A funny thing happened at our home the other day. My dog has spent the entire summer chasing flies that land on our deck door. It seems to be a new fascination with her. She tries to lick them off of the window. When they take to flight, she tries to snap them out of the air. I have never heard of a fly catching dog. All I can tell you is that the other day, after a summer of futility, she finally caught one in mid-flight. After she did, she had no idea what to do with the buzzing little critter inside her mouth. It was quite humorous to watch. Should she swallow it or spit it out? The next morning I found a very wet, dead fly in the middle of the kitchen floor.

My dog’s reaction to the fly she caught is not unlike marketing efforts going down in business right now. The word on the street is that certain sectors are experiencing growth and beginning to spend money again. Marketing is beginning to draw the attention of potential customers. That’s great news, right? But what do you do when you have a prospect on the line? Does marketing stop with the initial attraction to your products or services? To some degree, yes it does. Marketing’s job is to draw the prospects in and the job of sales is to make the offer and close the deal. However, marketing in today’s environment has to do with much more than just opening the front door to a new customer. There is a lot of the marketing proposition that has to do with retaining the clients you have and keeping the new clients coming back. How do you do that?

Customer service and marketing

There was a time when your customer service tasks were totally separated from marketing. Not so anymore. In particular, it is important that marketing pick up the function of making sure the customer is satisfied with whatever they purchased from you. You can do this with customer satisfaction surveys. But more so, you can do it on your social media company page. Building a network of satisfied customers is huge in retaining them. It is important that marketing guard the brand image of the company. Your brand can take a shellacking on social media. Left alone, these sites can become full of customer complaints. The way you combat this with marketing is to get to the customer early. Beat them to the punch. Ask them if they are totally satisfied. If yes, ask them to take action on your social media site. Give them an incentive to "like” you or to comment on how good you are. Also realize that any time you have a satisfied customer, you have the open door to market additional items to them. If they were not totally satisfied, you have an opportunity to fix what went wrong and salvage a relationship. Don’t let customer dissatisfaction get in the way of marketing. It affords you the opportunity to interact with the customer one-to-one, which is what we are trying to do with marketing for the long run. If you get to them before they leave one of those nasty comments, you will keep your brand from being tarnished. The customer needs to feel like they not only received something from you that was worth the price they paid, but that you care about them beyond the transaction. It pays to plan for either a satisfied or dissatisfied customer reaction. Both open the doors for marketing to work.

Setting your company apart

Another aspect of marketing beyond the initial sale is to set your company up as the experts in your particular field. How do your customers view you, particularly as it pertains to your competition? Are you the leaders of thought in your industry or are you just another run-of-the-mill vendor? If you want to be the leader, then you need to listen very carefully to what your customers are saying to you and about you. Where can you fix your service so it makes it easier on them? How can you better your product offerings? One way of doing this is to consistently tell your story. A very effective way to do that is through content marketing. This is an information based forum, like a blog, that gives pertinent advice that is relevant to the needs of the client. (You are experiencing our content marketing in reading this article.) Setting yourself apart as the expert is great for return business. There are certainly other ways to set yourself apart from the crowd. Making those distinctions is a function of marketing. If you don’t set yourself apart as the expert, you run the risk of being viewed as just another vendor, no different than your competition. When that happens, you are left in a price bidding war with your competitors for customers. Not that price is not a factor when you are the leader in your industry - it most certainly is – it just isn’t the only thing by which your customers will judge you. When I am the leader, there is a certain prestige lens that my customers will see me through. Use this to your advantage in retaining customers.