materials) by considering your clients’ desires first. This will help you approach your selling proposition from the right angle.
- Listen. Every time your clients speak, they reveal valuable information about themselves. Optimize this value by listening carefully and responding to the issues they bring up, both directly and indirectly.
- Create a perfect buying experience. That means no broken links. No confusing checkout pages or calls to action. Rewards and discounts for loyalty. Guarantees and refund policies that reassure clients of your commitment to value. In short, be the seller that everyone wants to buy from because there’s never any kind of problem.
- Over-deliver. This starts during the sales conversation, when you set up client expectations. Establish a habit of exceeding those expectations in every transaction.
- When necessary, apologize quickly and sincerely. Nobody’s perfect, and your clients know that. However, they’ll be much more understanding about your mistakes when you apologize immediately and sincerely for anything that goes wrong. Some companies, like Domino’s, have even created entire marketing plans based on a mistake (in the case of the pizza company, the “mistake” was creating a mediocre product, which they proclaimed they were improving with a new recipe).
- Reach out to maintain contact. In friendships, it can be annoying to be the one who always makes plans. But in your client relationships, don’t be shy about reaching out when you haven’t heard from someone in a while. And don’t rule out creating special events to draw clients back to you: sales, specials, and product launches are all great ways to reconnect.
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