Up to 45% of enterprises today spend more than $20,000 each month trying to exploit different digital marketing strategies like SEO to improve customer experience and drive growth and development. In order to gain a competitive edge, you need to meet and surpass the needs of your customers. To achieve this, it’s important to look at more dynamic ways to optimize your customer journey. Apart from developing a comprehensive content marketing strategy and improving social media presence, businesses need to embrace more encompassing and holistic options like lean marketing.
See Things from the Customer's Perspective
While this is considered by many to be a no-brainer, it’s surprising that most businesses turn a blind eye on this critical step in lean marketing. Understanding what your customers really want is totally different from having a brainstorming session to find ways to attract more customers. Corporate Business Solutions notes that for businesses to achieve continuous improvement in digital marketing, they have to research what customers really want.
That means knowing what their persona is, what products they buy, what services they are looking for, what questions they are asking online, what they want to achieve and other demographics. By seeing things from the customer’s perspective, you can now create a more effective digital marketing plan. In the process, avoid generalizing a few customer personas, and instead, focus on each individual persona on its own. This way, you can increase your chances of achieving better ROI results by implementing this step in your lean marketing strategy.
Understand Your Customer Interaction Points
How do customers interact with your brand? Is it through social media, landing pages, your brand website, call-to-actions or marketing ads? As a business, understanding your customer interaction points is one of the most critical steps in implementing any lean marketing strategy. You need to collect data from every customer touch point that you’ve identified so you can evaluate areas that provide the most leads and those that produce minimal results.
Conducting an impact analysis is what will ensure success in your lean marketing efforts. This will play a key role in helping you improve already effective and productive customer engagement platforms to eliminate any wastage. While keeping in mind that acquiring new customers costs up to five times more than retaining customers, any smart business will want to take necessary steps to understand and improve customer interaction.
Exploit How Customers Perceive You
For any customer-centric business, customer perception matters a lot. If your digital marketing strategies are not making any impact at all, you’re simply wasting valuable resources and time. One of the core goals in lean marketing is to identify and understand customer opinions regarding your brand, products and services, as well as marketing engagement. How do you do this effectively?
You can leverage ethnographic research in marketing and conduct online surveys to better understand the personas and mindsets of the ideal customer or client. For instance, if you’re in e-commerce business, analyzing the voice of the customer data (VOC) that’s generated from your customer service center can help your business get valuable information on what needs to be changed to serve customers more effectively.
Embracing lean marketing to optimize your customer journey transcends the capabilities of your digital marketing team. You need to involve everyone in the business, including designers, content marketers and influencers, to ensure they’re all on the same page. Implement these few lean marketing steps and make improvements when needed to grow your brand influence.
Community manager at Visual Contenting. Jacqueline loves to talk about social media trends, new technology and how they help businesses accelerate their marketing efforts.